The Dr. Hyman Show - How Meditation Rewires Your Brain and Reduces Stress

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

What if you could train your brain to handle stress better—just by meditating for a few minutes each day? In this episode of “The Doctor’s Farmacy,” I revisit conversations with Emily Fletcher, Dan Harris, and Daniel Goleman to explore how meditation rewires the brain, reduces anxiety, and enhances mental clarity. You’ll learn the science behind mindfulness, loving-kindness meditation, and other techniques that not only improve stress management but also promote overall mental health and wellness. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Why Meditation is the New Medicine Is one minute of meditation enough? Meditation, Kindness, and Compassion: The Secret to Your Life and Financial Abundance This episode is brought to you by Pique, Seed, and Ketone-IQ. Head over to PiqueLife.com/Hyman20 and get up to 20% off + a complimentary beaker and rechargeable frother. Seed is offering my community 25% off to try DS-01® for themselves. Visit seed.com/hyman and use code 25HYMAN for 25% off your first month of Seed's DS-01® Daily Synbiotic. Save 30% off your first subscription order & receive a free six-pack of Ketone-IQ with https://ketone.com/MARKHYMAN

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. It's the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. And in this day and age, where we've all become bulimic of the brain and we're all just ingesting technology day in and day out, I think that that skill is very valuable. Yeah.

However, mindfulness- So you can't really throw it up. It would be great if you could like purge it. Well, that's actually what meditation does. For many of my patients, caffeine can disrupt sleep, spike anxiety, lead to hormone imbalances. It's also incredibly hard on the gut, causing irritation that many don't even realize is happening. And that's why I'm so excited to share with you a truly remarkable alternative,

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in our daily health regimen. I'm excited now to be on the journey with them and offer my community 25% off your first month of DS01 with the code 25HYMEN. Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand,

well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, Supplement Store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, a practicing physician

and proponent of systems medicine, a framework to help you understand the why or the root cause of your symptoms. Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. Every week, I bring on interesting guests to discuss the latest topics in the field of functional medicine and do a deep dive on how these topics pertain to your health. In today's episode, I have some interesting discussions with other experts in the field. So let's just jump right in. A lot of people hear about meditation. It's mysterious. It seems vague. It seems a little bit culty. And certainly I've seen that happen. My way is best or this is the best way or that one sucks.

Or it's like the meditation wars. Should you do mantra-based meditation, mindfulness-based meditation? Should you do visualization? Should you do this? Should you do that? How much? How long? When? Where? help us sort of navigate this landscape because i think people get put off by that and they also think it's tied to incense and candles and cushions and

temples and everything has to be perfect and what i love about what you teach is like you can do it on the subway that's right which i often do. On a plane with your kids screaming in the next room. I get the headphones with this noise cancellation. That helps. Yeah, it helps a little. So I think the reason why there are the meditation wars or it feels a little culty is that once you find something that works for you and once you see the proverbial face of God, you think that, well, this must be it. This is the capital T truth. And I like to think about God as a disco ball. And then we're all looking at the same thing, but you might see purple and I might see red and someone else might see green. But if that's the truth for you, or the first time that you've seen it, you think that that is real and you're willing to defend that. And so I think-

Like the first person you fall in love with, you think that's it. Yes, this is it. And so I think that if we pull the lens back a little bit and see that all of it all roads lead to rome all of it is making us moving us towards the most amazing version of ourselves so to navigate the landscape a bit about meditation mindfulness which is what most people are practicing most of the apps out there most of the youtube videos most of the drop-in studios are what i would call mindfulness and mindfulness i would define as bringing your awareness the art as bringing your awareness, the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment, which is so powerful.

Like paying attention. Paying attention. Like in Aldous Huxley book where there was this magpie that kept repeating, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention. Yes. It was like the siren call of his book and his community. Or Marie Forleo's husband or partner is an acting teacher, and he has this technique where he says, I'm back. I'm back.

I'm back. Because in acting, you know, your mind will go down a rabbit hole, and you just, I'm back in my body. I'm back. And so, yes, it's the art of bringing your awareness into the present moment. And in this day and age where we've all become bulimic of the brain and we're all just ingesting technology day in and day out i think that that skill is very valuable yeah however mindfulness throw it up it would be great if you like purge it well that's actually

what meditation does so the mindfulness is very good at dealing with your stress in the now like my boss yelled at me i'm going to do 10 minutes of my app and i feel better in the now like a state change whereas meditation which is as teach at Ziva, is different than what most people have experienced. That's actually inducing very deep healing rest in the body. Rest that's about five times deeper than sleep. And when you do that, when you de-excite your nervous system, you create order and it allows that lifetime of accumulated stresses from your past to start to come up and out. Whereas meditation is all about getting rid of your stress from the past.

And in that, we're actually inducing rest that's about five times deeper than sleep. And when you do that, when you use the meditation tools, you de-excite the nervous system. When you de-excite something, you create order. When you create order in your cells, it allows for that stress, that backlog of accumulated stresses

that we all have in our cellular, now we know epigenetic memory, we allow that stuff to come up and out. And it's that backlog of accumulated stresses we all have in our cellular now we know epigenetic memory we allow that stuff to come up and out and it's that accumulation of stress in our brain and bodies that makes us stupid sick and slow and it doesn't sound fun stupid sick and slow it's not how i want to go through life no stress makes you stupid we're making t-shirts actually stress makes you stupid it actually also makes you demented oh it's one of the causes of dementia stress hormones the cortisol actually shrinks the memory center in the brain. So another reason to get your bones in the chair. And so then the third piece that you mentioned, which is manifesting, which is more of like the

visualization or prayer, I would define manifesting as consciously creating a life you love. It's getting intentional about what you want your life to look like. And while that might sound simple, because it is, I'm always fascinated by how infrequently people are doing that. How infrequently people stop to really ask, well, how much money do I want to make? Or what's my dream vacation look like? Or what's my dream partner look like? Instead, we just complain about our current circumstances instead of getting intentional. So that's really the trifecta of Ziva. Mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting. But there's mindfulness meditation. intentional. So that's really the trifecta of Ziva, mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting. But there's mindfulness meditation. Yes.

So people can get confused. What's the difference? Yes, so I would define mindfulness, like the technique-wise is where we are directing our focus. So if you're doing a guided meditation of any kind, I'm putting that in the mindfulness camp because by definition, you are directing your focus. And in mindfulness, a smaller part of the brain lights up, but up but very very bright which is different than ziva meditation because the whole brain lights up but not as bright because it's almost one is about focusing and the other is

about surrender one is about coming back to your body and it's a bit of a shorter leash mindfulness is actually derived of styles of meditation that were originally designed for monks thousands of years ago and so it's a little bit more austere. It's a little bit more disciplined. It's a shorter leash. You know, come back, come back to the breath, come back to the work, come back, come back. Whereas in Ziva, there's a much longer leash. I call it the lazy man's meditation because you're allowed to have thoughts.

You're allowed to drift into that sleepy feeling. You're allowed to, you know, let the technique go and come back to it. I call that napitating. Yeah. Well, yes, your wife has outed you out. I can't tell if I'm actually sleeping or if I'm meditating in some deep state of consciousness but it's fun. And if you look if your life's getting better then who cares. Yeah so there have been very different techniques as you mentioned mindfulness which is bringing awareness back to the breath, the present moment. There's mantra-based meditations, there's visualizations, and they've all been developed to help raise consciousness. They were never developed to really help you deal with your boss or your wife or work or bad situations or too much social media.

And they all have different roles and purposes. Why is it that you sort of picked this mantra-based ancient style of meditation? Well, to be very honest, the meditation portion of Ziva, that was the first style I ever found. And it was so profound. I mean, it cured my insomnia on the first day. And like I said, I didn't get sick for eight and a half years. And I always prided myself on being a seeker. know i read every self-help book i went to all the therapists and i was always seeking seeking seeking and it almost became a part of my identity and then when i found meditation i was like oh i'm not a seeker anymore i'm a listener i found it i'm a finder it's right here it's inside of me and and that's sort of an esoteric explanation

but what's happening neurochemically is within 30 to 45 seconds of starting your brain and body start flooding with dopamine and serotonin which are bliss chemicals and so we stop looking externally for our fulfillment and we start to be able to access it internally and binge on mantras instead of binging on munchies exactly exactly yeah Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so that was, it was the meditation portion that really changed my life. But then when I looked around, I saw there were so many ex-meditators, right?

The world is filled with ex-meditators. Every time I speak at a conference or go to a corporation. I was one. Yeah, you were one, right? I mean, I was younger. I would be in 10-day meditation retreats, meditating 12 hours a day and loving it. Yeah, but then we all get busy, right?

So every talk I give, I say, all right, I want everyone to raise their hand if you've ever tried meditation. And it's 2018, so almost every hand goes up. And then I say, all right, how many of you guys have a daily practice that you do no matter what? And about 90% of those hands go down. And that's why I wrote this book. I want to bridge that gap.

It makes me sad that stress less accomplish more right like stress is making us stupid and it makes me sad that a lot of people start and quit based on either misinformation or doing a technique that wasn't originally designed for them one that was designed for monks so they feel like they're failing because they're trying to clear their minds and then they can't and none of us will do anything for feel none of us will do anything for very long that we feel like we're failing at yeah you have to like be in a meditation retreat for eight days till you get 10 seconds of nothing exactly but this it's like within 30 to 45 seconds you're like oh this is different and it feels nice and then your whole life gets better

because it's designed to make you better at life it's not designed to remove you from life so that's very interesting so you know these techniques often were developed by traditions like Tibetan Buddhism and other Buddhist traditions to help people achieve a state of awakening. They weren't designed to help you cope with stress. They weren't designed to make you happier. They were designed to actually train your brain into different states of consciousness that allow you to access places that most of us can't access um and you're saying there's a different approach that can actually take you to a similar place but it's sort of a more sort of

tricky route where you get to kind of bypass some of that being in a cave for nine years and you can actually be in your life and like you say meditation isn't about um getting good at meditation getting good at meditation it's about getting good at life that's right and so you know that delicious feeling for anyone who's ever taken a yoga class when you lie down at the end and you have that delicious shavasana what the ziva does is that it it fast tracks that hour-long yoga class it allows you to get into that delicious headspace of the shavasana what the ziva does is that it it fast tracks that hour-long yoga class it allows you to get into that delicious headspace of the shavasana right off the bat and that is valuable if you have a busy life because you might not have time to go and take an hour and a half yoga class you might not have time to go to a 10-day silent retreat but you need to handle your stress because

if you're not managing your stress it's managing you and as you've said on this podcast before stress is related to 95 of all disease yeah and so it's not just i think we have to reframe meditation as oh well that's a luxury thing it's like a pedicure for my brain that i'll get around to when i have more time it's like no we have to reframe this as the single most important piece of mental hygiene that we need to be practicing every day yeah one of my missions at ziva is to make it- It's like mental floss. It's mental floss. I want to make it as rude to leave your house without meditating as it would be to leave

your house without brushing your teeth. It's like, that's gross. You need to handle that. Yeah. And as Mama Marianne said, she said, we need to be more disciplined. We need to take care. We need to strengthen our fortitude when it comes to these spiritual practices. Yeah.

I mean, I always thought of it as a nice to have you know you got to eat right you got to exercise right you got to sleep those are non-negotiable for creating health but i recently come to believe that meditation the training of the mind is also non-negotiable well when people say to me it's one of those pillars of health that you you can't replace with another technique i certainly agree and when people say to me well i don't have time to meditate i'm like you guys this is your brain we're talking about it's responsible for printing every single cell in your body and making every single decision in your life so what else are you doing with your time well Well, I don't have time not to meditate now.

And I don't know that many people who are busier than I am. I don't know anyone busier than you. And yet it is something that I look forward to that without which I start to feel not well. Like I notice a level of agitation or fatigue or mental strain and I use my brain a lot, I feel like it's like taking my brain to a car wash. It's the most amazing thing. Like I've been working all day in meetings, did more podcasts. I'm like you, before you came over, I was like, I'm going to go sit and meditate. And I could have like, you know, I could have taken a nap, but I, my wife laughs because I can

lay down and I can't take a nap. I could lay there for an hour. I mean, I sit down and meditate and sometimes within five minutes, I'll be napitating if I really need to. And it's just fantastic. And I wake up and I feel more connected to myself, more connected to the people around me, more present. And I think that's part of the problem with life today is that we are in a state of constant activity motion and we can't easily stop and just be present and appreciate those things that are so important it's the small little things right it's it's a taste of a cup of tea it's a this feeling of you know your partner touching you on your skin it's watching the light or the leaves or stupid stuff. The sound of your son's laughter. Yeah, you have a little baby.

And so we often miss those things, which are the actual beautiful things that make up life and make it amazing. And we can miss them. And I feel like I've missed often years just by being in the doing and not in the being. And it allows, paradoxically, by being in the being, allows you to be more actually in the doing and not in the being. And it allows, paradoxically, by being in the being, allows you to be more actually in the doing. If you've been following me for a while, you know I'm passionate about optimizing brain health, about boosting energy, enhancing metabolic function. That's why I want to talk to you about something that's

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You can cancel at any time and you won't be disappointed i mean i always thought meditation was ridiculous and had no desire to do it and no interest in it and never really even thought about it but the to the extent that i did i thought it was for you know crystal lovers and fans of uh anya and uh sorry to any fans i used to like it you're not so bad well okay we can agree to disagree on that actually it's good to do yoga too i'm fine yeah i'm not even sure i agree with that that's okay no offense to enya i don't even i just i pick on you could do yoga to barry white i don't know you could do yoga to barry white sure cold play um so anyway i what i what ultimately changed my mind was i saw the science i'm not a scientist i'm not good at math um but my wife's a scientist

my parents are both scientists and uh i was really convinced when i saw the science which is i don't want to you know you're did someone say hey dan you should check out meditation or the dialogue came to town you want to hear him talk like what was the trigger the long story is and i won't i won't make it too long but um i i had been assigned to cover faith and spirituality for abc news and uh i didn't want that assignment i was raised in the people's republic of massachusetts my parents are both atheists scientists as i often say i had a bar mitzvah but only for the money so i was not the envelope please exactly i was not interested in this stuff at all peter jennings my boss at the time was really interested in the subject and wanted me to do it so i it actually turned out to be great for me and i met a lot of interesting people and i saw

you know my own ignorance about these issues and and i really sort of i didn't i didn't join a church or go kosher or anything like that but i i was interested in the subject and that ultimately led me to reading a book by eckhart tolle oh the power of now i think it was a new earth that was the first book i read which i thought was really annoying and um it was you know triggered me in all the predictable ways as a skeptic he uses a lot of gooey language and pseudo-scientific uh language about vibrational fields and stuff like that but he was the first person i ever heard describe the fact that we have a voice in our heads yeah this inner narrator that's just hammering all the time at us mostly thinking about the past or the future crazy aunt in your head

yeah or the buddha calls it the monkey mind but i had never heard that theory before and when i read that book just to fight my overwhelming annoyance with him and his tone and some of his strange claims about how he lived on a park bench for two years in a state of bliss and blah blah blah that was a major aha moment for me because i realized okay this is just intuitively true a and b this theory about the human situation that we have this non-stop voice in our heads really explains why how i had a panic attack yeah because the voice in my head my ego my inner narrator um is what sent me off to war zones without thinking about the psychological consequences then i came home and i got depressed and didn't even really know it and then did this dumb thing of self-medicating so that was that was really interesting to me i so i

agreed there was one of my producers had recommended that i read this book by totally so to her delight i said okay let's go do a story on totally and i did and i found him i he's a very nice man but i found him very frustrating in that um a friend of mine has described totally as correct but not useful in other words he doesn't tell you much to do he doesn't give you a lot of practical advice for dealing with the voice in the head this phenomenon that he describes so well i then spent a bunch of time sort of marinating in the self-help world and um looking around for answers to this question of what do you do about the voice in the head? And that ultimately led me to meditation.

My wife gave me a book about Buddhism written by a shrink here in New York City named Dr. Mark Epstein. Yeah. Who's written a series of beautiful books about the overlap between Buddhism and psychology. And that is what pointed me toward meditation which initially i didn't want to do and then i started looking at the science and then i started thinking okay maybe i'll try this and as soon as i tried it i realized okay this is not you know like hacky sack or you know lighting incense it's not some hippie pastime this is a this is exercise for your brain around for thousands of years yes and it has a huge pr problem because it's the victim of the worst

marketing campaign for anything ever you know we it's been sold to us the wrong way yeah for a bunch of reasons that we can discuss and i had this entrepreneurial well i had a personal selfish feeling of oh this would be really good for me and and I adopted it as a habit pretty quickly I mean immediately really but the entrepreneurial feeling was maybe if I write a book that you know uses the f-word a lot and talks about this in a different way it would make it accessible to skeptics and so that's why I wrote the first book and then it went on to become a podcast and an app yeah ten percent happier that's really true true and it's it's happens without effort in other words you just have to do the practice it's like exercise you do the

exercise and your body will get in shape whether you like it or not and yes that happens in that way yeah no i i um i actually uh came at it in a different way through exploring eastern thinking i read thoreau's walden and in that there was a lot of you know asian and eastern religious influence and upanishads and so i kind of navigated down there and actually studied buddhism in college as my major and it essentially is a phenomenology of the mind it's a way of describing the operation of the mind how we perceive things the meaning we give to those things how our beliefs determine our experience and suffering and you know you can read about it all you want but unless you begin to know your mind which is what meditation helps

you do it's like slow down what's going on it's not this like blank slate you close your eyes and you're in bliss and nirvana that's not how it goes right it's a very it's a very interesting way to sort of reset your relationship to yourself to your world your experience to the meaning you give things and everything just sort of shifts whether you want to make it shift or not it's just the act of doing it and i think a lot of people read meditation books but don't don't actually a lot of people read diet books and don't actually eat differently right so it's it's really about the practice so when i remember when i came back from haiti after the earthquake i was working in port-au-prince It was just really rough.

And the 82nd Airborne there came in and they said, this is worse than anything we've seen in Iraq or Afghanistan. This is just horrific. 300,000 dead, 300,000 wounded. And, you know, I came back and I was in that same state of panic and anxiety and unreality and disassociation. How could the world not know what's really going on? Everybody's just in their little life and it really um it was really a very powerful shift in sort of understanding

this anxiety and panic i'd never had before uh so i can relate to what you're saying i was there too yeah in haiti oh yeah it was it was it was the worst thing i've ever seen it was i mean i i remember walking the first night it was actually a 60 minutes piece on it we got up to play with paul farmer and we went to the port of prince hospital a general hospital there and my friend did that piece byron pitts oh yeah byron yeah yeah he was the guy yeah so came and we went i said actually i grabbed him and i said byron let's go to the back and there was this this area where the morgue was and it was just full of bodies in the on the concrete i was riding in the sun i saw byron that night and they were using forklifts

to dispose of the yeah yes yeah it was unbelievably bad it was it was rough so i i get it and you know when you have that it's like how do you get out of that and a lot of people have different types of trauma and different types of stress and you know question is, we all are inundated every day with massive amounts of inputs that cause our psychology to be affected, our mood, our energy, our anxiety level, our sleep. And meditation seems to be a way to help people navigate through that in a way that's very powerful. So what were the things that you noticed when you started meditating and what was the kind of meditation you did? Can I swear? You can.

The first thing I noticed, the first data point that emerged was that I overheard my wife at a party telling friends that I was less of a shithead, which I thought was interesting. That was even before I saw any benefit for myself. That's hardly a swear. Yeah, it'll get worse now that I have permission. So there are two big benefits, as I noticed showing up in my own mind after a couple of weeks, really, of doing. And I was just doing five to ten minutes a day. That's it?

Yeah, that's it. And really, that's what I recommend people start with. And I also believe one minute counts. Because time is the biggest. In the second book I wrote, I was really trying to, it was a how-to book, and I was really trying to figure out how do we get people over the hump from being interested in this to actually doing it. And the biggest obstacle, I believe, is time. Yeah. And so if you tell people, look, what I tell people is one minute counts and try to aim for daily ish yeah and

what i've found and we've tested this with uh we we do a meditation challenge every year for the employees at apple and uh we meaning the folks from the 10 happier app and we set it up as a way to, as, hey, do meditate, try to meditate for at least one minute, 25 out of 31 days in the month of October. And if you don't have that minute, you got to look at your life and see what's wrong. Absolutely. What we find is the buy-in rates are incredibly high. So we're actually, this challenge that we run for Apple, we're about to roll it out to the public. So anybody can take the challenge starting in january um and and so we i see this as a really important sort of behavioral hack to tell people look i get it you

feel time starved here's how to get over the hump um but anyway for me what i found was just after a few weeks of doing this the two big benefits are focus you know really what meditation is and and you asked me what kind of meditation so when i talk about meditation i'm talking about mindfulness meditation which is derived from buddhism but secularized and stripped of all the metaphysical claims and religious lingo really the beginning instruction is sit close your eyes try to feel your breath coming in and going out you don't have to breathe in a special way just feel the breath as it naturally occurs and then every time you get distracted which is going to happen a million times you just start again and again and again and that noticing you've become distracted and beginning again is like a bicep curl for your

brain and it's what shows up on the brain scans of all the all these fascinating studies that have been done where neuroscientists look at the brains of people who meditate. This is the mechanism by which, or at least one of the mechanisms by which you change your brain and your mind and your life by extension. Anyway, focus was a huge thing for me because what meditation is, is a focus exercise in many ways. You're trying to focus on your breath and then every time

you get distracted start again and start again and start again and studies have found that this simple exercise changes the part of the brain associated with attention regulation so for me focus was a huge win it doesn't mean i'm in you know impenetrably you know undistractable or something like that i'm still a twitter checking sort of uh email checking fool a lot of the time i just think i'm i'm less prone to that than i used to be the other but the bigger benefit is is called mindfulness which is in our world of health and wellness is such a huge buzz phrase buzz word i fear that often people use the word without knowing what they're talking about so mindfulness really is it's an ancient word with a lot of different and you you know this from your days of studying buddhism it it's you know the ancient word is sati in the in the

pali language which was the indian language that the buddha spoke or said to have spoken it actually has many meanings but a very simple serviceable definition is the ability to know what's happening in your head without getting carried away by it yeah so mindfulness is just the skill of being able to see oh this this is anger that's coming up right now i don't have to be owned by it i don't have to take the bait and act on it it's lowered emotional reactivity is essentially or another way of saying it would be emotional intelligence and that is incredibly useful to know you're angry less fights with your spouse for sure doesn't mean no fights with your spouse i mean again or how you show up in them absolutely absolutely and but but again i always want to give permission

people for people to mess up this is the 10 ideas, very powerful, because it's not like you're going to start meditating, and then you'll never have a fight with your spouse, or you're never going to show up in one of those fights in a way that's really nasty and vindictive. It just means you may catch yourself earlier. friend sam harris who has a great podcast called waking up um and he wrote a book about meditation called waking up he has said and i love this that meditation doesn't mean you will never feel anger again but it may cut down on the half-life of anger yeah you may catch yourself two minutes into a bout of fury rather than an hour into a bout of fury and the amount of damage as Sam says that you can do in an hour of anger versus two minute two minutes I mean like that's an incalculable difference and that's really what meditation in my experience does it also helps you break the it seemed like in breakable unbreakable bond between your feelings your thoughts and your actions yes so often we we

we conflate the two we have what we have a feeling and that you know or a thought and that creates a feeling and that creates an action when you realize that everything you think in your brain is not necessarily worth listening to you know you shouldn't believe every stupid thought you have basically meditation helps you see that and you can break down that space where really it used to be one it used to be thought feeling reaction and that that's a powerful set of tools to have in any work a walk of life whether it's your relationship whether it's work or anything because it in my in my experience it's a it's a massive game changer because you're and the this is the cliche this is like the only cliche meditation cliche that doesn't make me want to put a pencil in my eye it teaches you how to respond wisely to things

instead of reacting blindly yeah because we have this non-stop conversation going on in our heads all the time that of course if we broadcast aloud people would think we're insane but we have this non-stop chatter and because we're unaware of it it owns us so every neurotic obsession that flits through our mind we just act it out blindly because we're not aware that this is just a thought what meditation does is force you into a collision with the asshole in your head so that you you're not taking every shitty idea he or she is offering up to you and that is what stops you from you know eating the 75th cookie or saying the thing that's going to ruin the next 48 hours of your marriage or whatever and and it

makes a huge difference again we're not talking about infallibility here we're just talking about reduced levels of the your quotient so what's the dose because you know you talk about the one minute meditation and i i get that it's a way to get people over the hurdle of starting, but is it really effective? And for me, I noticed that the first few minutes is like being in a wild ocean in a storm, and then after a while it kinda calms down and things settle down,

and I get to a much different space of being aware. And I think when you look at the science around meditators, you've got Richard Davidson, whoitators you've got richard davidson i know you've uh worked with and yeah has done all this research with the tibetan olympic meditators who meditated you know for nine years in a cave for example versus one minute here and there during the week how and their brains are different they look different their brain waves are different the shape and size of their brain is different, their behavior is different, their happiness is different. So what is that sort of like Goldilocks dose that is really the right dose? We don't know. You know, I've asked Richie Davidson, the eminent neuroscientist who's really led the charge on bringing scientific tools to bear on these inner

technologies of meditation and contemplative practices. I've asked him and many other neuroscientists who have been looking at meditation, and we don't actually know. The consensus that I've been able to generate among these folks is, if you were to do five minutes a day, what I've been able to gather from these folks is that they are of the view that that would probably give you access to many of the advertised benefits of meditation. So I think that's the good news. The better news, and now I'm in the realm of opinion, the better news, in my opinion, is that one minute truly does count.

Because what are we trying to do in meditation? We're trying to wake up from the autopilot of being owned by this sort of malevolent puppeteer in our head our ego the monkey mind right and so in a minute can you sit and then try to focus on your breath and then get distracted immediately and in that moment of seeing the distraction what are you doing you're waking up you're waking up from the this dream that we're in of just being controlled by this thought-producing machine in our head. And I think that can happen in a minute. I know it can happen in a minute. Do I think it would be better to do more?

Absolutely. I think if I could snap my fingers and say, yeah, everybody in the world is going to do five to ten minutes a day, I would, but I can't. And we're dealing with the fact that we did not evolve we did not evolve for healthy habits evolution didn't care about you flossing your teeth evolution cared about you getting your dna into the next generation and so we evolved for threat detection and finding sources of pleasure like mates and food.

We didn't evolve to develop these long-term healthy habits. It's really hard. We're wired for failure. And so I'm always thinking of ways, little hacks, to get people over the hump because the best way to create a habit is to access the benefits so that it becomes blazingly obvious you should do it, not because somebody's telling you to do it, but because your life is better, because you like the act of doing it, and because your life improves as a consequence and so the

little tricks i use are like one minute counts and daily ish etc etc and again we're finding and by we i mean my team at 10% happier we're finding that this really does work with people and so that's why i stick with it your brain is like a muscle that if you exercise in the right way, you can train it to be better at things. It's called neuroplasticity. Yeah. And science now tells us that the more you practice and work out a brain circuit like a muscle, the stronger the connections get, the better it works. So the basic move in meditation, say mindfulness, very popular these days. Mindfulness starts with watching your breath. You put your mind on your breath, you watch the inhalation, the exhalation, and you know what? Your mind's going to wander. Wanders 50%

of the time, Harvard research tells us. And you notice it wandered and you bring it back. That's the rep. The basic rep is noticing that it wandered and bringing it back. It's just like going to the gym. Every time you lift a weight, you make that muscle that much stronger. Every time you notice your mind wandered and you bring it back,

you make the circuitry for paying attention that much stronger. That's right. So that is a powerful idea that you can actually train your brain like you can train your muscles. You can condition your brain like you can train your muscles you can condition your brain like you can condition your body and this is one of the big differences I saw with the psychology that I knew at the time was

that nobody thought you could change the brain you could you know it was just a given you worked within those parameters you took you know the limits that you had is how you will always be. And these Eastern psychology said, hey, no, this is just a starting point. But if you practice, it's interesting, they call meditation practice, practice. Because you're practicing.

You're getting used to making your mind more flexible, more focused, more calm. The bonus is if you do loving kindness meditation, it works out a different set of circuits, like working out different muscles. And it makes the mammalian caretaking circuitry, which is a parent's love for a child, stronger. So people who do that kind of meditation

actually become kinder. They actually are more generous, more altruistic. So it depends what you do, as it does it does you know when you go to the gym whatever you work out is what you can improve and same with meditation whatever kind of meditation you do that's where the benefits will be yeah and it's interesting because most people think oh meditation is a waste of time what am i doing i'm just sitting there staring at my navel but it actually has this powerful effect on so many different yeah the aspects of rough you wrote this book altered traits where you actually talk about how it changes

who you are in a positive way exactly so the the naive notion that uh working out mentally is a waste of time just doesn't understand what the benefits are and like i said there you get more calm you get more clear and focused, you get kinder, calm, clear, kind. That's actually a better human being. It makes you happier. It's all about well-being, Mark. Yeah.

I mean, it's true. I studied Buddhism when I was in college. I went to these 10-day Zen meditation retreats. You'd come out of there feeling you just took LSD. Everything was crystal clear. everything just seemed magic and beautiful and you know then I kind of went through you know having medical school and becoming a parent and I kind of fell off it and a number of years ago I picked it back up again in a way that is really profoundly impacted me and I noticed that I don't get upset or triggered

or angry well there was one time my wife said I got angry that was when we checked your hotel we were first kind of getting together and there were two double beds and it was I was super tired and I lost it but other than that I don't think I was meditating that much. No, I was, but I was like, I was sort of over the limit. But I usually notice that I'm not triggered, even by stressful events. Well, that's another thing, that the changes are subtle. All of a sudden, you notice, I'm not getting angry. You have to notice harder to notice you're not getting angry. But, you know, things that would trigger you in the past don't trigger you as much,

or as often, or as strongly. Or if they do, you recover more quickly. Yeah. Which is the technical definition of resilience is how long it takes you to recover from peak of arousal to getting back to calm. And the studies that we looked at in Altered Traits make it very clear this happens. And there's a dose-response relationship. The more you do it, the stronger the benefits. You know, what is interesting is, in your book, you looked at different kinds of meditators.

So there's the beginners, and there's a lot of benefit you get from just doing it. We were surprised right away, like the first 10 hours of practice, you get benefits that are measurable. You don't have to be in a cave for nine years, right? No. No. And the benefits accrue very fast.

But then there's the kind of Olympic meditators, right? The guys have been meditating literally nine years in a cave every day, all day. And you put those people in brain scans and you look at their brain waves and you found some amazing stuff. Their brains are different in good ways one of them is inter i really like something called the gamma wave we all get gamma like when you have a great idea or when you picture very vividly like biting into a peach and it's so crunchy and the smell and the sound and the taste when that comes together you get a gamma for about a quarter second. These yogis-

That's why I eat peaches a lot. These yogis have gamma all the time. Unbelievable. It's never been seen before. A couple of remarkable things about them. Another is I was in the lab when the first yogi was run, and for statistical analytic reasons, this is in an fMRI. An MRI is like a human cigar case.

You know, you just put in this giant magnet that whirs around you. Some people are so frightened of the MRI, they have to go in a practice MRI to get ready for the MRI. Oh, it's scary. I meditate when I go there because I don't freak out.

So this first guy, yogi who goes in, and these yogis were flown over one by one. So the first one goes in and they say, okay, we want you to do four different kinds of meditation and do the meditation for 60 seconds. Then you'll hear a buzzer, then nothing for 30, and then 60 again, and then buzzer, nothing 30, like four times for each meditation. I don't know about you, but if you or anyone listening to this meditates, it's like, it takes my mind a little while to settle down,

but these yogis could do it instantly. Wow. And the readouts showed that each of those four meditations, there was visualization, concentration, open presence, whatever it was. They could do it immediately, and there was a unique profile for each. So in other words, their brains are really flexible, and they have them under just unbelievable mastery.

And then there are things like… And structurally, they're different too, right? What happens, this is really encouraging for someone in my age group, the brain ages more slowly the more you meditate. And there was this one of the 14 yogis who was like this superstar. Like when he did compassion, his circuits for happiness, interestingly, talk about well-being uh activated like seven to eight hundred percent seven to eight hundred percent has never been seen

it's not thought to be possible like something somebody lifting two thousand pounds of weights right think about this the moment he thought of being compassionate he got happy yeah like big time right well that's an interesting that's an interesting point because what we know is that of being compassionate, he got happy. Yeah. Like, big time. Right, well, that's an interesting point, because what we know is that altruism, and in a sense, that's compassion. Yes, it is. Triggers the same pleasure centers in the brain as heroin or cocaine, and it's much safer.

It's a little trick. So the Dalai Lama has always said, the first person to benefit from compassion is the one who feels it. Yes, that's right. That's very well put. Yeah, it's so true. And what's fascinating is, I was listening to Michael Pollan, who's going to be on our podcast, talk about the effect of psychedelic drugs and the research going on around how they affect the brain. Yes. research going on around how they affect the brain yes and he says the they suppress something called the default mode network which is this new area of

the brain that was recently discovered that it seems to be where the ego lives where the sense of separation for thoughts of ourself my worries what's wrong in my relationships all that is default right it's the I this the little eye of the little self which is all about the threat to the ego which is which is protective and defensive and fearful and it's what we want to protect and control things with and when that area gets suppressed with psychedelics it allows you to feel one with the world and you know connection to everybody and love and and your

your little self gives way to the big exactly and the same thing happens with meditation well there's a difference it's a very big difference we call our book altered traits not altered states yeah because michael is talking about an altered state yes the minute that drug leaves your body i'm sorry the self comes back. So meditation changes the brain in a lasting way. That's the altered trait. And it's a very important difference. And that's what causes suffering, right? According to the Buddhist philosophy, suffering is your attachment to things being a certain way, which is usually driven by your ego. Yes. And liking or disliking this or that, and worrying about this thing and that person and all of that.

The ego is the source of suffering. And that's one thing that we found is that the part of the brain where the ego lives, so to speak, gets smaller. It reduces in meditators, in yogis, in long-term meditators. That's fascinating. So was there any other wisdom that came out of that Altered Traits book and things that people should really know? Well, I think the bottom line is that meditation changes you in beneficial ways.

And the very best kind of meditation is the one you will do. I don't recommend any brand. It's whatever you can stick with because they all seem to have the same general benefits. And you don't have to be in a meditation hall in the Himalayas wearing a maroon robe. You can do it on the subway. Don't do it while you're driving, please. But if you're a passenger, you're free to do it. You can do it anywhere that you can put aside everything else yeah and make a space for yourself which it's in itself is a luxury these days a time and a place where you're just there for yourself

I've even meditated in the lecture sometimes I'm like that that's boring. I just close my eyes. Wherever you can do it. I put on my Bose headphones on the plane. Nobody's going to bother you. That's the only thing. It has to be. Because you don't want to have to pay attention to other stuff. That's the point. Yeah.

And just to touch back on what we said, you don't have to be an Olympic meditator to get the benefits. We know even in people who are beginners, who have done it for weeks or days, actually start to see benefit. to get the benefits. We know even in people who are beginners, who have done it for weeks or days, actually start to see benefit. And it seems to improve the immune system, increase stem cells, increase brain connections,

increase neurogenesis, which is new brain cells. It helps to regulate inflammation in the body. It's pretty extraordinary. And it's free. And it's free. Meditation is medicine, just like food is medicine. I think it's so powerful. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

And follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes, and lots more. And now you can have access to all of this information by signing up for my free Mark's Picks newsletter at drhyman.com forward slash Mark's Picks. I promise I'll only email you once a week on Fridays and I'll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey and I hope they'll help you too.

Again, that's drhyman.com forward slash Mark's Picks. Thank you again and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Altra Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for your help in

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