The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Start A Meditation Practice And Create Healthy Habits

Episode Date: June 11, 2021

How To Start A Meditation Practice And Create Healthy Habits | This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market Meditation is now commonly accepted for its range of benefits, yet many of us still struggle with making it a regular practice in our daily lives. And this doesn’t just happen with meditation. Whether it be adopting healthier eating habits, spending more time in nature, or improving our sleep hygiene, the understanding that these things are good for us is rarely enough to change our behavior. The good news is having trouble changing habits is not about a lack of willpower or discipline. In this mini-episode, Dr. Hyman talks with Dan Harris about his own journey into meditation and how just one minute a day may be enough to get you on the path towards all of meditation’s benefits. He also speaks with BJ Fogg about using the science of behavior to create new and lasting habits.  Dan Harris is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and the co-anchor of ABC's Nightline and the weekend edition of Good Morning America. He is the author of two New York Times best-sellers, 10% Happier and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book.  Dr. BJ Fogg is a behavior scientist with deep experience in innovation and teaching. For the past 20 years at Stanford University, he has directed a research lab and he also teaches his models and methods in graduate seminars. BJ has personally coached over 40,000 people in forming new habits, using his breakthrough method called “Tiny Habits.” His New York Times bestselling book, Tiny Habits: The Small Changes that Change Everything, was published in early 2020 and is contracted to be published in over 25 languages. This episode is brought to you by Thrive Market. Right now, Thrive Market is offering all Doctor's Farmacy listeners an extra 25% off your first purchase and a free gift when you sign up for Thrive Market. Just head over to thrivemarket.com/Hyman.  Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Dan Harris, “Is One Minute Of Meditation Enough?” here:https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DanHarris Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with BJ Fogg, “How To Make Behavior Change Stick” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/BJFogg

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. I think about it in general as lowering the bar. Don't have this high bar that you must clear. Lower the bar and embrace the fact that you succeeded in getting over the bar. And if you do more than that, terrific. If you do 20 push-ups rather than two, awesome. But you don't raise the bar on yourself. You set yourself up to succeed.

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especially when it comes to our health. Most of us have at least a few items on our list of things we quote unquote should be doing. Whether you want to start meditating or incorporate any other new habit, there's amazing science that can help guide us to the results that we want. So what do we know about setting ourselves up for success when it comes to creating healthy habits? Dr. Hyman spoke to journalists and the host of the 10% Happier podcast, Dan Harris, about his own journey into meditation and how just one minute a day may be enough to get you started with a regular practice. I had been assigned to cover faith and spirituality for ABC News and I didn't want that assignment. I was not interested in this stuff at all.

It actually turned out to be great for me and I met a lot of interesting people and that ultimately led me to reading a book by Eckhart Tolle. 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 yammering all the time at us, mostly thinking about the past or the future. The crazy ant in your head. Yeah. Or the Buddha calls it the monkey mind. But I had never heard that theory before.

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 explained 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 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 and it's it 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 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 interesting way to sort of reset your relationship to yourself, to your world, to 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? Right. So, it's really about the practice. So, what were the things that you noticed when you started meditating and what was the

kind of meditation you did? 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 yeah that's it and there I really that's what I recommend people start with and I also believe one minute counts you know 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. And so, if you tell people, look, what I tell people is one minute counts

and try to aim for daily-ish. So, I see this as a really important sort of behavioral hack to tell people, look, I get it, you feel 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 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 you know when you look at the science around

meditators you've got richard davidson i know you've uh worked with and yeah dailama 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. 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. 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 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 10 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. 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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. The work of behavior scientist Dr. BJ Fogg illuminates why this idea of one minute a day can lead to lasting behavior change. He recently discussed his breakthrough method called tiny habits in a conversation with Dr. Hyman. Well, I mean, in a way, your work is the antithesis of perfectionism. It's like, it's like the celebration of small little wins that sometimes seem silly, but actually build

a life of success, right? Floss one tooth, do one push-up, take one step, you know, say one prayer, whatever it is that you want to do. I think about it in general as lowering the bar. Don't have this high bar that you must clear. Lower the bar and embrace the fact that you succeeded in getting over the bar. And if you do more than that, terrific. If you do 20 push-ups rather than two, awesome. But you don't raise the bar on yourself. You set yourself up to succeed. Part of the trick, or not trick, or part of the skill of doing tiny

habits effectively is picking the smallest new habit that will also have meaning to you. I mean, it can get so small that it's completely trivial, and that's not a good selection. So pick something that's really, really small, but will also have meaning and build from there. So let's dig into it a little bit. So this is a very scientifically based model. It's not just some cockamamie idea you came up with, you know, while you were taking a shower. Or maybe you came up with it then, I don't know.

But it's something you've studied extensively at Stanford. It's backed by enormous amounts of research. And you really have created this whole fog behavior model. And talk about these three things that come together at the same moment and why they're important and sort of what you've learned, how it's so different than everything else that we see about behavior change. A behavior, any behavior, happens when there's motivation due to behavior, there's ability

to the behavior, and then there's a prompt. And when those things converge and behavior happens, if any one of those things is missing, it does not happen. And then when you graph it out in two dimensions, which I could draw or show a poster if I should,

there's a relationship between motivation and ability. If something is hard to do, and in order to do it, in my model, because there's a line that defines what action happens and what doesn't, if something's hard to do, then you have to have high levels of motivation. When motivation drops, you can no longer do hard things. But on the other end of the model, if something's really easy to do, and this is what led to the Tiny Habits breakthrough for me, if something's really easy to do, your motivation can be high or middle or even low.

When I saw that in my own model, I was like, oh, what this means is if I make a new habit really, really easy to do, then I don't have to worry about my motivation level very much. All I need to worry about is the pump. You can do it, and it's not about willpower or discipline. It's about design. You design new habits into your life. It's a design challenge, not a test of somebody's character. I think that's so important to say that because I see this all the time as a doctor. People beat

themselves up. They trash talk. They have self-loathing. They get discouraged. And I just love this part of your book, 100 Ways to Celebrate and Feel Shine. And you have like 100 ways to celebrate yourself and to celebrate the little successes and the tiny habits and builds and builds on a positive feedback loop. And I think that's a really key part of behavior change is these positive feedback loops. And other behavior change models have been studied. And it's one of the banes of existence. if you go to your doctor and he gives you a prescription, there's only a 50% chance that you'll fill it. And if you fill it, there's probably a 50% chance that you'll take it. And so doctors do all these great things. Unless you're a surgeon,

you have the patient lying unconscious on the table, you can do whatever you want to them. You know, to get patients to do what you think is right for their health or what you think will help them, whether it's take a pill. I mean, taking a pill is pretty easy, right? Forget eating better, exercising, meditating, getting eight hours of sleep, building your social network, relationships, you know, all those things are so challenging. And it is why we're seeing this incredible global epidemic of chronic illness. One of the systematic problems is focusing people or yourself on something abstract, like, oh, I got to exercise. That's an abstract thing. It's not a behavior. We'll often call those things behaviors, but they're abstractions. And then the next thing

that goes wrong is people think, I just need to motivate myself. That combination of trying to motivate yourself towards something abstract does not work very well at all. Whether you're changing your own behavior or somebody else's. In fact, with, this is kind of an oversimplification, but in my work in Tiny Habits, rather than motivating the abstraction, you make something very specific, really easy. So like do three jumping jacks, right? Yep, and make it really easy to do. And so you're not worried about motivation

and you know exactly what the behavior is. You've talked about this model. It seems pretty obvious. You have a motivation to do something. You have the ability to do it and you have a trigger or a prompt. And that seems like a very simple model. And it is, it works. I've used it. But on the other hand, what is pushing against people that is limiting them? Well, we talked about the idea of people even focusing on the wrong thing. Like if your

aspiration is weight loss, and you think it's about walking on the treadmill at the gym, focus on the wrong behavior. So that's one of the systematic problems. Another one of the problems is the idea that you set this really lofty goal and then you just have to keep yourself motivated toward that lofty goal. You're not facing the reality that your motivation is going to shift over time the idea and we can come back to that if you want and so the goal setting people don't get super upset with me I break it into aspirations and outcomes so there's a type of goal that's an aspiration there's technical that's an outcome so rather than using an ambiguous word because I'm really big on precision let's use when it's an aspiration, like earlier, Mark, you said you wanted to get stronger. That's an aspiration. And then you find behaviors, specific behaviors that will take you there. So in either case, you start with what you want to achieve. And this is part of the system in the book. And then you figure out

what behaviors are the right ones for you to take you there. So you don't guess at the behaviors. There's a way to figure out what are the best behaviors for you. Now, when you look at what has worked, like your example is a great one, Mark. When it has worked, what will always be true is that there was an emotional component where you felt more successful or it relieved some negative emotion. And the better you are at feeling that emotion, that positive emotion on demand,

the better you will be at wiring and habits. So that's an interesting piece. So it's the B, which is behavior equals motivation, ability, and prompt, but there's also the emotion in there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me sketch it out. So when I say behavior, I mean all types of behavior. Habit is a subset. So within, like if I were drawing a diagram, within the big circle that is behavior, motivation, ability, prompt applies to all behavior types. It applies to habits. It applies to stopping behaviors. It applies to one-time behaviors. It applies to temporary behaviors like taking an antibiotic. Then when you get down to

the subset of habits, those are behaviors you do quite automatically. Those are different than the other types of behaviors. What creates the automaticity is the emotion. So the positive feedback, the emotion, I have people focus on the emotion of success, the feeling of success. That's what makes that behavior automatic and puts it in the category of what we call habit. So it's the feeling of success that wires in the habit and also motivates you to continue. So it has those two functions. Right. Well, this is powerful. And I think it sort of breaks us free from one feeling bad about ourselves because we don't change because we have the wrong map, literally. And now we got a different map that we should try out and want to adopt can be a game changer to our quality of life. To learn more about anything you heard in

today's episode, I encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Dan Harris and BJ Fogg. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with your friends and leaving us a comment below. Thanks for tuning in. on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.