How Meditation Works & Science-Based Effective Meditations | Huberman Lab Podcast #96

- Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast

where we discuss science and science-based tools

for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'm Andrew Huberman,

and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, we are discussing meditation.

We are going to discuss the science of meditation,

that is, what happens in the brain and body

while we are meditating,

and we will talk about the science of meditation

as it relates to how the brain and body change

as a consequence of meditation,

that is, what you export or take from a meditation practice

that can impact everything from your sleep to your mood.

For instance, meditation has been shown

to alleviate symptoms of depression.

And we will also talk about how meditation

can be used to enhance focus and other states of mind

that are useful for work and other aspects of life.

Now, of course, most of you

have probably heard of meditation,

and when we think of meditation,

most often, we think of somebody

either sitting or lying down.

If they're sitting, we might imagine them

in the so-called lotus position,

you know, sitting with legs crossed, very upright,

with hands on the knees or, you know, crossed in our lap

or something of that sort.

Typically, we think of somebody who is in a very calm state,

eyes closed, focused on their so-called third eye center.

The third eye center is the area just behind one's forehead.

There's no third eye there, at least there shouldn't be,

but I'll tell you why it's called the third eye center

and what the origins of that are

and why it's relevant, actually, for a meditative practice.

With all that said, it turns out that meditation

encompasses a huge variety of different practices.

Some of those practices indeed are done sitting

or lying down with one's eyes closed,

focusing on the third eye center.

Other of those practices are focused on a body scan,

you know, really focusing on one area of the body

and its contact with whatever surface

you happen to be sitting or lying on

or can be done walking.

In fact, there are walking meditations done with eyes open.

So there are many different forms of meditation,

but today, we are going to focus

mainly on how specific types of meditation

and specific areas of the brain

that are activated during those meditations

change our way of being in fundamental ways,

not just during the meditation practice,

but afterwards as well.

So if you're somebody who's interested

in changing your default state of mood or of thinking

or enhancing your ability to focus

or improving your sleep or improving performance

in some cognitive or physical endeavor,

meditation is powerful,

but you want to make sure

that you pick the right meditation practice.

So we will talk about picking a meditation practice

that isn't just feasible because you'll do it

but is actually directed at the goals specific to you

and what you need most.

So to give you some sense of the contour of today's episode,

first, I'm going to talk about

some of the underlying biology,

the mechanisms and the brain areas

and also the areas of the body that are activated

during certain forms of meditation,

and, equally important,

which areas of the brain and body

are shut down or reduced in their activity

during specific types of meditation.

Then I'll transition

into how to best do a meditation practice,

how to get the most out of that meditation practice,

and then I will talk about how to change

or alter your meditation practices

according to your specific goals

and as you get better at meditation.

And this can get a little bit counterintuitive,

but in a positive way.

What I mean by that is, for instance, a lot of people think

that as you meditate and get better at meditating,

you need to meditate more and more and more,

sort of like if you get better at running endurance races

that you need to keep running longer and longer,

you know, first a 5K, then a 10K,

then a marathon, then ultras.

With meditation, it's actually quite the opposite.

The better that you get

at dropping into a particular brain state

and the more your so-called traits of brain state shift,

not just states as they're sometimes referred to,

but traits, this is a theme that I've picked up

from a terrific book that I'll refer to later,

but the more that you can get

into specific neural circuits quickly,

actually, the less you need to meditate

in order to derive the benefits of meditation.

So that's a wonderful aspect of meditative practices

that's unlike a lot of other forms of mental exercise

and cognitive enhancing exercises.

So we'll talk about all of that today,

and I promise that by the end of today's episode,

you will have a rich array of meditative practices

to select from,

you'll know why each of them work

and why they can be directed toward particular goals

and how to do that,

and you'll also know

how to modify those meditation practices

under conditions where you might get busier

or where you're suffering from lack of sleep,

and I think a lot of people will be excited to know

that today we're going to discuss

a specific form of meditation

that can indeed reduce your need for sleep

and still allow you to enhance your cognitive

and physical abilities.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is, however, part of my desire and effort

to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information

about science and science-related tools

to the general public.

In keeping with that theme,

I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is InsideTracker.

InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform

that analyzes data from your blood and DNA

to help you better understand your body

and help you meet your health goals.

Now, I've long been a believer

in getting regular blood work done

for the simple reason that many of the factors

that impact your immediate and long-term health

can only be analyzed from a quality blood test.

One issue with a lot of blood tests

and DNA tests out there, however,

is that you get information back

about hormones, blood lipids, et cetera,

but you don't know what to do with that information.

InsideTracker makes understanding all of that very easy

and, even better, points to specific directives,

that is, things you can do in terms of your lifestyle,

your nutrition, supplementation, et cetera,

in order to bring those numbers

related to metabolic factors, lipids, hormones, et cetera,

into the ranges that are optimal for you,

your immediate and long-term health.

If you'd like to try InsideTracker,

you can go to insidetracker.com/huberman

to get 20% off any of InsideTracker's plans.

That's insidetracker.com/huberman to get 20% off.

Today's episode is also brought to us by Thesis.

Thesis makes custom nootropics,

and to be honest, I am not a fan of the word nootropics.

I've said this many times before

on this podcast and other podcasts,

and the reason I don't like the word nootropics

is that it means smart drugs.

And as a neuroscientist,

I'm aware that there are neural circuits,

that is, connections in the brain and body

that underlie things like focus

or our ability to switch tasks or creativity, et cetera.

There is no neural circuit for being smart.

And so Thesis understands this,

and as a consequence, they've developed custom nootropics

that are designed to bring your brain and body

into specific states to become, for instance, more focused

or to engage in creative work

or to have more energy for workouts and things of that sort.

At Thesis, you can go there, you take a brief quiz,

and they will design a kit

of four different custom nootropics that you can try

and then modify along with their help

so that you can develop a kit of custom nootropics

that are perfect for your needs.

Perhaps one for creativity, another one for motivation,

another one for focus, and another one for energy.

They'll build those for you.

To get your own personalized nootropics starter kit,

you can go online to takethesis.com/huberman.

Again, that's takethesis.com/huberman

and use the code Huberman at checkout

to get 10% off your first box.

Today's episode is also brought to us by ROKA.

ROKA makes eyeglasses and sunglasses

that are of the absolute highest quality.

The company was founded

by two all-American swimmers from Stanford,

and everything about ROKA eyeglasses and sunglasses

were designed with performance in mind.

Now, I spent a lifetime working on the visual system,

and I can tell you that your visual system

has to contend with an enormous number of challenges

in order for you to be able to see clearly.

ROKA understands this

and has designed their sunglasses and eyeglasses

to be worn in any number of different conditions

and for you to still be able to see with crystal clarity

They were designed for things like cycling and running

so they won't slip off your face if they get sweaty,

they're extremely lightweight.

In fact, most of the time,

I can't even remember that they're on my face,

they're so lightweight.

However, they also can be worn anywhere,

to work, to dinner, et cetera.

They have a terrific aesthetic,

unlike a lot of other performance eyeglasses out there

that you can only find in designs

that really make people look like a cyborg.

ROKA makes the cyborg versions, some people like those,

but they also make versions

of their eyeglasses and sunglasses with frames

that you can wear out to dinner, to work, et cetera.

If you'd like to try ROKA eyeglasses and sunglasses,

go to roka.com, that's roka.com,

and enter the code Huberman

to save 20% off your first order.

Again, that's ROKA, roka.com

and enter the code Huberman at checkout.

The Huberman Lab podcast

is now partnered with Momentous supplements.

To find the supplements we discuss

on the Huberman Lab podcast,

you can go to livemomentous, spelled O-U-S,

livemomentous.com/huberman.

And I should just mention that the library

of those supplements is constantly expanding.

Again, that's livemomentous.com/huberman.

Let's talk about meditation.

As I mentioned earlier,

we are going to talk about what areas of the brain and body

are active during meditation and after meditation

and why that can be so beneficial.

We will also talk about when and how best to meditate.

Now, this is a topic I've long been interested in.

I was first given a book on meditation

when I was in high school

because, to make a long story short,

I was a bit of a wild one early in my high school years,

and as a consequence of a program that I was in,

somebody handed me a book on meditation.

That book is still available now.

That book is called "Wherever You Go, There you Are"

by Jon Kabat-Zinn.

He was one of the first, not the only,

but one of the first people

to really start popularizing meditation

and mindfulness practices in the United States.

So this was in the late 1980s,

and it was really only until recently

that there were very few studies of meditation,

although those really picked up in the '90s.

Now you can find many, many thousands of studies

on meditation and their mechanistic basis,

so brain imaging studies, changes in hormones in the body.

But in the late 1980s and in the early 1990s,

because functional imaging of the brain,

so-called MRI or fMRI, was really just starting to emerge

as a popular tool in laboratories and hospitals,

there really wasn't that much mechanistic understanding

about how meditation worked,

but, of course, there was a deep understanding

from cultures outside the United States

that meditation was extremely useful.

I should just mention,

as long as we're talking about the history of meditation,

any discussion about meditation

is going to be a discussion about states of mind,

and any discussion about states of mind

invokes the word consciousness,

a kind of a dangerous topic to get into in any format

because a lot of people talk about consciousness,

but people use consciousness, the word,

to mean different things.

It doesn't have one standard operational definition

as scientists call it.

However, discussions about consciousness

are often part and parcel with conversations

about things like psychedelics

and kind of alternative therapies.

And so in the 1960s and especially in the 1970s,

meditation and psychedelics were actually close cousins

in the conversation about consciousness and states of mind.

That conversation started to split

into two different divisions,

and I'll explain why in a moment.

It gets to a little bit of interesting academic sociology.

But what happened was there were a couple of guys

at Harvard, including Timothy Leary and others,

who got really interested in psychedelics,

in particular LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide.

And at that time,

that was part of the whole counterculture movement,

it was considered very anti-establishment,

and they were really encouraging students at Harvard

to take LSD.

They were also very interested in meditation.

But what ended up happening

is they essentially got kicked out or fired from Harvard,

and there's a book that I'll refer you to

in the show note captions

if you're interested in learning more about all this.

But they got kicked out and fired

for their emphasis on psychedelics.

Now, nowadays, there's a lot of interest in psychedelics.

We've had episodes with Dr. Matthew Johnson

from Johns Hopkins University who's running clinical trials

on psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD

for the treatment of depression and PTSD.

We've also had Dr. Nolan Williams on the podcast,

my colleague at Stanford who's doing incredible studies

on some of those compounds as well.

So nowadays, the conversation about psychedelics

is coming back,

and it's somewhat divorced

from the conversation about meditation,

but in the 1960s and 1970s,

the conversation about psychedelics and meditation

was sort of one and the same.

That changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s

when people like Jon Kabat-Zinn

started writing books that were purely about meditation

and suggesting that people explore meditative practices

for the utility to bring calmness,

adjust stress, improve sleep, et cetera,

divorced from the conversation about psychedelics.

Now, that's not to say that the scientific community

immediately embraced the conversation about meditation.

In fact, it took quite a long while

for schools like Harvard and Stanford

and other universities around the world

to start embracing and funding studies of meditation,

asking what sorts of brain areas are involved,

how it changes the body,

and, perhaps most importantly,

how a meditation practice can shift the brain and body

when somebody is finished meditating

and is off in their life doing their everyday things.

In the late 1980s and especially within the 1990s,

the advent of brain imaging technology

like magnetic residence imaging, MRI,

or functional magnetic residence imaging

was a way to look at the brain while it was active,

not just to get an image of its structure,

but also how it's functioning

in the areas that so-called light up.

When all of that technology became accessible and popular,

well, that allowed a large number of laboratories

to start asking how specific patterns

of thinking and breathing,

maybe people sitting in the lotus position,

but more often than that,

it would be people inside of an MRI magnet

because it is a magnet,

they sort of put you into a little tube

and push you into the tube, not against your will of course,

but put people into the tube, have them meditate,

and then look at how the brain changed

and to do that over time.

When those studies were done,

what was discovered was really quite miraculous, really.

And now we don't think of it as surprising,

but what was discovered

was a huge laundry list of brain changes.

And then when people were evaluated in their outside life,

so when they would fill out reports

of their subjective feelings of happiness

or they would report their sleep,

or even if objective measures were taken

like changes in hormones

or markers of inflammation, et cetera,

a large list of information fell out of that

which revealed that indeed there are many,

a dozen or more clear benefits

of a regular meditation practice,

and some of those meditation practices could be quite short.

So nowadays, we think of meditation

as pretty commonly accepted,

and in fact, that has a lot to do with the fact

that many of the major tech companies

in the Bay Area during the 2000s such as Google and Apple

and any number of different social media companies

and other companies and business ventures, et cetera,

and investment firms all over the world

started hiring people to train meditation

or had online courses for meditation.

So nowadays, we think of meditation as this thing

that almost everybody understands can benefit us,

but we now sit at an interesting frontier

where most people think of meditation as one thing,

sort of like the word exercise,

which, of course, could mean weight training,

it could mean running,

it could mean high-intensity interval training,

all of which, as you know, will get you different results

depending on what you do, how often you do it,

and the specifics of what you actually do.

So, too, meditation can give you very specific results.

It can give you more focus, it can give you better sleep,

it can give you a combination of results

just like exercise can depending on the exercise.

So what we are going to talk about next

is the specific changes that happen in the brain

with specific aspects of meditation.

That is, what happens when you close your eyes,

what happens when you focus your attention inward

versus focusing your attention outward

because, as I mentioned before,

there's third eye meditation where you close your eyes

and focus on that spot just behind your forehead

and you focus on your breathing.

There's also meditation practices

where you're focusing on what you're eating

with a lot of so-called mindfulness,

being very present to whatever's happening,

not letting your mind wander

or think about yesterday or tomorrow

or what's happening next,

but really focusing on the present.

There are also meditation practices, of course,

where you are in a format of interpersonal communication

where you're really listening very intensely.

That, too, is a form of mindfulness.

So we're going to parse each of these things,

and we are going to ask

what's happening in the brain and body

during each of these meditation practices

so that you can develop specific meditation practices

that you can invoke in your real life on a daily basis

or, thankfully, I would say, for some who are pretty busy,

that you could even do once a week or even once a month

that will still clearly benefit you in specific ways.

I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so

talking about the neuroscience of meditation,

and I promise you I'm not going to just list off

a bunch of different brain areas

that are active during meditation.

That wouldn't be useful to you.

In fact, I don't believe

in throwing out a lot of nomenclature

without also giving some mechanistic explanation

as to what different brain areas do.

And you could say, "Well, what good is it knowing

what different brain areas do and their names

if I can't actually manipulate those brain areas?"

But the good news

is you actually can manipulate those brain areas.

As I'll tell you today,

you can turn up the activity in certain brain areas

and turn down the activity in specific brain areas

with specific elements of a meditation practice,

so that's quite exciting and quite different really

from other aspects of neuroscience

that we might discuss on this podcast.

So there are a few different brain areas

whose names I'd like to arm you with.

And again, the names themselves aren't essential,

but if you can grasp even the top contour

of what I'm about to say,

you'll be in a much better position

to parse and use the information that follows.

There's an area of your brain

that sits right behind your forehead

that's called the prefrontal cortex.

Basically, it's the front bumper of your head

just behind the bone, okay?

That area just behind your forehead

that we call the prefrontal cortex

actually encompasses a lot of different things.

And actually, you have two of them.

You have one on the right side of your brain

and you have one on the left side of your brain,

and they're connected to one another

but they actually do different things.

The area that I'd like to focus on today for a bit

is the so-called left prefrontal cortex,

or if we were going to get really specific,

we'd say the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Dorsal means up, lateral means to the side,

so if you want to touch the left side of your head

and move your hand just toward the midline,

toward the sort of top of your head a little bit,

so that's dorsal, and then lateral,

as long as your hand is still on the side of your head,

you're in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, okay?

So you've got your hand probably right over

your left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

That area of the brain, we know from lesion studies

where it's been damaged in animals or humans

and we know from stimulation studies

where it's been selectively stimulated in animals,

or yes, indeed, also it's been done in humans,

has an incredible ability to control your bodily senses

and to make sense, that is, to interpret what's going on

in terms of your emotions and your bodily sensations.

So from now on, unless I say otherwise,

if I say prefrontal cortex, I'm specifically referring

to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

but I'm going to shorten that up

just for sake of simplicity and ease of communication.

If I'm going to talk about another area of prefrontal cortex,

I'll talk about another area,

but if I say prefrontal cortex today,

what I mean is left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Stimulation of left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

or, I should say more appropriately,

when your left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is active,

you are in a great position

to interpret what's going on with you emotionally,

to interpret your bodily signals of comfort or discomfort,

and then to make really good decisions

on the basis of that interpretation.

And that's because the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

is in direct communication with

and is directly connected to another brain area

called the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC.

Now, I'm just going to refer to it as the ACC, okay?

The ACC is an area of your brain

that is interpreting a lot of different things

about bodily signals,

for instance, how fast you're breathing,

whether or not your heart is beating quickly or slowly,

and, more importantly,

whether or not your heart is beating quickly or slowly

for the circumstance that you are in.

So for instance, if you're running up a hill

and you're even in great shape

and your heart is beating very fast,

it's unlikely that you are going to be concerned

about your heart beating fast

because that is appropriate for the circumstance.

However, if you're just walking along

and all of a sudden, your heart starts beating very quickly

for no apparent reason,

well, then you are going to interpret that

as either pathologic or uncomfortable,

inappropriate for the context that you happen to be in.

The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

is the area of the brain

that actually has some control over

and especially can interpret

what's going on in this ACC region.

Now, most of you probably haven't heard of the ACC.

Most of you probably have heard of a brain area

called the amygdala.

It's an almond-shaped structure

on the two sides of the brain,

people talk about it as the fear center, et cetera.

But your ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex,

gets input from areas like the amygdala,

your threat detection centers,

but it also gets input from an enormous number

of other areas of your brain and body,

including your heart, your gut,

so it gets information about how full,

that is, distended, or how empty your gut is.

It gets information about how quickly you're breathing

from input from your lungs and related structures.

It's an absolutely critical station

for making sense of what's going on in your body,

and it works very closely along with one other structure.

And I promise this is going to be the third structure

in this triad, and then I'll stop listing off names.

So we have dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Think of that as sort of the interpreter

of what's going on inside of you.

You have the ACC, or anterior cingulate cortex,

which is the area of your brain

that's bringing in all this information

about what's going on inside your body

and even on the surface of your body.

You know, if you have any pain or an itch

or a mosquito bite on the surface of your body,

your ACC would definitely register that.

And then there's this other

absolutely incredible brain structure

which is called the insula, I-N-S-U-L-A, insula,

and the insula has a bunch of different parts to it.

But the insula is another area that is interpreting signals

of what's going on in your brain and body,

so the ACC and the insula are working together

to try and figure out, you know, what's going on inside me?

And in addition to that,

the insula is interpreting information

about what's going on outside of you.

So your insula is saying, for instance,

hey, this is a steep hill that I'm running up,

and as a consequence,

whatever heart rate increase that I'm experiencing

or heavy breathing or burning in my lungs,

this all makes sense.

I don't have to be worried, I don't have to be scared.

I might want to slow down, but this makes sense.

Whereas, for instance, in the example I previously gave,

where if you're sitting in a room

and everything is pretty calm,

and all of a sudden, you start feeling really uncomfortable,

like your stomach doesn't feel right

or you start breathing quickly

or you start having a so-called anxiety or panic attack,

in large part, that's because the shift

in your bodily sensations doesn't match

or doesn't correspond to something in the outside world.

So there's this incredible triad

which includes the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

the cingulate or anterior cingulate cortex, and the insula,

and those three are working together

in a kind of conversation,

it's a neural conversation, but a conversation nonetheless,

trying to figure out, okay, what's going on inside me?

How do I feel? What am I thinking about?

And this could be thoughts about the past

or the future or the present.

They are also in a conversation

as to whether or not the sensations

that you're experiencing,

meaning how quick your breathing is

or how slow your breathing is,

how your heart feels, how your skin feels,

any sensations of pain, or pleasure for that matter,

whether or not that makes sense for the situation you're in

and trying to determine

whether or not you are doing the right things

as a consequence of those sensations.

Okay, so again, if you can't remember the names

of these different neural structures in the brain,

don't worry about it.

It's really not that critical.

What is critical is that you understand

that there's a conversation that's constantly occurring

as long as you are awake

trying to figure out what's going on inside of you

and whether or not it makes sense

relative to what's going on outside and around you.

Now, humans are smart.

That is, we are, to some extent, conscious of the fact

that we have memories of the past, awareness of the present,

and anticipation of the future.

So we do realize, for instance,

that we can be seated at the dinner table, excuse me,

and have a thought about something tomorrow,

maybe an exam that's stressing us out

or something like that,

and that will change our bodily state

in a way that is not optimal

for what we're doing in the moment

but that can still make sense to us

because that exam is important,

maybe we're feeling some pressure

about a hard conversation we have to have,

or maybe we are very excited about the next day

and we can't eat because we're so excited,

and that can make perfect sense to us

because we do have access to this knowledge about self

that we can think about the past,

the present, or the future.

So that makes the conversation these three structures are in

even more interesting and dynamic

because what it means is that we can be doing something,

eating, talking, running,

any number of different activities,

and our bodily state may or may not match what we are doing

in a way that's adaptive for that,

and yet that can be completely okay

or at least understandable for us.

Now, a major emphasis of a meditation practice

is to make us so-called more mindful.

What is mindfulness?

Well, again, there isn't one perfect

universally accepted operational definition of mindfulness.

That's basically nerd speak

for saying people can't agree exactly what mindfulness

should be, is, and means for everyone.

But most people assume, and I think agree,

that mindfulness includes something about being present.

And when I say present,

that doesn't necessarily mean present to one's surroundings

because of course a lot of meditation practices

that are designed to make us more mindful and present

are designed to make us more mindful and present

to what's happening internally

while ignoring everything that's happening externally,

but they are designed to make us more present

to our bodily sensations

and, in particular, our breathing and our thoughts

in the moment.

So let's now explore

what a generic meditation practice looks like,

and let's evaluate how that tends to change the activity

of these neural circuits in the brain and body.

And then from there, we can split the conversation

into a couple of different bins,

that is, meditation practices that are ideal

for enhancing focus,

meditation practices that are ideal for improving mood,

meditation practices that are ideal for improving sleep,

and meditation practices that, believe it or not,

benefit all of those things in one fell swoop.

Okay, so what happens during a meditation practice

at the neural level?

In order to answer that question,

we are going to be scientists.

That means you and I are going to be scientists now.

We are going to break down a practice

into its different component parts

and address what we know for sure

about the brain activation states that occur

with those different component parts.

In order to do that,

let's use a somewhat generic form of meditation,

but it's generic and pretty far-reaching

because I would say that for most people,

about 75%, let's say,

a meditation practice is going to involve stopping,

meaning getting out of motion, sitting or lying down,

and, in most cases, closing one's eyes,

although it is absolutely not required

to close one's eyes during meditation.

There are many forms of meditation that are done eyes open.

But for most people,

it's going to involve stopping our movement,

that is, not ambulating, not walking or running,

so seated or lying down with eyes closed.

When we do that,

meaning when we sit or lie down and close our eyes,

as trivial as that shift might sound to you,

it actually is a profound shift in the way that your brain

and other neural circuits in your body function

for the following reason.

When we close our eyes,

we shut down a major avenue of what's called exteroception.

What do I mean by exteroception?

Well, very briefly, we are sensing things on our body

and in our body all the time.

We are also sensing things from outside of us all the time,

so these could be sights or sounds, touch on our body,

sensations withinside our body, et cetera.

Now, sensation is distinct from what we call perception.

Perception is, put simply,

the sensations that we happen to be paying attention to.

So at any given moment, you are sensing many, many things.

There are sound waves hitting your ears,

there are pressure receptors on the bottoms of your feet

sensing your shoes or your sandals or the floor, et cetera,

but you're not perceiving them

until you place your attention on them.

Now, the way perception works

is that you have so-called spotlights of attention.

You can't perceive everything all at once,

every sound, every sight, every touch.

That would be overwhelming. In fact, that would be terrible.

Rather you have spotlights of perception

that can either be very narrow,

so for instance,

you could focus all of your perception right now

on your big toe of your right foot

and really pour all of your awareness, your attention

into what you're perceiving there, what it feels like,

if there's tingling or pressure, heat or cold, et cetera,

or you can broaden that spotlight to include both feet

or all your toes on both feet

and then your legs and your whole body or the entire room.

Perception is like a spotlight,

and I should mention there are very good data

that we can split our attention into two

but probably not more than two spotlights,

and we can make those spotlights of perception

either very broad and diffuse or very narrow.

You can practice this now if you like.

You can pick a spot on the wall away from you anywhere,

or if you're driving, you can look at some location,

and you can focus intensely on one small location,

for instance, a tree in the horizon

or a person on the street

or any number of different things outside of you,

or you can broaden that spotlight

to include the entire scene at once.

You can also focus a spotlight of perception on your body,

say on the left upper portion of your chest.

And of course you can focus

on the left upper portion of your chest

and something outside of you,

you can split your attention

between those two perceptual spotlights.

It's very hard, although not impossible,

to have three perceptual spotlights,

but most people can split to two points

of attention or perception pretty easily.

The other thing that most people can do pretty easily

is merge those two spotlights

or, rather, to have just one spotlight of attention.

So you don't always have

to have two spotlights of attention on,

and here, I'm using the word attention

and perception interchangeably.

But you could, for instance, have two points of attention,

so you're talking to somebody and you're paying attention

to whether or not somebody's walking in the door or not,

so that's two,

or you could be completely focused

on the person you're talking to,

or you could be completely focused on the stomach ache

or the great sensation of hunger that you have in your belly

while talking to somebody,

in fact, you're not even listening

to what they're saying at all.

Okay? So you have two spotlights of perception.

You can split them or merge them into one.

And, this is very important,

those spotlights of perception can intensify or dim,

and there, I'm using analogy.

What I mean by that is your perception of what's happening

within those spotlights can be very, very high acuity.

That is, you can register very fine changes in detail

like tingling on one side of your big toe of your right foot

versus the other,

or it can be somewhat more diffuse.

You're just thinking about your whole toe,

which, in that case, seems like a small area,

but the point is that you can consciously adjust the acuity,

that is, the fineness of your perception.

All of this is under your power

because of the incredible ability of a brain structure

whose name you now understand and know,

which is the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

although there are other areas of your brain

involved as well.

Your ability to direct your attention to specific things

in your environment or within your body

or to split those points of attention or merge them

or dial up the intensity

of how closely you're paying attention

to every little shift or ripple

and change in sensation there

or to kind of dissociate, if you will,

for lack of a better word,

to disengage from that perception,

all of that is under control because of your ability

to engage this area that we call the prefrontal cortex,

and, in particular, the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

I'd like to take a quick break

and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Athletic Greens.

Athletic Greens, now called AG1,

is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink

that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs.

I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012,

so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast.

The reason I started taking Athletic Greens

and the reason I still take Athletic Greens

once or usually twice a day

is that it gets me the probiotics

that I need for gut health.

Our gut is very important.

It's populated by gut microbiota

that communicate with the brain, the immune system,

and basically all the biological systems of our body

to strongly impact our immediate and long-term health,

and those probiotics in Athletic Greens

are optimal and vital for microbiotic health.

In addition, Athletic Greens contains a number

of adaptogens, vitamins, and minerals that make sure

that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met,

and it tastes great.

If you'd like to try Athletic Greens,

you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman

and they'll give you five free travel packs

that make it really easy to mix up Athletic Greens

while you're on the road, in the car,

on the plane, et cetera,

and they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3+K2.

Again, that's athleticgreens.com/huberman

to get the five free travel packs

and the year's supply of vitamin D3+K2.

Okay, so now if we look at the example of what happens

when you sit or lie down and close your eyes

and decide to meditate,

you should immediately realize

that that's a tremendous shift

in your perceptual ability, why?

Because that spotlight of attention,

while it can be oriented

toward, for instance, what you hear in the room

or maybe the feeling of wind moving trees

in the environment that you happen to be in,

when we close our eyes,

we shut down one of the major avenues for sensory input,

which is vision.

And when we do that,

there's a tendency for those perceptual spotlights

to be focused more so on what happens

at the level of the surface of our skin

and inside of our bodies.

And that informs us about something very important,

which is that there are actually two axes

or two ends of a continuum of perception.

Up until now, I've been talking about perception

and intention as kind of the same thing,

and indeed they are, at least for sake of this conversation,

but within that word perception

or within that word attention, there's a continuum,

and that continuum has on one end

something called interoception.

Interoception, spelled with an I,

is everything that we sense

at the level of our skin and inward,

so the sensation inside our stomach,

the sensation of our heart beating.

Some people can sense their heart beating pretty easily.

Other people have more challenge doing that.

What we are feeling on the surface of our skin,

how hot or cold we feel, that's interoception.

In contrast, at the other end of the continuum

is so-called exteroception, spelled with an E.

Exteroception is perception of everything

that's outside or beyond the confines of our skin.

So by shutting our eyes,

and in particular, in a meditative practice

where we direct our attention

toward our so-called third eye center,

this area right behind our forehead,

which, not so incidentally, is the prefrontal cortex,

or in some cases where people will focus on their breathing,

so the movement of their stomach

or the movement of their diaphragm

or the lifting of their chest

or the extension of their belly while they breathe.

By doing that,

we are taking what ordinarily is a perceptual state

that's split between the outside world, exteroception,

and usually also toward our inner state.

You know, most people are generally in touch

with how they are feeling from the skin inward

while they are also paying attention

to what's outside of them.

You can think about somebody,

for instance, at a restaurant or a sandwich shop

about to order a sandwich and you're reading the menu,

so that's exteroception, right?

The menu is outside the confines of your skin.

And little ideas or maybe big ideas come to mind

about what the roast beef sandwich

or the vegetarian sandwich will taste like,

what it will do for you,

what's in it, what you like, what you don't like, et cetera.

That's splitting interoception and exteroception.

But when we close our eyes, we stop, we slow down,

we focus on our breathing or that third eye center,

the majority of our perception then shifts to interoception.

And when we shift down

to that end of the continuum of interoception,

something very important happens.

What happens is that those two regions,

the ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the insula,

really ramp up their levels of neural activity,

and that should make perfect sense to you

because those are areas of your brain that are registering

and paying attention to the various sensations

of how full or empty your stomach feels,

whether or not the surface of your skin feels hot or cold,

and on and on.

So by just sitting down or lying down and closing your eyes,

your brain undergoes a massive shift

from exteroception to interoception.

Now, that's not to say you can't be distracted

by external events, and, in fact, many people are,

but the early stages of transitioning

into a meditative state

involve this shift down the continuum,

or, I should say, to one end of the continuum

because there's no down-up, there's just the continuum,

shift along the continuum

to heightened levels of interoception.

Now, I mentioned this briefly before,

but many people are very interoceptively aware

just naturally, even if they don't do a meditation practice.

Other people are not.

And there's a pretty good measure

of whether or not you have high levels

of interoceptive awareness or capability,

and that is your ability to count your heartbeats

without placing your fingers anywhere with any pressure

to take your pulse.

You can do this if you like,

you can actually try and estimate your number of heartbeats

simply by trying to feel your heart beat.

Some people are very good,

meaning they're very accurate at doing this,

other people are not.

It does seem to be an ability

that can be trained up quite a bit,

and, in fact, meditative practices

will improve your interoceptive awareness,

but, and this is a very important point,

heightened levels of interoceptive awareness,

while that might sound attractive,

oh, to be really in touch with your body,

that is not always beneficial, why?

Because many people who, for instance,

have excessive levels of anxiety

have excessive levels of anxiety

because they are very keenly aware

of any subtle shift in their heart rate or breathing

or change in the sensations within their stomach.

Whereas other people who are less aware

of their bodily state, that can be beneficial, right?

It can be adaptive or not, depending on the circumstances.

It's probably not adaptive

to be very, very aware of your internal state

if, for instance, you're doing public speaking,

you don't want to be thinking

about what's going on in your stomach

or how quickly you're breathing.

I'm certainly trying to ignore all those signals,

those sensations now.

But for somebody who has no awareness of what's going on,

very little interoceptive awareness,

that can be problematic, too,

because these are the very people

who can ignore the fact that they're having a heart attack

or can ignore the fact that they have high blood pressure

and are carrying about life focused on everything external

with no awareness of their own body.

They're, quote, unquote, out of touch with their body.

So we want to be very careful about placing valence,

which is a sort of value of good or bad

on interoceptive awareness versus exteroceptive awareness.

More importantly, we want to emphasize

that when you undergo a meditation practice,

if it's of the sort where you stop your movement

and close your eyes,

you are training for interoceptive awareness.

This becomes important later when we get into discussions

about meditation for reducing anxiety.

Some people may opt,

in fact, I would say some people ought to opt

for a meditative practice

which involves more exteroceptive awareness,

actually a meditation like a walking meditation

or even a seated meditation

where they are bringing their focus

to a place outside their body

as opposed to inside their body.

And in fact, there are examples of people

who have meditated quite a lot

who develop such a heightened state or awareness

of their interoceptive components,

that is, just fancy, again, nerd speak

for so aware of their breathing and of their heart

and of the state of their gut

that it actually is intrusive for daily activities.

So I will ask you to ask this question of yourself now.

Are you somebody who tends to be very in touch

with your bodily sensations,

so, for instance, from the skin inwards?

Or are you somebody who tends to be less in touch with

or aware of your interoceptive state?

There is no right or wrong answer.

You don't get an A or an F or a D or a C

depending on your answer.

It's just a good question

for each and every one of us to answer,

and I think most people will answer that it depends.

It depends on whether or not you are in a social setting

or whether or not you're alone.

But we are going to return to that answer so keep it in mind

because it will become very beneficial

in building an optimal meditation practice for you.

But for now, just note,

there's this continuum of perception,

interoception and exteroception.

Closing your eyes increases interoception.

Opening your eyes dramatically increases exteroception

just automatically,

just automatically because so much of your brain,

in fact, 40% or more, is dedicated to vision.

And this, I should say, for those of you

that are low vision or no vision

and those of you that are blind or have poor vision,

this entire process is translated to the auditory,

to the sound domain,

so it's true for people that can see

and it's true for people that can't see.

Of course, people that can't see, closing the eyes

doesn't have this huge shift towards interoception,

but there have been a few studies,

not as many as I would've liked to find,

but a few studies of, for instance, people who are blind

or have low vision, don't see very well,

and when they close their ears

and they can't hear the external world

or they put headphones on or noise-canceling headphones,

then the world inside of them becomes very prominent

relative to the world outside of them for obvious reasons.

So I asked you to ask yourself

whether or not you are somebody

who tends to be more interoceptively aware or not,

more exteroceptively aware or not.

And some of you might not be able to answer that question,

and if you can't, chances are

that you are effectively sliding along that continuum

depending on the activities that you're doing.

So you're probably the kind of person

where if somebody comes over to you

and starts talking to you,

you will engage in that conversation,

and you don't feel so inside your body

that you're thinking about your heart beating

and whether or not you're flushing red, et cetera,

you're going to pay attention to what they say.

Many people, however, when somebody talks to them,

if they have social anxiety

or even a slight bit of social anxiety,

will be thinking about whether or not

their cheeks are flushing

or whether or not they look right or sound right

or whether or not they have something in their teeth.

These are normal responses,

but they really speak to this issue

of whether or not you tend to shift

more towards interoceptive awareness

or exteroceptive awareness.

And, of course, it's context dependent.

It will depend on whether or not

you're, you know, out on a date with somebody

that, you know, you would loathe to find out later

that you had food in your teeth

or whether or not you're with somebody

you're more familiar with

where that would not really matter much

or the other person would tell you this kind of thing.

What does it mean to be at one location or another location

along this continuum of interoception or exteroception?

Well, we know what it means neurally, right?

We know that if you are more interoceptively aware,

your insula and ACC are active, but that's not very useful.

That's not helpful as a tool. That's just a fact.

Now, there have actually been studies

of what a meditation practice can do

in terms of moving you along this continuum

from where you naturally sit

in order to help you function

not just during the meditation but at all times.

And in order to illustrate this,

I want to start with a description

of what is now a classic study.

It's a very cool study, it has a very cool name.

It talks about something very important

that will come up again and again in today's conversation,

and that's something called the default mode network.

The default mode network

is a collection of different brain areas

that essentially are active

when we're not doing much of anything

and certainly is active when we are not focused

on one particular task or conversation or activity.

The default mode network can be thought of more or less

as the network that generates mind wandering

or our thoughts drifting from the past

to the present to the future.

Remember, earlier, I talked about

how your perceptual spotlight

can either be two spotlights or they can merge.

Well, similarly, human beings

can think about the past, surely,

the present, definitely, and the future.

And it turns out we can also split our thoughts

just like we can split our perception

into two of those three things,

so I can think about the past, a past event,

and I can think about the present.

I can split my thinking and my memory in that way.

I can also think about the present and the future.

I can also think about the future and the past,

although it's very difficult, although not impossible,

to split one's thinking and memory

into the past, the present, and future simultaneously,

not easily done,

but pretty easy to split one's attention and thinking

into two of those three things,

either the past, the present, and the future

or any two of those three things, okay?

Just like with attentional spotlighting,

you can place your mind, your thinking, and your memory,

your cognition onto one of those things

and be very, very present

or the past and the present and so on and so forth.

The default mode network,

while it involves a lot of different brain areas,

can be thought of simply as the network of brain areas

that are active when your mind is wandering

between these different time domains.

And the paper I'd like to share with you,

as I mentioned before, is now a classic paper,

it has a wonderful title,

which is A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.

Now, that sounds almost like a news article

or a news article about a scientific paper,

but that's actually the title of the scientific paper

which was published in the journal, "Science,"

which is one of the three apex journals.

You know, scientific publishing is competitive,

but it's especially competitive

to get manuscripts accepted into "Science," into "Nature,"

and into the journal "Cell,"

so it represents kind of the Super Bowl, NBA Championships,

and Stanley Cup, if you will,

for you sports aficionados of scientific publishing.

This is a paper from Matthew Killingsworth and Dan Gilbert.

It was published in 2010,

but it's still considered a classic.

And this paper, A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,

has a number of very important points.

I'm going to paraphrase certain elements of it for you

because they say essentially what I would like you to know

far better than I could say.

So first of all, they started out with a statement,

which I confess I disagree with,

which is, "Unlike other animals,

human beings spend a lot of time

thinking about what is not going on around them:

contemplating events that happened in the past,

might happen in the future, or will never happen at all."

I agree with their assertion that human beings do that.

That's certainly my experience,

although I must say,

I don't think there's any evidence whatsoever

that other animals don't do it also.

So my apologies, Killingsworth and Gilbert,

but I'd be happy to go toe-to-toe with you on that.

I am not aware of any data that prove one way or the other

what other animals are thinking.

So let's set aside other animals,

and let's focus on the human animal.

Now, their point is still a very good one,

which is that humans have this wandering of the mind

that they call stimulus-independent thought.

That is, there's nothing happening to create these thoughts

or anything happening in the immediate environment.

These thoughts are just happening on their own internally.

That's the default mode network.

This study was important.

In fact, it was a landmark study

because they did it right about the time

that smartphones became widely available and in use,

so again, 2010.

So they basically pinged people,

they contacted people on their iPhones many times per day,

and they did this for well over 2,200 adults.

They had a mix of male and female people in this study.

The mean age was 34 years, but there was a range,

mean, of course, being average,

but there were a range of different ages and so forth.

And at any moment, they asked people,

"What are you feeling right now?"

And they also asked them, "What are you doing right now?"

So they were looking for the match or mismatch

between what people were doing and what they were feeling.

They were essentially trying to probe

what people were thinking about,

and they also addressed that.

And they came up with a kind of a bubble chart, if you will,

where the bigger the bubble,

the more answers came back about one particular thing,

and they assessed whether or not

people were happy or not in that moment, or sad or not,

whether or not they were focused

on what they were doing or not.

There are a lot of bubbles in this chart,

so I'm not going to read them all.

But the important points that came from the data,

and, again, this is a very large data set,

was that, and here again, I'm paraphrasing,

first, people's minds wandered frequently

regardless of what they were doing.

In nearly half of the samples taken,

people were generally thinking about something else,

except, it turns out,

there's this one little bubble

sitting way far out on the horizon here,

people claimed, and I'm inclined to believe them,

that they tend to be very focused on making love

if they were making love in the moment

where they were pinged on their iPhone.

Now, why their iPhone was there with them at that moment,

I don't know.

That wasn't included in this description of the study.

But all the other activities, grooming and self-care,

listening to the news, watching television,

relaxing, working, et cetera, et cetera,

during all those activities,

people claimed that their mind wandered a lot.

And then they also assessed, of course, their mood

and how those people felt at any given moment

depending on what they were doing

and how well their mind and their emotions

matched what they were doing.

And what they say here is second,

they revealed that people were less happy

when their minds were wandering than when they were not,

and this was true during all activities.

And then third, what people were thinking at a given moment

was far better a predictor of their happiness

than what they were doing.

So this is interesting

and I think matches a lot of people's experience.

In fact, I think as you hear about this study,

many of you will probably just say, "Well, duh."

I mean, if you're working and you don't like your work

and you're thinking about something bad that happened,

well, then of course you're not going to be happy.

But the key point of this study

is that it did not necessarily have to be the case

that people were thinking about something unpleasant.

In fact, if people were working

and they were thinking about something else

that was pleasant, that also made them feel unhappy.

In other words, the mismatch between being in an activity

and having our mind elsewhere

led people to report themselves

as feeling more unhappy in that moment.

And when you total this up, what you find is that people

are often not present to what they are doing,

and that is a great source of unhappiness,

even if their thoughts are those of happy, joyful thoughts.

So this is interesting

and I think runs counter to what most of us have heard

or have been taught,

which is, you know, think good thoughts,

you know, try and suppress bad thoughts,

have a good internal landscape,

you know, create a good narrative.

That is all true, but equally if not more important

is to have the ability to be fully engaged

in what you are doing at a given moment.

That is the strongest predictor of being happy.

And there were several other studies

that followed up on this,

but their conclusion that they put

in the final short paragraph of this paper

I think really captures it beautifully.

They say, and here, I'm quoting directly,

"In conclusion, a human mind is a wandering mind,

and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.

The ability to think about what is not happening

in a moment," I added the in a moment part,

"is a cognitive achievement

that comes at an emotional cost."

So I know I'm not alone in believing that this paper,

A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,

and we will provide a link to this paper

in the show note captions,

is absolutely key in understanding

why a meditation practice is so important

because a meditation practice

is really about adjusting your place

along that interoceptive-exteroceptive continuum

to what you happen to be experiencing in that moment.

And while most people think of a meditative practice

as focusing on what's going on internally

with your eyes closed, third eye center,

focusing on your breathing, et cetera,

for any number of minutes or maybe even an hour or longer,

there are other forms of meditation

in which your exteroception dominates

and which you are actively focusing on things outside

or beyond the confines of your skin and internal landscape,

and that, too, is meditation.

And if we are to take the work of Killingsworth and Gilbert,

this A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind, seriously,

and I know a number of other laboratories have

and have supported this research with their findings

again and again and again,

what this means is that meditating

is not necessarily a practice that we do

divorced from the rest of life.

Meditation and mindfulness in particular,

being present to what we are doing in a given moment

is one of the essential keys to happiness and improved mood

even if what we are doing is unpleasant.

So that brings us to a tool,

and it's a tool that any and all of us can use

whether or not you tend to be interoceptively dominant,

right, that you tend to pay more attention

to your bodily sensations, or exteroceptively dominant.

And, again, if you don't know the answer to that question,

there's a simple test that you can do.

You can just sit down or lie down, close your eyes,

and you can ask yourself or assess

whether or not your attention tends to fleet

to things outside of you, right,

cars honking or going by, people in the room,

or whether or not you tend to be able to focus

on your internal landscape

to the exclusion of exteroception and attention to things

outside the confines of your skin easily.

Now, of course, this will depend on context and situation,

even how well rested you are, et cetera,

but that's exactly the point.

This is the sort of thing you want to do

every time you decide to do a meditation practice.

In fact, I would suggest that you use this

to determine what meditation you do at any given moment.

So let's say you are somebody who is a regular meditator

or let's say you're somebody who's never meditated

and you'd like to develop a meditation practice.

I suggest that you do a test

of whether or not you are more interoceptively dominant

or exteroceptively dominant in that moment.

Again, this is not a personality trait.

This is a question about where you happen to be in a moment.

So let's say you're on a plane or you're in the car.

If you're in the car,

please don't close your eyes while driving,

that's sort of obvious, but do this in a safe way, please.

But stop, close your eyes,

and assess whether or not you can access

and focus your attention primarily on your internal state

or whether or not your attention and perception

gets pulled to something external, to exteroception.

And, again, that will vary

depending on circumstance and who you are.

Then I suggest opening your eyes

and trying to focus your attention

to something external to you

and seeing or evaluating the extent

to which you can divorce your perception

from sensations that occur

at the level of your skin or internally.

Now, I should say that there's no technology,

at least not that I'm aware of, absence of fMRI machine,

in which case, you are inside an fMRI machine

while you do this.

But unless you are in that experiment,

and most of us aren't,

there's no technology that can tell you, for instance,

whether or not you are interoceptively dominant

or exteroceptively dominant

and whether or not the ratio is, you know, 75 to 25

or what have you at any given moment.

You have to assess this subjectively.

However, if you sit down, for instance,

and you notice that you can equally split your attention

between internal sensations and external sensations

or whether or not you find yourself

pulled into external sensations

when you're trying to focus inward

or you find yourself pulled inward

when you're trying to focus outward,

well, that will dictate the sort of meditation

that you perhaps ought to perform in that moment.

Let me give an example of how you would do this.

You would stop in some way,

so sit or lie down, close your eyes,

and evaluate whether or not you can essentially rule out

or eliminate attention to all outside events.

Most people won't be able to do that entirely,

but try and focus your attention,

for instance, on your breathing

or the typical third eye center,

you know, focusing at a spot right behind your forehead.

If you feel you can do that reasonably well

to the exclusion of what's happening around you,

well, then an important question arises.

Should you meditate in a way

to enhance that interoceptive awareness?

Or rather, should you meditate in a way,

for instance, with your eyes open

and your attention on a particular portion

of the landscape you're in

like a tree or maybe even, you know, an object or a plant

or something else in your immediate environment

to try and cultivate

or enhance your exteroceptive awareness?

That's up to you, but my bias would be one

in which you work against your default state.

Again, the default mode network is where you land

on this interoceptive-exteroceptive continuum.

It's going to lead to more mind wandering,

whereas when you encourage

or we could even say force yourself a little bit

to anchor your attention

to either inside your body or outside your body,

and you make that decision

according to what you are doing less easily,

well, then you are actively training up the neural circuits.

You are engaging so-called neuroplasticity,

the brain's ability to change in response to experience.

You are deliberately engaging a shift

along that continuum.

To make this crystal clear, what I mean is this.

Let me give an example.

If I were to sit down and I wanted to do some meditation,

let's just say three minutes of meditation.

There's good evidence that even three minutes of meditation

can be beneficial for a variety of things,

including enhanced focus and enhanced anxiety management.

Let's say I sit down

and I notice that I can really focus inward

on what's happening at the level of my skin

and my internal organs, and I can rule out everything.

Maybe that's 'cause the room is quiet

or maybe it's just because my brain is in a state

that I'm particularly good at that at that moment

or maybe it's just a natural ability.

Well then I would opt for a three-minute meditation practice

in which I deliberately exterocept,

that I build up the circuitry

to focus on something external to me

because I want, and I think most people would like,

to have an adaptive mechanism within them

so that they can slide along that continuum

and they don't default

to whatever happens to be easiest for them in that moment.

Now, if I were to sit down

and try and focus on what's going on internally

and I kept getting distracted

by things happening outside of me,

opening my eyes or feeling like I need to reach for my phone

or paying attention to the sounds in the room,

well, then I would actively engage a meditation practice,

in this case, a three-minute example but it could be longer,

where I'm deliberately trying to focus my perception

on events at the level of the confines of my skin

and internally.

Why do I say this?

Well, you know, I love to use the phrase anytime with kids,

you know, when they say "This is really hard

or something's challenging,"

or adults will say, "That's really tough."

Well, as my graduate advisor used to say,

that means you're learning.

If something were easy,

if you can perform any activity or thought, et cetera,

well, then there is absolutely zero reason

for your neural circuits to change.

It's the friction, it's the feeling that something is hard

that turns on the enormous variety of mechanisms

at the level of cells, et cetera,

that allow you to potentially change your neural circuitry.

So challenge and discomfort

is the signal to your brain and body

that something needs to change,

so I'm encouraging you to embark on meditative practices

that are not your default, okay?

To essentially go against the grain

of where your interoceptive bias or your exteroceptive bias

happens to be at a given moment.

And, again, this will change.

For some of you, this will change across the day

where early in the day, you are very, very good

at doing an interoceptive-biased meditation,

and later in the day, you aren't.

I actually believe, based on the data that I've covered,

and we'll get into a few more papers about this,

and my lab is actively working on this as well,

that a meditative practice can be made far more effective,

that is, it can invoke more neuroplasticity,

more shift in brain states and brain circuitry

if we do not take the easy path,

that is, we go against the grain

of what our brain would naturally do in a given moment.

So if you're in a crowded airport

and you're finding that everything's very distracting,

well, then that would be a great time

to do some interoceptive focused meditation.

Whereas if you are really in your head,

you know, you're looping thoughts

about the past and present,

maybe you're even in obsessive thought,

well, that would be a terrific time, an ideal time really,

to do a short meditation

focused on something external to you.

In both cases, whether or not you're focused

on interoceptive bias or exteroceptive bias,

you are going against, or I should say you're pushing back

against your default mode network.

I would argue it's going to be far more effective,

that is, you're going to reduce or shift the activity

of that default mode network far more

and in a far more beneficial way

if you actively try and suppress your bias

toward being more interoceptive or exteroceptive.

Now, I think that's immensely beneficial,

both for the immediate changes that you experience,

what others have called a state change,

because that's what it is,

and it also can lead to, as we referred to earlier,

more neuroplasticity, more changes in the brain circuits

that underlie your default mode network

and lead to what are called trait changes.

And I want to be very clear that I am not the first

to make this state versus trait distinction.

That's a distinction that was raised

in a really wonderful book.

In fact, I can't recommend this book highly enough.

The book is "Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation

Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body."

This is a book by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson

who've done terrific work and many writings

and many TED Talks, et cetera, about meditation.

I would say that circa 2016, 2017,

this book really captured

what I believe to be the most essential elements

of the science of meditation

and a lot of the history of it as well.

Today, we are focusing

on much of what's covered in this book

but also a lot of things

that have happened, excuse me, since 2017.

In fact, most of the papers that I'm going to talk about

are papers that were published after 2017.

But, again, this is a wonderful book

where they very clearly distinguish

between state changes and trait changes,

trait changes being the more long-lasting ones.

My read of this book and the literature that follows

is, again, that when you sit down to meditate,

it is going to be most effective

to do that interoceptive, exteroceptive bias assessment.

Ask yourself whether or not you are more in your head

or outside your head, if you will,

and then to do a meditation practice

that runs counter to where you happen to be at,

that is, that pushes you more externally

if you're in your head,

and if you're more focused on what's going on around you,

that pushes you more internally.

Now, I think most people are familiar

with how to do an interoceptive-biased meditation.

Again, that would be setting a timer.

Maybe you don't have even set a timer,

you just sit or lie down, close your eyes,

focus on that third eye center behind your forehead

or focus on your breathing or your bodily sensations.

That's typical and often discussed.

Exteroceptive based meditations,

you pick a focal point outside

or beyond the confines of your skin,

so that could be, for instance, a point on the wall

if you are indoors, it could be a plant,

it could be a point on the horizon far away.

What you will find is that your visual system

will fatigue a little bit

when you concentrate your visual focus at that location.

I want to remind you that it is perfectly okay

and, in fact, necessary to blink,

so you should blink, you can relax your face,

you can change your expression.

There is no rule that says that you can't do those things.

This is not, you know, just beaming a particular location

in space and holding your eyelids open.

I've been accused many times of not blinking very often.

That's for other reasons.

It's part of the way I access memory

about what I want to say.

I don't use a prompter here,

so I'm accessing from a sort of internal image in my head.

That's how my memory works.

But in any case,

if you're going to do an exteroceptive-biased meditation,

there is absolutely no reason

why you wouldn't look away from that location

every once in a while

in the same way

that if you were focused on internal thoughts

with your eyes closed and focused on your breathing,

every once in a while,

your thoughts will skip away from that breathing

or from your third eye center.

In fact, and this is discussed in the book "Altered Traits"

but by many other people as well,

one of the key elements of any meditative practice,

whether or not it's interoceptively focused

or exteroceptively focused,

is that it's really a refocusing practice.

The more number of times that you have to yank yourself back

into attending or perceiving one specific thing.

In other words, the more times your mind wanders

and you bring it back,

actually the more effective that practice is.

Again, if you can just focus on one location

with laser precision

and your mind never darts away from that

and you don't have to bring it back,

well, then there's no neuroplasticity,

nothing needs to change because your nervous system

will effectively know it's performing perfectly.

So if you're somebody who tries to do meditation

and you find that your mind just wanders,

just remember every time you scruff yourself

and pull yourself back

to focusing on some location externally

or focus back on your breath or your third eye center,

each one of those aren't just opportunities to do better,

they are essential to the improvement process.

Think about them as ascending a staircase of refocusing.

Every time you refocus, you're going up one more level,

another stair, another stair, another stair,

and I think that will move you away

from the kind of judgmental process

of thinking, "Ugh, like, I can't focus on anything."

Pretty soon, what you'll notice

is that the refocusing process will happen so quickly

that you don't even perceive it.

And, again, this is something that's borne out

in the neuroimaging data.

A lot of people think that they can focus

with laser precision,

but actually, what they are better at doing

is refocusing more quickly and consistently over time.

There's a classic study about this

in very experienced meditators that was done in Japan

where they had people

with varying levels of meditation ability,

so some who had never meditated,

others who were really expert meditators

with many hundreds if not thousands of hours

of meditation under their belt,

and they had those people listen to 20 tones

repeated over and over, the same tone,

and they found that the expert meditators

could really focus, and they did this by brain imaging,

they could really focus on all 20 tones,

whereas most people kind of attenuate

or what's called habituate to the tone

so that by the 10th or 11th tone,

their mind is really going to something else.

Now, that's wonderful, but that really just tells us

the expert meditators have better focus.

But it turns out that the more modern neuroimaging studies

have shown that they don't have better focus

such that they're staying in a very narrow trench of focus.

What they're doing is they're exiting focus

and going back in more quickly, more quickly, more quickly

over and over again.

So rather than think about your ability to focus,

think about your ability to refocus,

and the more number of times you have to refocus,

the better training you're getting.

So earlier, I mentioned doing this interoceptive-biased

or exteroceptive-biased meditation for three minutes.

Why did I say three minutes?

Well, three minutes seems like a reasonable number

for most people to do consistently, you know, once a day.

And in fact, there are some studies

of one-minute meditations and three-minute meditations

and 10 and 60.

My laboratory has been studying a 5-minute-a-day meditation,

and that clearly has benefits,

but I think it's also clear that by three minutes,

many of the benefits are starting to arrive.

And so while I'm not pointing

at any one particular data point here,

it's very clear that forcing oneself

to direct one's perception, that is, your attention,

to your internal state or to something external to you

is immensely beneficial if you do it consistently

and is, again, especially beneficial

if you're focusing your attention

on the portion of your experience,

either internal or external to you,

that is not the one

that you would default to in that moment.

And some people have taken this to the extreme to say

that, you know, you can even just move about your day,

and then every once in a while,

just do a one breath meditation.

To be honest, when I look at the whole of the data,

it seems as if it doesn't really matter

in order to derive most of the benefits

of a meditation practice.

Now, I'm a big fan of some of the newer meditation apps

that are out there.

One in particular that I've been using

and that actually I started using

because my dad is a big fan of it

and he does now fairly long meditations.

He's doing about 10 or 20 minutes

at least every other day and often every day,

and he convinced me to check out the Waking Up app

that Sam Harris has put out.

I looked at it, I think some of it sits behind a paywall,

but you can access much of it or at least do a trial

and try it out without having to get behind that paywall.

They're not a sponsor of this podcast, I should mention,

but I decided to use the Waking Up app.

I think it's terrific,

and I think one of the reasons it's terrific

is that Sam includes short descriptions

of what meditation is doing

and what a specific meditation can do for you

just prior to doing that meditation.

So those meditations can be quite brief.

Some of them are a minute long, two minutes long,

some are longer or even quite a bit longer.

That app, I think, includes a variety of meditations

that really encompasses the huge range of possibilities

that are possible with meditation,

and that, at least by my experience of the Waking Up app,

has led to my most consistent meditation practice.

And, of course, I would love to get Sam

on the podcast as a guest

so we could talk about the sort of underpinnings

of the Waking Up app

and his views on everything from meditation

to, I know he's big in the discussion

about free will and consciousness,

some of the very deep and somewhat abstract discussions.

I really hope to get Sam on the podcast

at a time not too far from now.

Meanwhile, we've never met in person,

but I absolutely love the Waking Up app, Sam,

and I know my father does as well,

and I know many of you already use it.

If you haven't tried it already,

I really do encourage you to check it out.

I want to talk just briefly

about this third eye center business

because it turns out to be pretty interesting.

The third eye is actually a name

that's been given to another neural structure,

or I should say structure because it's not strictly neural,

and that's the pineal gland,

and this has an interesting history.

I promise I'm not taking off on a tangent here

that isn't relevant to meditation.

So you have a brain of course,

and on both sides of your brain,

you tend to have mirror symmetric representations

of the same things.

What do I mean by that?

Well, you have a prefrontal cortex on the right,

you have a prefrontal cortex on the left,

and they actually do slightly different things.

Language is sometimes lateralized to one side,

but in general, for every structure

that you have on one side of the brain,

you have the same structure

on the opposite side of the brain.

There's one clear exception to that,

and that's the pineal gland.

The pineal gland is the gland that makes melatonin,

which, at night when it gets dark, secretes melatonin,

and that melatonin makes you sleepy,

it helps you fall asleep but not stay asleep.

Descartes, right, the philosopher Descartes

asserted that the pineal was the seat of the soul

because it was the one structure in the brain

that he saw was not on both sides of the brain,

it was only one of them and in the middle.

Now, I don't know if it's the seat of the soul or not,

I'm not in a position to make assessments like that.

But what do we know about the pineal?

The pineal, as I mentioned,

is involved in releasing melatonin,

it does a few other things as well,

but it is also considered the third eye

for a couple of reasons.

One is that it responds to light,

although, in humans, not directly.

So in birds and lizards and snakes,

they actually either have a thin skull,

or, believe it or not, two holes in the top of their skull

that allow light to go directly in.

If you look at the head of a snake,

light can go directly into their brain through these holes

and activate the pineal to suppress melatonin

and control their wakefulness, sleep rhythms.

In birds, they don't have holes in their skull,

but they have very thin skulls.

And, believe it or not,

light can penetrate the thinness of the skull in many birds

and communicates information about time of day

and even time of year,

and that's translating to hormonal signals

such as melatonin release from the pineal.

And so the pineal has been called the third eye

because it's a light-sensitive organ inside the brain.

In humans, the pineal sits deep, deep, deep to the surface,

and light cannot get in there.

In fact, if light can get into your brain,

unless you are part of a specific experiment

where that's the intention

or you're having neurosurgery or something of that sort,

then you've got serious issues happening.

That pineal sits deep, deep, deep

near what's called the fourth ventricle,

and it absolutely should not see light directly.

So the idea that the pineal

is the third eye in humans is not true.

It just isn't true.

So anytime someone says, "Oh, the pineal is your third eye."

That's not the third eye center that people are referring to

when they talk about meditation.

Now, you'll see a number of different forms of art

where it will be a picture of a face

and the eyes will be closed or sometimes open,

and there'll be literally a third eye,

like a cyclops eye in the middle of the forehead.

That has been proposed for many thousands of years

to be, quote, unquote, the seat of our consciousness.

Now, that's interesting

because that real estate behind the forehead

actually turns out to be the prefrontal cortex,

which we know from lesion studies and stimulation studies,

if you remove that brain area, people become very reflexive.

They are not thinking intentionally,

they don't become deliberate.

In fact, and this is kind of an eerie result,

but if you inactivate, you turn off the prefrontal cortex

and you give somebody the opportunity

to play a shooting game, for instance,

their accuracy goes through the roof.

They become essentially like a machine.

They see a stimulus, they shoot at it,

they see a stimulus, they shoot at it.

Their accuracy is exceptional,

but their ability to distinguish

between enemy and friend completely disappears.

So they become a highly effective motor,

or I should say sensory motor machine,

but their assessment and their judgment

about right or wrong completely disappears.

This is also true for people that have prefrontal damage.

They often will have inappropriate behavior

or a hard time suppressing behaviors, et cetera.

So the third eye center

as the seat of consciousness and our intention

is something that makes sense generally

with what we know about the neuroscience and neurology,

but there's something more to it

that I think is especially important for all of you

that goes beyond anything about ancient traditions

or pineals or birds or snakes

and pits in the top of the head, and here's what it is.

The brain itself, meaning the brain tissue,

does not have any sensory neurons.

What do I mean by that?

Well, if I touch the top of my hand, I can feel that.

If I want to sense my heartbeat,

if I work at it, I can feel that.

If I want to sense how I feel internally

at the level of my stomach,

is it full, is it empty, am I hungry, is it acidic,

does it ache or does it feel pleasant, et cetera,

I can sense that.

And that's because we have sensory neurons

on our skin and in our body, et cetera.

We also have sensory neurons in our eyes

that let us perceive things externally.

We have no sensory neurons on our brain.

This is one of the reasons why you can remove the skull

and do brain surgery on somebody who's wide awake

and be poking around in there,

and they don't need any anesthetic on the brain itself.

They need anesthetic for the incision site,

but they don't need anesthetic on the brain

because it has no feeling.

You have emotions, but there's no feeling.

So normally, we are perceiving and paying attention

to what we are sensing,

either externally, sight and sounds, again, exteroception,

or internally, interoception, touch, et cetera.

But by focusing our perception and our attention

not on our bodily surface like a body scan,

but to a point a couple centimeters or inches

behind our forehead,

we essentially are bringing that attentional,

that perceptual spotlight

to a location in which there is no sensation.

There's nothing to feel there.

And when we do that, by closing our eyes

and focusing on that, quote, unquote, third eye center,

which is the prefrontal cortex, to be quite honest,

when we do that, something else happens.

And what happens is when we are not thinking about

and perceiving our sensations, because there are none there,

our thoughts and our emotions and our memories

sort of mushroom up.

A better way to put it would be that they geyser up

and take on more prominence in our perception.

What I mean by this is that normally,

you know, I'm not thinking about the contact point

between me and this chair,

but as I'm speaking, I'm in contact with the chair

and those neurons are firing.

But if I focus my energy and attention on them,

they're going to fire the same

but more of my perception goes there.

Similarly, I'm thinking things all the time. You are too.

And I'm perceiving things all the time,

and I'm remembering things all the time,

and I'm anticipating things all the time about the future.

But by focusing my attention on the one organ

for which I have no sensation,

that is, my brain,

well, then thoughts, feelings, and memories,

feelings meaning emotional feelings,

start to grow in their prominence

in my awareness and in my perception.

And so this is why

when you sit down to a meditative practice,

if it's a meditative practice where you close your eyes

or you're focused on that third eye center,

where you're focused on your brain

as opposed to your bodily surface

or something external to you,

the thoughts seem to come by in waves,

and they can almost be overwhelming.

It's very hard to, as it's often described,

just sit back and watch your thoughts go by

because there are so many of them.

Actually, the best way to stop thinking

is to really focus on something external

or to focus on sensation.

That's less thinking than it is perceiving senses, okay?

So I don't want this to get too abstract.

When people talk about the third eye center,

they're not talking about the pineal,

they're talking about prefrontal cortex,

and when you direct your own attention

to the very area of your brain that directs attention,

there's nothing to sense there.

The only things that will become present to you

are feelings, emotions, that is,

thoughts and memories,

and they will often arrive

in what seems to be a very disorganized fashion.

And the reason they arrive in somewhat disorganized fashion

is because, normally,

we just don't perceive things that way.

Normally, we are splitting our attention,

our perception, that is,

to multiple things, our sensation and our thoughts.

When we put all of our perception into our thoughts,

we see how disorganized, how wandering they are

and how, in fact, how random and intrusive those can be.

Again, random and intrusive.

And much of what we talked about in that paper earlier,

the one where they asked people,

what are you doing and what are you feeling

and how happy or how unhappy you are,

what they discovered was that most people

are sort of in their head a lot.

They're not really present to what they're doing,

which leads me to the statement that I believe,

at least based on the data, that paper included,

that most people have an interoceptive bias.

They're focused more on what's going on internally

than they are focused on what's happening externally.

There are certainly people who for the opposite is true,

but I think that this is an issue

because we hear so often about the need

to do a meditation practice that allows us to focus inward

and that we're getting yanked around

by all the stressors of life, et cetera, et cetera.

And we are, we're getting yanked around

by all the stressors and demands of life.

But as we do that,

we tend to be very focused on what's happening with us.

The data clearly point to the fact

that being mindful and being aware

can enhance one's level of presence and happiness.

But we can go so far as to say

that being mindful and aware of what's happening,

not just with us

but external to us in our immediate environment,

that includes what other people are saying and doing,

that also can really enhance our sense

of well-being and happiness.

At least that's what the data point to.

Let's briefly recap where we've been so far.

We've talked a little bit about the brain networks

that are activated during meditation,

which include prefrontal cortex, ACC, the insula.

We also talked about the difference

between interoception and exteroception

and the importance of assessing where you are

along that continuum.

And I should mention, of course,

that you can be right in the middle of that continuum.

You might sit down to do meditation

and find that you are smack dab in the middle

of being able to attend to things outside of you

but also attending to things inside of you.

In which case, I suggest doing a meditation

that is either exteroceptive-biased or interoceptive-biased.

But as I mentioned earlier,

if you find that you are more, quote, unquote, in your head

or in your body,

well, then focus on an exteroceptive-biased meditation

to build up that set of circuits.

Whereas if you are more exteroceptively focused

at any given moment,

well, then I encourage you

to do an interoceptively focused meditation practice.

And as I mentioned earlier,

there is this issue of how long to do a practice.

There are a lot of different data on these,

but some of the practices

we've covered on this podcast before

when we had guests, for instance,

highlighted the 13-minute meditation

that Dr. Wendy Suzuki from New York University's laboratory

has popularized,

and they popularized it because they have a wonderful paper

that we will provide a link to

which shows that a daily 13-minute meditation,

which is of the traditional third eye,

interoceptively biased, focus on breathing,

and focus on that location

directly behind one's forehead or both,

that meditation done daily for about eight weeks,

maybe shorter, but in that study, eight weeks,

greatly improved mood, improved ability to sleep,

improved cognitive ability and focus, memory,

a huge number of metrics were looked at very specifically.

So that's a terrific one.

And you may be asking yourself,

do you need to do the full 13 minutes?

Could you get away with five minutes or three minutes?

Well, my laboratory has shown benefits in stress reduction,

improvement in sleep, et cetera,

with a five-minute-a-day meditation.

However, in trying to establish

how long you should meditate,

I would ask yourself a couple of questions.

First of all, what is a practice

that you can do consistently?

And by consistently,

that doesn't necessarily mean every day.

If you answer the question about consistency honestly,

and you find that you can only do

one meditation session per week,

well, then I would encourage you to go a little bit longer,

maybe 10 or 15 minutes, maybe even 30 minutes.

Again, understanding that you're going to have to refocus

repeatedly throughout that meditation

regardless of whether or not you're focusing

on internal perceptions or external perceptions.

If, however, you can set aside 5 or 10 or 15 minutes per day

and you can meditate every day,

well, then I think you have a bit more flexibility

in terms of how long you meditate.

Maybe it's three minutes one day, one minute the next day,

10 minutes the next, and so on and so forth.

Just like with exercise, the key component is consistency,

and this is borne out in all the data

that's covered in "Altered Traits."

It's also borne out in all the recent studies

that have come out since that book was published.

Consistency is key,

so ask yourself what you can do consistently,

and also don't necessarily burden yourself

with always having to do the same amount

or duration of meditation.

So earlier, we decided we were going to parse

or fine slice the meditation practice,

and indeed we've been doing that.

We've talked about interoceptive versus exteroceptive bias,

and we've been talking about

where you place your perception or your focus.

Another key component of meditation

is the pattern of breathing that you embrace.

In fact, the pattern of breathing

that you embrace during your meditation practice

can itself be its own form of meditation.

What do I mean by that?

Well, these days, we hear a lot about breathwork.

Breathwork has really grown in popularity

in the last 5, 10 years,

and there are a number of reasons for that.

First of all, I think we need to credit Wim Hof,

or can we call him, I think appropriately,

the Great Wim Hof?

You know, certainly there were people before Wim

who were doing deliberate breathwork

and talking about deliberate breathwork,

but it was really about 2015 or so

that Wim Hof started to grow in recognition and popularity

for a particular style of breathing,

which, in the laboratory, we call cyclic hyperventilation.

I know there are other names for it

that come from ancient traditions.

He named it, or people named it after him, Wim Hof.

Wim Hof, for those of you that don't know,

is a Dutchman who is known to hold many world records

for deliberate cold exposure,

including swimming under icebergs, longest period of time

buried in ice up to his neck, et cetera,

but who's also expert

in the use of breathing in particular ways

in order to manage and maneuver through those challenges.

And he started speaking about

different patterns of breathwork,

in particular, the use of cyclic hyperventilation,

deep, deliberate breathing,

so big inhales [inhales], exhales [exhales],

big inhales [inhales and exhales] exhales.

In the laboratory, again,

we call that cyclic hyperventilation.

It's very clear from studies both done on Wim specifically

but on the general population as well

by my lab and other labs

that that pattern of cyclic hyperventilation,

of deliberately breathing deeply and repetitively,

typically in through the nose, out through the mouth,

generates a lot of adrenaline

or causes adrenaline release from the brain and body.

It, quote, unquote, heats up the body.

Indeed, it raises body temperature,

but the liberation of adrenaline does a number of things

to shift the state of the brain and body.

That, more or less, is what Wim Hof breathing is,

although Wim Hof breathing,

or some people will call it tummo breathing

or cyclic hyperventilation,

is not a pattern of breathing

typical of most meditations that have been discussed,

at least not in the research literature.

Now, that's not to say that cyclic hyperventilation

can't be incorporated into a meditation practice,

but Wim Hof breathing aka cyclic hyperventilation/tummo

is typically considered its own practice, okay?

Its own breathwork practice divorced from meditation.

It might have a meditative component,

but it's not often discussed as meditation

or as part of meditation.

More typically, a meditation practice

involves slowing one's breathing,

and this could be in the form of cyclic breathing

of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, which is cyclic,

or, in some cases, doubling up on inhales and then exhaling,

so inhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, inhale, exhale,

or controlling the duration of inhale, breath hold,

exhale, breath hold, repeat,

so-called box breathing

where the inhale, the hold, the exhale, and the hold

are of equivalent durations.

Any number of different breathing patterns,

slow cyclic breathing, box breathing,

a cadence of three to six seconds in,

holding for two seconds, and seven seconds out,

regardless of what cadence of breathing one uses,

there is a tendency during most meditative practices

to slow one's breathing and/or control one's breathing

in deliberate fashion.

This is essential because when we default our breathing,

that is, when we don't pay attention

to how long we are inhaling relative to our exhales,

when we don't deliberately exhale,

that is, normally we just passively exhale

but we actively inhale,

I repeat that,

normally, when we're not thinking about breathing,

we deliberately inhale,

there's a a motor command that's sent to inflate the lungs,

and then we passively exhale.

But in many breathwork practices or meditation practices,

we actually actively exhale as well.

Well, when we do that, a number of things happen.

First of all, it forces us into interoception. Why?

Because the diaphragm,

the muscle that helps move the lungs essentially

and create a specific cadence of breathing

or depth of breathing

as one would with box breathing

or deliberately slow breathing,

well, that muscle resides inside of us,

and so when we focus on our breathing,

more often than not, we aren't focused

on the actual air leaving our nasal passages or mouth,

maybe a little bit,

but more typically, we are forced to focus

or we just default to focusing

on the movement of our diaphragm or of our belly

or the rising and falling of our chest.

All of that is to say

that by deliberately focusing on our breathing,

we shift to interoception.

So breathing and specific patterns of breathing

are sort of along for the ride in meditation,

but the reverse can also be said,

that when we focus on our breathing,

we shift to interoception and away from external events.

It doesn't mean we can't still pay attention

to external events, we can still exterocept,

but at least some portion of our perception,

of our attention shifts to interoception.

So we of course need to breathe to stay alive.

We have to breathe at least every so often

in order to stay alive,

so, of course, breathing is part of any meditative practice,

just like it's part of any living activity, even sleep.

But if the first component of meditation

is to direct our perception in a deliberate way,

using that prefrontal cortex,

to a specific location, either on the surface of

or within our body or external to our body,

or both, but typically one or the other,

then we can say that the second element

of a meditative practice is the pattern of breathing,

and we can ask ourselves,

can it and should it be deliberate or not?

In other words, do we just default

to however we happen to be breathing,

or should it be deliberate?

That is, should we be controlling the depth and the cadence?

And I do believe that,

based on what we know about the capacity

for specific patterns of breathing to shift our brain state,

that controlling one's pattern of breathing

during meditation can be enormously useful,

and that is true regardless of whether or not

one is focusing on interoceptive perceptions within our body

or exteroceptive perceptions.

So that raises the question,

how should we breathe during meditation?

Well, there is, again,

no simple one-size-fits-all rule there,

but there are some general rules of respiration physiology

that can help us access and develop a meditation practice

that is going to best serve our goals.

And since this is not an episode all about respiration,

and we will do one,

I simply want to give you the basics

of what respiration can do

to shift your brain and body state.

Before I do that, however,

I want to give a very specific instruction,

which is when you sit down to meditate,

or if you're going to do your meditation walking,

that's fine too.

I should just say when you are about to begin

your meditative practice,

you need to ask yourself a question.

Do you want to be more relaxed than you are at present,

or do you want to be more alert than you are at present

when you exit the meditation practice?

Do you want to calm down,

or do you want to become more alert?

Simple question. You can decide from session to session.

You could even switch within a session.

But just as you need to assess whether or not

you are leaning more interoceptively or exteroceptively,

you also need to ask yourself,

do you need to calm down or want to calm down,

or do you want to be more alert

at the end of your meditation session?

Or maybe you want to go into a state of deep relaxation

and then exit with more alertness.

The way to do that is very simple

using breathwork and specific patterns of breathing.

And here is the general rule that is supported

by all the respiration physiology that I'm aware of.

I'm oversimplifying here,

but I'm oversimplifying intentionally

so you can simply apply the tool.

And then, as I mentioned before, we will do an episode

all about respiration physiology in the future.

Essentially, if your inhales

are longer and/or more vigorous than your exhales,

then you will tend to be more alert

or you'll shift your brain and body

towards a state of more alertness.

This is simply based on the way that the neural circuits

like the pre-Botzinger nucleus and the parafacial nucleus

that govern respiration physiology and alertness,

it's simply the way they work.

They communicate with brain areas

that release noradrenaline and norepinephrine, et cetera.

In contrast, if you emphasize longer duration

and/or more vigorous exhales relative to your inhales,

you will tend to relax more,

you will tend to calm your nervous system.

Now, you might be saying, "Okay, I understand what it is

to make an inhale longer than my exhale,

but how do I make it more vigorous?"

Well, it simply means drawing more air into your lungs

more quickly than you allow yourself to exhale that air.

So an example of inhale-biased breathwork

would be [inhales and exhales] [inhales and exhales],

so there's an active emphasis on the inhale,

and it's a little bit longer than the exhale

which is passive.

Conversely, if you want to relax,

then you want to extend your exhales

relative to your inhales,

and you can even make them active exhales.

So it can be inhale [inhales and exhales],

exhale [inhales and exhales].

That's going to shift your nervous system

in a direction of more calm.

And, of course, if you would like to stay

at the level of alertness aka calmness

because those are two sides

of the same seesaw or the same continuum,

if you'd like to be right where you're at

at the end of your meditation as where you started,

at least in terms of levels of alertness and calmness,

well, then you would just keep your inhales and your exhales

relatively balanced in terms of duration.

Now, the introduction of things like breath holds

with box breathing or Wim Hof breathing,

typically, it's 25 or 30 deep inhale, exhales,

deep inhale, exhales, and then exhale all your air,

hold your breath for 15 to 60 seconds,

and then repeat and so on, sometimes some inhales and holds.

Well, that's a whole business into itself.

But for sake of meditation, the key thing to understand

is that if you are going to do

a complicated breathing practice,

it will, by design, by necessity,

shift much of your attention to the breathing practice,

especially if it's not cyclic,

if it's not inhales follow exhales.

Cyclic breathing is where inhales always follow exhales,

follow inhales, follow exhales.

It actually relies on a specific brain center

called the pre-Botzinger complex

discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA.

He was a guest on this podcast previously.

However, if you are doubling up on your inhale,

so two inhales [inhaling], and then an exhale [exhales],

a pattern of breathing

my laboratory has studied extensively,

well, then that relies on a different brain center,

the parafacial nucleus.

The point is that if you are engaging in noncyclic breathing

or you are deliberately emphasizing inhales or exhales

or the vigor of inhales and exhales, et cetera,

well, then some portion of your attention will be devoted

to making sure that you follow that breathing practice.

We are very good at going into cyclic breathing practices

by default, and our attention can drift to other things.

Interoceptive or exteroceptive, it doesn't matter,

we can just drift into, you know, how our body feels

or something we see or hear in the room, et cetera.

When we are focused on our breathing

and the breathing pattern

is noncyclic or complex in some way

in that it involves deliberate voluntary commands,

again, from those so-called top-down mechanisms

of the prefrontal cortex,

well, that, by design, requires some portion,

often a significant portion of our attention

to be devoted to the breathing practice itself.

So what does this mean?

This means that breathwork itself

can be a form of meditation,

and meditation can involve breathwork,

but one should know that the more deliberate and unnatural

that pattern of breathing is,

the less you will be able to focus on other things.

Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

You can actually leverage this.

So for instance, if you are somebody

who's very much caught in your own head,

right, we talked about this earlier,

or you're in a moment where you're really stuck in your head

and you want to get out of your head,

well, then that meditation practice that you do

really should be focused on exteroceptive bias,

you should really focus on something external to you,

and I would encourage you

to use a natural cyclic pattern of breathing

where inhales follow exhales follow inhales follow exhales.

If, however, you are finding

that you're sort of caught in the landscape

of things happening around you

and you want to ground yourself, as it's sometimes called...

That's a loose language, not a scientific language.

I know there's this practice of grounding,

and that's a whole thing.

People are always writing to me,

"Is grounding a real thing, walking barefoot on the Earth

and magnetic fields, you know, and gravitational fields?"

Well, gravity's real,

but, you know, grounding,

there isn't a lot of science for it, to be frank.

It does feel nice to walk on the ground, however.

But if you are somebody who's kind of feeling

pulled out of yourself a lot or in a moment

and you want to bring your awareness into your body

and sort of calm down,

well, then I would encourage you

to, yes, use a deliberate, somewhat unnatural

or non-default pattern of breathing,

which, by definition, will force you

to attend to what's going on interoceptively.

Again, I'm not aware of any place

that this has been discussed in detail such as this before.

If there is a research literature on this,

please let me know.

My laboratory has been working on this extensively.

I'm always looking for new colleagues and collaborators.

We, meaning Dr. David Spiegel who's an expert in hypnosis,

again, who's been a guest on the Huberman Lab podcast

and my colleague at Stanford Psychiatry.

In fact, he's our associate chair of psychiatry,

world expert in hypnosis, he's been on this podcast before,

we have an active research program focused on these issues.

We are very much of the belief

that a breathwork practice itself can be meditative,

a meditation practice can include breathing,

but the more that that meditative practice

focuses on the breathing itself,

the more interoceptive-biased it will be.

Now, it's very important to understand

that an interoceptive-biased breathwork practice

will have a specific effect,

which is to make you more interoceptively aware.

And if you think back to earlier in the episode,

for many people, that will be a wonderful thing

and something that they are actively seeking

or ought to seek

because it can help people gain awareness,

for instance, you know, if they're stressed

and they're not realizing it till the end of the day,

they're just exhausted,

more interoceptive awareness throughout the day

can be very beneficial.

If, however, you are somebody

who is overly focused on your bodily sensations,

well, then more exteroception awareness is important.

And this brings us to a yet larger theme

but a theme that I think really emphasizes

what particular types of meditative practices

are going to be best for certain people,

especially people who are using meditation

to combat certain challenges,

in particular, mood-based challenges

or sleep-based challenges or focus-based challenges.

I haven't listed off

all the positive benefits of meditation yet in this episode,

but they are many, many, many.

In fact, there are now tens of thousands

of scientific studies showing, for instance,

there are known benefits of doing meditation

for enhancing sleep,

there are known benefits of a regular meditation practice

for enhancing focus,

there are known benefits of a regular meditation practice

for reducing inflammatory cytokines,

even improving outcomes in cancer,

reducing pain, improving mood,

reducing the symptoms of ADHD and clinically diagnosed HD

and on and on and on.

And, again, rather than focus

on all those beautiful studies today

which all basically point to the fact

that some meditation practice done regularly,

even if it's very brief,

has tremendous, even outsized benefits on our health

even relative to some drug treatments, that's been shown.

Rather than focus on all that, I've been more focused

on what sorts of brain and body changes occur

when we do a meditation practice

and, perhaps more importantly,

what really constitutes a meditation practice.

We have this thing about a continuum of perception.

We also now are talking about breathing.

Well, there's another component that I'd like to raise now,

which we could say is the third major component

if the first one that I raised

was interoceptive versus exteroceptive bias or continuum,

the second being breathing,

is it going to be default or deliberate breathing?

Is it going to be natural cadence or unnatural cadence?

Again, no right or wrong,

it just depends on what your goal is.

There's a third component.

This is a component,

again, that hasn't really been formalized in the literature

but that Dr. Spiegel and I are working hard to formalize

through some research and through an upcoming review

that we will provide links to once it's out,

and that's a separate continuum which is the continuum

between interoception and dissociation.

So now all of you know what interoception is,

but most people probably don't know

or don't realize what dissociation is.

Often we hear about dissociation,

sometimes called disassociation.

Some people pronounce it dissociation. Guess what?

Despite being corrected many times

for each of those pronunciations,

I checked with my colleagues

who are experts in dissociation or disassociation,

and guess what?

They're the same thing. Tomato, tomato, potato, potato.

So I'm going to say dissociation.

Some people will say disassociation, like I disassociate.

Other people will say I dissociate, okay?

Both of those refer to essentially the same thing.

Dissociation is often talked about

in the context of a negative event.

And indeed, dissociation is unfortunately,

or, I should say, is adaptively associated

with traumatic events.

In particular, violent or sexual trauma, people will report

feeling out of body or out of the experience

during the experience

or during a recollection of the experience.

Dissociation has also been described

in terms of people who are in a traumatic accident

or they see someone killed right in front of them.

First responders will talk about dissociating

when they arrive on a scene.

I don't want to provide, you know, gruesome imagery here

'cause I know people can be pretty sensitive to this,

but, you know, showing up on the scene of a car crash

and just seeing carnage or incredible damage to bodies

or, you know, this sort of thing.

Dissociation lies at the opposite end

of a continuum with interoception.

Now, earlier, I said that interoception

is on the opposite end of a continuum with exteroception,

but it also is on the opposite end

of a continuum with dissociation.

We can provide some better definitions perhaps

to make this crystal clear,

and here, I'm actually reading from an upcoming review.

I feel comfortable reading from it

because I'm an author on the review.

But nonetheless, interoception refers to a process

by which your nervous system,

meaning your brain and connections with your body,

senses, interprets, integrates, and regulates signals

originating from within the body,

and thereby provides a moment-to-moment mapping

of your internal landscape

at both a conscious and unconscious level.

Okay, that's a lot of words

to describe basically the process

of perceiving what's happening

at the level of the surface of your skin or inward.

Dissociation can be thought of

as the opposite of interoception.

It's a lack of bodily awareness

or a removal of one's conscious experience

from one's bodily experience and awareness.

Again, this is most often talked about

in the context of something traumatic,

but really, if we think about health

and mental health and physical health,

the optimal place to reside

on the continuum between interoception and dissociation

is somewhere in the middle.

We don't want to be dissociated from life's experiences,

but we also don't want everything that happens in the world