transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] This is the Ten Percent Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, everybody. How are we doing? Today, we are talking about the top 10 neuroscience-backed tips for a healthy brain. For this episode, we have recruited two powerhouse neuroscientists, both of them friends of the pod. Just to say from the jump here, we're gonna go through the best ways to maintain your brain, but my guests are very sensitive to the fact that you're a busy person, so they will recommend strategies that you can actually do, that you can actually weave into your daily life. In other words, we will talk about things like sleep, exercise and meditation and how they change your brain, but we will also talk about the minimum effective dose. My guests are doctors Amishi Jha and Wendy Suzuki. Amishi Jha is Director of Contemplative Neuroscience and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami. She's also the author of a bestselling book called Peak Mind, and she's the creator of an app called Pushups for Your Mind. Wendy Suzuki is the Dean of NYU's College of Arts & Sciences and a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology, and she's the author of Healthy Brain, Happy Life, and another book with the provocative title Good Anxiety. I should say the reason we're doing a top 10 list today is that we are celebrating the 10th anniversary of this show. Thank you very much for listening. I can't believe we've been doing this for 10 years. Being the host of this show has changed my life. It's given me so much. My team and I could not and would not do this without you. I also want to say that if you're interested in meditating with me, I've got two live in-person events coming up. The first is on May 17th. I'll be at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. I'll guide some meditation, talk about how the practice can help in a chaotic world and take your questions. And then in October, I'll be doing my annual meditation party retreat with my friends, Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren. It's a weekend thing at the Omega Institute in upstate New York. It's super fun. We teach a bunch of different styles of meditation, but there's also a lot of time for Q&A and socializing and pickleball, whatever you're into. We even do a dance party. It really is important to do meditation in the carpool lane. The Buddha talked about this 2,600 years ago. So that's the spirit of the meditation party event. I will put links to both events in the show notes. You should come to both of them. I'm kidding. You should do whatever you want, but you can come to both. Anyway, we'll get started with doctors, Wendy Suzuki and Amishi Jha right after this. Dr. Amishi Jha and Dr. Wendy Suzuki, welcome back to the show, both of you.

Speaker 2:
[02:58] Great to be here.

Speaker 3:
[02:59] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[03:00] Thank you for agreeing this strange experiment where we celebrate the 10th anniversary of this show, which feels like I started yesterday.

Speaker 2:
[03:08] Amazing. Congratulations.

Speaker 3:
[03:09] Congratulations. That's amazing.

Speaker 1:
[03:13] Well, thanks. Okay, so we're going to talk about the top 10 neuroscience backed tips for maintaining a healthy brain. Some of these tips will come from you as individuals, but this first tip comes from both of you as a unit. And it is simply just to understand that you can change your brain. Amishi, let me start with you. I believe the term for this is neuroplasticity.

Speaker 2:
[03:37] Yes, that's absolutely right. And first of all, just great to be here with you, Dan, and with Wendy. I'm a fan both as an academic and as a science communicator, so wonderful to be here together. When I think about that term neuroplasticity, it sounds like something special, but in fact, it is essentially this understanding that, broadly speaking, that things can change as a function of experience. And in particular, this case, the brain can change as a function of experience. That is a very powerful insight that can shape how we attempt to experience and plan our lives. With the idea, I think, for the topic of this conversation, that if we make a dedicated effort to engage in certain kinds of training, we can produce reliable, tractable changes in the brain that suggest the brain can change. So many ways to do that, which I'm excited to talk about.

Speaker 1:
[04:30] Yeah. Well, I want to get into some of the ways to do that. So, Wendy, one of the main mechanisms that you've talked about is exercise. So I'd like to hear a little bit more about that and anything else that comes to mind for you.

Speaker 2:
[04:42] Absolutely.

Speaker 3:
[04:42] I want to send back the compliment to Amishi. This is the first time we've met each other, but of course I followed your work and so great to be here with you and with you, Dan. Exercise is one of the most transformative brain plasticity promoters that we have. As I like to say, every single time you move your body, it's like you're giving your brain a wonderful bubble bath of neurochemicals that include growth factors that are at the heart of the anatomical changes that we see with exercise. Stepping back for a moment about the definition, this key definition of neuroplasticity. It's simply the idea that your brain is not fixed. I think this is a really important idea that everybody needs to understand. Our brains are not fixed. Our brains are constantly wiring themselves around what we repeatedly do. You do things like moving your body, giving your brain this bubble bath of neurotrophins and dopamine and serotonin, things that improve your mood. You are going to grow your brain. You are going to have a higher level of baseline mood. That is why it's one of the most transformative things that you can do to exercise your own brain plasticity.

Speaker 1:
[05:57] I think people can hear this argument about neuroplasticity generally and the importance of exercise specifically. I think they can hear it in two ways at least. One is that's incredibly good news and that's certainly the way I talk about it. We all talk about it is this is radically good news in an era of so much bad news. The other way to hear it, and I'll stay with you on this Wendy for a second, the other way to hear it is, dude, I have so much shit to do and the world is telling me I'll be better as soon as I do what the local influencer on Instagram is telling me to do or as soon as I look a certain way, then I'll finally have my shit together and so I'm never enough. And so, yeah, what do you say to the people in the latter camp of, you know, I'm tired of the optimizer argument?

Speaker 3:
[06:46] I say neuroplasticity is basically biological. We evolved as beings that move. I don't care if you have all sorts of things to get done. You have to walk. You have to move around every day. Most of us do. Use that. Use the stairs. Use every moment that you have. Go into the grocery store. Everybody has to go do that. It is powerful. Use that for your advantage. It is not an added thing. It's something that you can enhance what you're already doing. So that's how I approach it.

Speaker 1:
[07:18] Amishi, do you have a take on this?

Speaker 2:
[07:20] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[07:20] I hear it all the time. I was just being interviewed the other night for a local NPR station in Minnesota, and the host was quite smart, asked me this astute question of like, I already feel like everybody's telling me I need to do a million things in order to keep up, and now you're telling me I can affect my brain, but, you know, it requires work.

Speaker 2:
[07:39] Yeah. Well, I'd say, let's go back to the definition or description we gave of neuroplasticity. Essentially, that the brain will change through repeated activity. And if you are saying to yourself over and over again, life is tough, I'm overwhelmed, there's never any time to do things that might advantage me. Just know that those repeated thoughts themselves are a form of brain training. And to be aware of that, and in some sense, the journey with at least from my perspective with mindfulness training, mindfulness meditation training, is to start watching for the habits of mind that already exist, and understand that those habits of mind are creating set points within your brain and the way you feel and act and behave and interact in the world. And so, instead of thinking about what the offer is here, whether it's physical exercise or mindfulness training or other forms of contemplative practice, instead of thinking of it as a burden, think of it as an opportunity to change the default of how you already function. And as Wendy already alluded to, this doesn't have to be a big giant thing you do. It can be essentially integrated into the way you move through your life with slight adjustments. I think you just mentioned this, Wendy, so take the stairs instead of the elevator, but do that every time you see an elevator, look for the staircase. And that's a small adjustment in terms of the way in which you incorporate physical activity into your day. But it can have a big impact if you do it enough and repeatedly. But I do appreciate that burden of optimization at this point in our modern life. And so I think it's worth actually acknowledging that we need to lay off ourselves a little bit to not have this giant ask of ourselves over and over and over again. And we can come to that a little bit about how in some sense, even as it has to do with activities like mindfulness training, and in particular with my expertise and attention, realizing how we may be taxing ourselves unknowingly, that may be adding to that feeling of overwhelm, dread and like the weight of the world is on our shoulders, for example, by how we engage with social media day to day. So that's a kind of a deeper conversation. But I hope that address the point you're making, which is, yeah, it can feel that way, but it need not be taken that way.

Speaker 1:
[09:57] It's super helpful. And I think the bottom line is, look, the bad news is, if you want to be healthy in the holistic understanding of that term healthy, you are going to have to do stuff. It just requires some work. But the good news is, we can do it in very manageable increments and fit it into our busy lives. And then the subtle point, so there's bad news, good news, and then a really subtle overarching point is, just keep an eye on like what your motivation for change is. If it's out of self-directed aggression, a sense of insufficiency, well, yes, that is why we're so tired of optimization. But if it really is out of a sense of personal affection for yourself and wanting the best for yourself, the good news can be operationalized. You can find ways to make this work in your life without it feeling awful. How does that sound as a overly long summary?

Speaker 3:
[10:59] I think that sounds good. Can I just add, Dan, I want to add this because I hear this so much from when I give talks around, walking counts. People think that we're talking about moving your body. They're thinking about, oh, I'm never going to be a marathon runner. No, we're not talking about that. Moving your body, including walking helps. I like to cite the least amount of exercise that has been shown to have a significant effect. Ten minutes of walking can decrease your depression and anxiety levels. Can everybody do ten minutes of walking? I don't even have to change my shoes. It counts, so remember that. That's my tagline, ten minutes of walking counts.

Speaker 1:
[11:38] That's awesome. Wendy, I want to come back to you on exercise in a minute, but let me move to the second in the top ten tips here. This is yours, Amishi, and it has to do with something you've already referenced, which is meditation. Let's just say a little bit more about the three recommended types of meditation based on your research. One is focused attention, the other is open monitoring, and the third is loving kindness. Can you break those down for us?

Speaker 2:
[12:04] Well, thankfully, the last ten years of your podcast have done such a service for the world in popularizing a very accessible understanding of those practices. I want to just begin by acknowledging that and say thank you. So I'm hoping your audience will already have been somewhat familiar with all three of those forms of practice, given the opportunities that this context has provided. So I study attention in my lab, and this is this very powerful brain system that is essentially like the boss of the brain. Wherever it is that we direct our attention, the rest of the information processing in the brain is impacted by that. Attention is essentially three different things, and I like to use these metaphors that we can anchor around to describe attention most broadly. It has to do and probably everybody understands this with focusing, or directing our focus in a dedicated way. I use this metaphor of thinking about attention as a flashlight, meaning that wherever it is that we direct that focus, we get privileged access to the information that's in front of us. In the same way, if you pointed a flashlight in a darkened room, that'd be the area that you'd be able to get more granular, clear access to the information in. That's a really important way to think about attention because it gives us that sense of agency, we can direct our attention, but that's just one way to think about attention. There's actually two other ways that actually relate to the three practices you mentioned. The second way of thinking about attention is almost the exact opposite of that narrow directed flashlight. I use the metaphor of a floodlight, keeping attention not narrow and focused, but broad and receptive to anything that's arising moment by moment. Then the third way to think about attention is a coordination function. I use the metaphor of a juggler there, the idea that we are actually holding a lot of balls in the air and ensuring that none of them drop. Of course, this juggler system directs the other two so that there's coordination between various forms of attention to function properly. It ends up that these various metaphors of attention that I've used also overlap with known brain systems that are distinct but interrelated. One of the things from my work that led me to, let's just start with focused attention, the very first of the three that you mentioned, mindfulness practices. One of the things I was interested in understanding is how can we provide people with short exercises they could do every day that might allow us to engage all three of these forms of attention. And so if we think about what the instructions are for a focused attention practice, it's typically something like if you want to do it as a stillness practice, lower or close your eyes and pick an anchor for a period of time where you're going to do this practice, where you're going to actively and on purpose pay attention. It could be very often it's breath-related sensations. So you can think of it as taking that flashlight and directing it to breath-related sensations, whether that's the coolness of air in your nostrils or your abdomen moving up and down, whatever it is, it's very specific and you're directing focus there. The second instruction of a focused attention practice though is, yes, keep your attention focused on breath-related sensations. And when you notice that your mind has wandered, gently return it. So that's the second emphasis is notice it, and the third piece of the practice is redirect it back, refocus. That noticing component is very much like this alerting system being active. You're noticing what's happening right now. And that can be what's happening in the world around you or in this case, when we're practicing, noticing what's arising. Are you on the target of your dedicated focus for this practice or have you mind wandered away? So we're engaging the alerting system when we're doing a focused attention practice. And then, of course, when we refocus, we're questioning, ah, is my action and my goal aligned right now? No, I'm supposed to be focusing on the breath and I'm thinking about lunch or my next vacation. Bring it back. This is why I actually refer to the focused attention practice as a push up for the mind, and in particular, a push up for the attention system. Because through this simple yet elegant practice, simple not meaning that simple to do, but at least the three steps are pretty straightforward. Focus, notice, redirect, engage all three systems of attention, and going back to what we were saying about neuroplasticity, the idea is that if you do that practice repeatedly, you might actually strengthen all three of those systems. So that's why focused attention is kept in there. Open monitoring is a practice that is emphasizing not so much about the flashlight and moving it around and redirecting it, but more about this alerting system or really floodlight, with the instruction being, for the period of time you're going to do this practice, it's not about anchoring on a particular body sensation, but really anchoring on whatever it is that arises in this moment, without really going in and engaging in it. So actually trying to not have your flashlight come into play, staying broad and receptive, allowing the arising and passing away of sensory experience, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and I often describe this as the river of thought. Like you're sitting on a riverbank and you allow and see things coming and going down the river in terms of your conscious experience. This is a practice in which that floodlight really gets to do its job of steady, stable alert to whatever is happening. Here, you'd engage the executive functioning when you're not doing that, when you've actually gone and chased a particular thing down the river. Then you're like, oh, I'm using my flashlight here, that's not the intention, pull back broad and stable. Then when it comes to loving kindness practice, which we've had the world's expert teachers and friends of ours, like Sharon Salzberg here to guide your audience, which I've loved. Loving kindness practice is broadly speaking, a practice of well-wishing toward ourselves and others. The reason that this ends up making this trio of exercises, is because in some sense, it is the culmination of what we can use our flashlight and floodlight for, to in some sense, cultivate the capacity to connect with ourselves and our well-intentions, as well as the well-wishes for other people. So that's why it makes, conceptually why, and then in practice, we found all three practices, when engaged for about 12 minutes as a single practice, four days a week, we see reliable benefits to the brain's attention system.

Speaker 1:
[18:27] Let me just double-click on that, the minimum effective dose, Amishi, because we heard Wendy talk about minimum effective dose for exercise, and we're about to take a deep dive on exercise after I get finished interrogating you. The minimum effective dose on meditation, according to your research, is 12 minutes a day, four to five days a week, combining focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness?

Speaker 2:
[18:54] Yes, and it's not about, according to my research, it's really regarding a focus on what you might do for a minimum effective dose to strengthen attention. You might have a different prescription of how long you need to practice for if you have a different target, lowering blood pressure, for example, or improving your well-being. Those numbers may change, but for the purposes of my own research, it has been on offering practices that are intended to strengthen attention, with the question being, how much do you have to do? When you say combining all three of those, it's essentially not combining within one period of 12 minutes, but really combining the use of those over the course of a four-week program, for example. So, the focused attention practice is every other practice with a through line. And then in week one, they're only doing focused attention. Second week is body scan, which is another form of using focused attention, but now directing it to body sensations in a systematic way. Third week is open monitoring. Fourth week is connection, our loving kindness practice.

Speaker 1:
[19:51] Thank you, Amishi. Much more from you in a second. But let's talk to Wendy about exercise. Let's just say a little bit more about, you talked about walking 10 minutes as a minimum effective dose. What about if we're like one notch more ambitious? What else would be a minimum effective dose?

Speaker 3:
[20:09] So there's something for everybody here. No matter what age you are, no matter what fitness level you are, every single time you move your body, you get some benefit. And so I can tell you some of the results from my own studies. Let's say you haven't been moving a lot. You're an adult, you haven't been moving a lot. Less than 30 minutes a week for the last three months is defined as low fit. How much do you have to move to get not just mood benefits, which are the perhaps most immediate benefits that you get, but other benefits, those brain plasticity benefits, the benefits that change the brain's anatomy, physiology and function. Let me just pause for a second. What are those benefits? Exercise can actually help you grow brand new brain cells in the brain's hippocampus critical for memory and for synapses in the prefrontal cortex. It is so critical for the meditation and attention effects and different kinds of attention that Amishi was just talking about. That is the brain plasticity benefits of exercise. And so you don't get that. I'm sorry to say you don't get that level with 10 minutes of walking. Let me be clear. What do you need to get those kinds of effects? You need to get the activation and the flow of a growth factor, BDNF into your bloodstream that goes up through your brain, through your blood brain barrier and into these brain areas, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex. That, all the research shows, including my own, takes aerobic activity, any activity that gets your heart rate up. And so your readers want numbers. How much? What kind? So I can tell you that a group of low fit adults went to 45 minute spin classes, two to three times a week. They didn't make it. We asked them three times a week. They made it like 2.4 times a week for three months. And they started to see significant changes in their baseline, not just mood, we expected that, but baseline attention functions, their ability to shift and focus attention got significantly better. And their memory capacity, their memory functions, dependent on the hippocampus got better. So it's not nothing, but it's not as easy as popping a pill, but that gives a flavor for what you need to do to go from low fit to actually changing my brain and my hippocampal and prefrontal function.

Speaker 1:
[22:37] And you have a couple of tips, Wendy, for folks who struggle with maintaining an exercise habit. One tip is to keep it fun. Yeah. And this is a related tip. Tip number two is to do it with other people.

Speaker 3:
[22:49] Absolutely. I think Amishi was saying this, start with what you're already doing, hopefully what you enjoy doing. Enjoy walking with your friends, make that a part of the exercise. Start small. Again, people are so worried that walking doesn't count. It does count. Walk a little bit more, park a little bit farther away, walk to the next subway station. I'm saying that because I live in New York City and that's a great way to get more walking in. So many easy ways that don't take up too much time, maybe ten more minutes will get more exercise in. So yeah, make it fun, make it short, make it communal. All these things will help you get more movement into your life.

Speaker 1:
[23:31] Okay, Wendy, staying with you. Let me just reset for the listener here. We're working through the top ten neuroscience-backed tips for a healthy brain with doctors Amishi Jha and Wendy Suzuki. We've worked through the first three tips. One, understand your brain can change. Two, meditate, three, exercise. Tip number four, Wendy, I'm gonna stay with you, is sleep.

Speaker 3:
[23:54] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[23:54] Give us the top line information on sleep.

Speaker 3:
[23:57] So the core idea about sleep is that sleep is your neural maintenance every single night. I like to say that sleep is the overnight board meeting for your brain. What happens every night in sleep is that all the memories that you took in on the day before get strengthened during sleep. You don't have good sleep, not surprising. Your memory for what happened the previous day is not very good. To add on to Amishi's wonderful metaphors, I'll add my own metaphor for sleep, which is people don't realize that one of the most powerful things that happens during sleep is that you clean up all those cellular metabolites for all that activity that your brain cells are doing during the day. They are spewing out metabolites like the garbage that you put on your front stoop to be cleaned out and I give the metaphor of a little garbage truck, going to all the billions of synapses every night and cleaning up all that garbage. What happens if you only get four hours of sleep? Well, a whole lot of garbage is left on the side of the sidewalk. What do you feel like the next day? You feel like your brain is full of garbage. So I think it works on several different levels. You need it to strengthen your memory. You need it to clean up those metabolites and to wake up with that fresh, clean, minty smelling brain to get to your next day. I think people feel this. We are all sleep deprived. We know what it feels like to finally get a good night's sleep. This is what's happening. You're allowing your brain to do that overnight neural maintenance, and it's so important for every single one of us.

Speaker 1:
[25:45] Coming up, doctors Jha and Suzuki talk about why you cannot hack your way around sleep and what actually helps to boost your sleep. We also talk about the truth about multitasking and much more. Just to add some personal color here, I was in the hospital yesterday with my dad. It was a total false alarm. He's totally fine. But my dad, who's about to be 82, did everything right really throughout his life when it comes to exercise. He ran marathons before marathons were cool. He was a kind of high-powered doctor, very impressive, very kind man. But he got dementia. I and his doctors believe, and my wife who's a doctor also believe, and this happened to her father too, interestingly. He was also a doctor. They both got dementia because they had untreated sleep apnea. In other words, they weren't getting enough sleep. And for both of these men who were both athletes and both physicians and both got dementia, they were really not sleeping for many years of their lives. You would sleep a little bit and then just be woken up because they were essentially choking from sleep apnea. So this is a long way of saying you can do everything else right. If you're not sleeping, it can go poorly for you.

Speaker 3:
[27:05] Dan, can I just add my favorite tagline for sleep is that you cannot biohack your way out of chronic sleep deprivation. It is fundamental. You just need it. So that is how critical it is for all of us, for good long-term brain health.

Speaker 1:
[27:25] Is there a minimum effective dose?

Speaker 3:
[27:28] I go with the average eight hours is good. My own personal sleep experiment happened during the pandemic when I decided, okay, I'm going to actually see how much sleep that I really need. I wanted to do that experiment where if you could sleep, where you slept long enough or you wake up on your own without the alarm clock, what would that be? I was six to seven and I needed eight. So ever since the pandemic, I have given myself eight and I feel it. I absolutely feel it. So how many of us are below our optimum sleep? It makes a difference as you've just your example from your father and your father-in-law suggests.

Speaker 1:
[28:11] Indeed. Okay. So it leads inextricably to the next question, which is, okay, so how do I get more sleep? You have a bunch of tips. I'm just going to read them to you, Wendy, and you can hold forth on any you believe would benefit from further explication. So practice screen hygiene approaching bedtime, practice a wind down ritual approaching bedtime, reduce or eliminate alcohol approaching bedtime, reduce hydration approaching bedtime, so you're not getting up and peeing. And finally, build up sleep pressure during the day.

Speaker 3:
[28:43] Yes. So build up sleep pressure during the day. I think I'll start there because people don't appreciate. The best way to feel really sleepy at 9 p.m. is to get up at 5 a.m. and build up that sleep pressure. It's not rocket science. It is just how many hours have you been awake? And if you let yourself sleep to 10, 11 o'clock in the morning, well, you are going to be up until 1 o'clock at night. And if you get eight hours with that schedule, that's fine. But often we shorten our actual sleep times. I'll bring in that I've been having first year students in the College of Arts and Science at NYU do personal sleep and meditation experiments. And Amishi, you will be happy to know that they were all very curious about doing meditation, trying meditation, seeing what it did. They did exactly what you are recommending. Eight to 12 minutes guided meditation. They all chose that. They found their favorite YouTube guided meditation video. And what I found was surprises in how long they slept, how well they slept, how good they felt the next day. Several of them saying that it improved their social interactions the next day, which we know are so good for your brain. You ask them to actually use the science in their life, and really good things come out of it. So that was really exciting to see.

Speaker 1:
[30:09] I will say before we leave sleep, just again, me interjecting with personal N of 1 laboratory data here, but I have done a lot of work practicing screen hygiene before bedtime, really putting my phone away for an hour or two or more before I go to bed. And the other is I really do have a wind down ritual that basically entails doing some walking meditation and taking a warm shower. And those have both helped me a lot. But Wendy, I want to get to tip 5. You mentioned it, but it bears a lot more discussion. And that is social connection as a way to increase our brain health. Please say more.

Speaker 3:
[30:46] Yeah. So loneliness, which is up all around the world, is a biological stressor. It is affecting us more and more. The pandemic didn't help being locked in our bedworms sometimes. Either teaching classes, if you're Amishi and I, or taking classes, it increased our stress. People don't always link those two. Loneliness is a biological stressor. Because we as human primates evolved to be in a social context. We evolved to socially connect with each other. It's good for our brains. We crave it. I'm not saying that everybody needs sometimes downtime. You can't be at a party all the time. But when we start to feel lonely, I am missing human company, that is when it becomes a stressor. A lot of the work at universities, not just mine, but so many, are reintroducing activities that bring students together and get them to socialize in a way that was more natural before the pandemic, but needs a little bit of extra help. And you see the benefits. There's a lack of social skills there sometimes, but quickly learned. You see the decrease in stress. You see the belonging coming in. You feel the pull of having support from your fellow students, in this case, but substitute in office worker, club member, whatever you want. So helpful and such a beautiful practice to increase your positive brain plasticity, that is increasing the social connection in your life.

Speaker 1:
[32:23] Amishi, is there any evidence that loving kindness meditation, which we've discussed already, which again for the uninitiated involves envisioning a series of beings or people or animals and sending good vibes like maybe happy, safe, healthy, live with ease. Any evidence that this practice can increase our social connection quotient?

Speaker 2:
[32:47] Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the entire suite of practices we were describing show positive support. One of the studies we actually did during the pandemic was with older adults because again at that point they were more vulnerable to the COVID-19 and we were concerned about them. So we did a research study during that time where we offered them a series of practices, including the three that we were just describing. And what we found was not only were their sort of mood was protected, but the loneliness level that they reported decreased. And that's just in that particular context. But there are now growing number of studies that suggest even without actual engagement, holding yourself and practicing in these ways, holding yourself with that care in the context of loving kindness and others can reduce the distress associated with loneliness.

Speaker 1:
[33:37] Amishi, Wendy just did this awesome run of three tips there, exercise, sleep, and connection. But meditation actually can work in conjunction with and amplify all of these.

Speaker 2:
[33:48] Yeah, absolutely. And I think there are many connections between the two. So let's just start out with sleep. When you talk to folks about what the challenges are to falling asleep and staying asleep, oftentimes, it is what the mind is doing, whether it's collaborating or battling you as you attempt to do this. And while we often, at least in the work that we do, describe mindfulness training in particular as a way to strengthen attention, meaning for our ability to be attentive in our lives, these practices can also actually help us fall asleep. And there is growing support that the sleep quality can be benefited by mindfulness training. If you think about it, going back to that sort of flashlight metaphor of attention, if what's happening as you're attempting to fall asleep is the thoughts are racing, the flashlight is just like all over the place getting pulled here and pulled there, so there is no quiet or calm that might allow these other processes to sort of take root so you can fall asleep. How can we give ourselves an assist? And even if we don't explicitly tell folks, they will spontaneously figure this out, that doing a short practice can actually aid in the ability to fall asleep, whether it's a short focused attention practice or a body scan, we're actually going through systematically focusing on various body parts. So just wanted to say that, that practicing can actually facilitate sleep quality. But the other thing that's come out recently, and this is really sort of new stuff, has to do with that, I love your metaphor of the garbage truck cleaning system for the brain. I mean, that's much more eloquent than what I describe it as, which is like, there's a lot of brain poop and just like your digestive system's got to get it out, the same thing is happening. And essentially, it's very interesting because for a long time, we didn't know, like, why is it that the brain has this sort of rhythmic low frequency oscillations and during certain stages of sleep. And now we're thinking that it may actually be structural. If the brain is kind of pulsating in that way, you could think about it almost like the way you might think your large intestine has to have muscular movements to actually allow drainage to happen in that sense. So there's a term and it's not to get too jargony, but it's called glymphatic drainage, which is essentially this garbage truck or brain poop getting pushed out of the brain. There are recent studies that suggest that practicing mindfulness meditation helps with glymphatic drainage. And these are just opening up more questions about the relationship between sleep and things like mindfulness. Sleep and mindfulness practice, contemplative practice, very beneficial. When it comes to exercise, it's also the case that there is a two-fer quality, meaning you got one thing will benefit you, the other thing will benefit you, put them together and it's wonderful, kind of almost synergistic benefit. What we know is that when you compare sort of exercise alone to mindfulness infused exercise, if you will, is that a lot of the kind of aversive aspects of exercise, meaning that feeling of like, I just can't go on if it's a very intensive workout, or I don't want to do it. Or the initiation and maintenance of an exercise engagement period are really kind of dialed down if you pair it with mindfulness practice. Because in some sense, what you're doing is anchoring people to the moment to moment experience they're having. And then all of those sort of judgments regarding what this experience is, that might derail you from continuing the actual engagement in the exercise are softened. So there is a real benefit known between comparing exercise with and without mindfulness. So if we think about exercise and mindfulness, contemplative practice as two levers we can pull, we can pull them separately. We can have them have a double whammy of using them together. We can incorporate them formally as formal periods of practice and informally in the day-to-day functioning of our lives.

Speaker 1:
[37:35] Okay, let's move to tip number six. And Amishi, I'm going to stay with you for this. This is really good advice, hard to do, but really good advice. Stop multitasking.

Speaker 2:
[37:46] Yes, yes. So let's first like describe what we mean when we usually say that term multitasking. The idea is that we can effectively, those that choose to do this, engage in multiple, attentionally demanding tasks simultaneously. Right? That's the idea. It's like I can be having a conversation and checking my email and reading this article. And if you talk to students, oftentimes they think that they're doing all three effectively when unfortunately they're not doing any of those effectively. Part of the reason multitasking needs to be sort of actively and effortfully not approached as a good thing to do, but is actually a bad thing that you shouldn't do is because the way the brain functions, and in particular the way the attention system functions. In those metaphors I gave for attention and going back to that flashlight idea, I didn't say we have flashlights of attention, we have a flashlight, meaning there is a singular aspect to our ability to focus. And what people think it means when you multitask, as I described, is that I've got three flashlights or four or five, and they're all pointing in different directions, and they're all doing their thing. That is not what actually happens. So even the term multitasking is a myth. What we're actually doing is task switching, meaning we're engaging that flashlight, we're disengaging it, removing it over here, we're pulling it back. And that feature of engaging and disengaging attention is one of the best ways, if you continue to do that a lot, that you can deplete your attentional capacity. So you want to really not be multitasking because what you don't want to do is drain your attentional capacity through forcing it to task switch over and over again. And instead, what you want to do as much as possible is monotask. Now, what I mean by that is just essentially do one thing at a time. And there are many groups, we work with many communities and professionals where they say, that's just not possible. I have to have the background input from a police officer. I can't just turn it off and do whatever else I'm doing. But when you can monotask and be aware that if you are putting yourself in a situation where there will be this competition for multiple inputs of what you may need to be doing simultaneously, that you will be vulnerable. You'll be vulnerable to being slower in any of the things that you're doing and more prone to making mistakes. So just having that in the back of your minds, like I'm in this multitasking context because I have to be, I better watch a little bit more because I'm going to be more vulnerable to errors and being slow. So that's why the request is monotask when you can. One way you can ensure that you are monotasking is when you're sitting there with the dedicated intention of focusing on something, turn off all the notifications, quiet the cell phone for the period of time that you're doing that. Because what those alerts are doing, it is yanking the flashlight. So now all of a sudden, you didn't intend to have another task, but you are all of a sudden in another task that you're going to be engaged in. Whether it's as simple as just looking to see who called you, or actually getting on and starting to text the person back, it is a pull away from your intended focus.

Speaker 1:
[40:54] I'm still working on this one, but it's so good to have the reminder. Coming up, Amishi and Wendy talk about what meta awareness is, and how to notice what your mind is doing in real time, how to use anxiety as fuel instead of letting it spiral, and why giving your mind more white space can actually make you sharper and calmer. Okay, staying with you, Amishi. Tip number seven, practice meta awareness. What does that mean?

Speaker 2:
[41:30] Right, so I think I would put that sort of plainly in the category of pay attention to your attention. The term meta awareness is essentially this capacity that we cultivate through mindfulness practice to be aware of the contents and processes that are at play in our moment to moment experience. So we are aware of our awareness, meta aware. And the reason I say pay attention to your attention is because that's a good way in. It's a good way to kind of check in with what is going on right now. Even checking in with your goals. You know, I set out to do this thing. Am I actually doing it? Is it the right thing to be doing? What ends up happening in folks that engage in mindfulness training is that the simple practice like we talked about the focused attention practice, for example, where you're focusing on the breath, noticing mind wandering and then refocusing as needed. That noticing piece is what can be cultivated into meta-awareness. Because while you're doing the practice, it's sort of the checking in of like, hey, where am I right now? I want to be on the breath. Where am I? But that kind of broadens you out to be monitoring in an ongoing way what is happening. And that can be a real superpower. Because oftentimes, when things happen and we've gone astray, it's already too late. We're already derailed. We're already overreacting. We're already panicked. If we can pull back enough to kind of watch what's happening, even see what's brewing on the horizon, it gives us much more agency to take action that may not allow the storm to actually overcome us.

Speaker 1:
[43:07] How do you remember to do this?

Speaker 2:
[43:09] In some sense, you remember when you're formally practicing and you have to think about it as creating that habit of mind. Practice noticing. We all know this from anybody that's had a chance to engage in any kind of mindfulness practice. It is not an easy thing to do. It is not an easy thing to do. Oftentimes, we might even be fooling ourselves to say, oh, look at me, look at how focused I am, and then realize, oh, actually, in that statement, I'm already off the thing I'm supposed to be focusing on, which is my breath, and onto this thought, and my reflection on what my state of attention is. You can get more and more granular and subtle in watching the mind for the smallest hints of essentially excursions the mind takes from where you want for your focus to be. That is what I think when we talk about befriending the mind, befriending attention through contemplative practice, it is getting that friendly familiarity with what's going on with us moment by moment, which is part of the, not the mandate that can feel like, again, like a panic feeling of like, how am I going to get myself to do this? But more like, ah, it's a different way of knowing myself and knowing my experience moment by moment.

Speaker 1:
[44:18] Let me just reset for the audience. We've covered seven tips so far. Tip number one, understand you can change your brain. Two, meditate. Three, exercise. Four, sleep. Five, connect. Six, don't multitask. Seven, practice meta awareness. Eight, Wendy, harness anxiety. How do we harness anxiety? It feels like we want to do the opposite. We want to fend it off.

Speaker 3:
[44:40] I'm glad you said it that way, Dan. So I want everybody to understand that anxiety is a normal human emotion. It's not the enemy. It's actually activation energy. The question is, will you let that activation energy scatter you? I've done it. Everybody's done it every once in a while. Or will you steer it to help you and to actually do what it was designed to do? That is protect you. So let's start with reality. Everybody has high levels of anxiety at this particular moment in time in our world, country, history. I'm not saying that everybody should be able to function at their highest at a high level of anxiety. First, let's learn how to turn it down. Turn the volume down on anxiety. We already talked about two beautiful ways to do that. Meditation, all three kinds that Amishi described so beautifully. Exercising is beautiful. I want to add a third less well-known, which I call joy conditioning. It is the equal and opposite to something that we've all experienced, which is fear conditioning. Fear conditioning is something scary happens and you can't forget it because your amygdala has really sealed it in your brain so that it protects you for the rest of the time. That's not great to walk around with all these fearful memories. How come my most joyful memories of the time that I spend with my family, my friends, how come those can't be sealed in in the same way? It's because memory doesn't work that way unless you use joy conditioning. Joy conditioning just says to enhance all those wonderful memories that you already have. We all have them. Think about them again. Rehearse them. We started out brain plasticity is if you do it over and over, it gets strengthened. If you remember your most joyful memories in your life over and over and over, they come out from the background and you remember them more and it helps your overall mood. That is my uncommon tip to lower your anxiety. Amishi said a great word in her last segment, which is a superpower. I think I call anxiety our superpower if you know how to harness and steer its energy. I'll give you the most common superpower that everybody has. Did you know that your anxiety could be your superpower for productivity? It works this way. Most common form, a very common form of anxiety is the what if list. It hits me right at night when I'm trying to go to sleep. We talked about sleep as like, oh my God, what if that email didn't land right? What if what I said to that person didn't sound good? What if my report didn't go well? I think about all these things and I ruminate and then I can't sleep. Well, first, remember that all these what ifs are meaningful to you. These are the things that are important for you. That's the first thing to remember. Second, what I've done is I don't get up and do something about them, but I note them, I go to sleep and the next morning, I do something, put an action plan for each of those worries that are meaningful to me. In that way, I become more productive. If I actually do an action, I will go review the e-mail, I'll ask three friends to look at the report one more time. These are actionable items that turns your natural anxiety brain, your what if list into a productivity list. That's what I mean by turning your own form of anxiety into a superpower, in this case, a superpower of productivity.

Speaker 1:
[48:18] Let me just make sure I understand that. If I'm feeling anxious about something, in fact, this happened to be today, just as I was sitting down to meditate, I was just hit by this huge bolt of anxiety about the title of my next book, which I want to be something risky, but now I'm not sure I can live with the risk. And so that hits me, and for you listener, it could be something else. You know, as Wendy said, it could be something, you feel like you put your foot in your mouth earlier in the day, or you're worried about the quality of a project, you're working on whatever. If I'm hearing you correctly, it's a two part move, Wendy. One is, remember that this is connected to something that gives your life meaning, you care about it for a reason. So that's just kind of a reframing device. And the second is, you might not be able to do something about it right now, especially if you're trying to go to sleep, make a note of it. And then the next day, allow less the anxiety, but more the meaning, the fact that you care about it, motivates you to revisit it in a calm and sane way.

Speaker 3:
[49:18] Exactly, exactly. That will naturally decrease your anxiety about it. You, Dan, will be asking your three smartest friends to help you think about what that title should be, and you'll get more information, it should decrease your anxiety. I got this from a lawyer, a well-paid New York City lawyer. She uses this every day, and she claims that this is the reason why she is a very high-paid New York City lawyer. She turned her own anxiety into a productivity list that makes her a better lawyer. I said, can I use that for my book? She said, yes.

Speaker 1:
[49:50] Wendy, is there evidence that anxiety, if untreated and unharnessed, can damage our brain?

Speaker 3:
[49:57] Absolutely. Anxiety exists on a very, very wide spectrum from just everyday mild worries to clinical level anxiety that needs a professional, needs a medication, and leads to high, high levels of stress. High levels of stress absolutely will damage your brain in the long term. And I call chronic anxiety and chronic stress, the two most common forms of negative brain plasticity. We've only been talking about positive brain plasticity, but actually chronic anxiety and chronic stress can move the brain in the opposite direction to damage and shrinkage in some cases.

Speaker 1:
[50:39] Real quick before we move on to the ninth tip, there are a couple of other ways we can mitigate anxiety and all of the stress it produces. And those are, according to you, Wendy, both gratitude and generosity. Can you say a little bit about these two G words?

Speaker 3:
[50:58] Absolutely. Well, gratitude is a mindset shift. To spend a moment thinking about all the things you have in your life that you are grateful for elevates them. Kind of like joy conditioning elevates the positive memories and then diminishes all those things that can seem so overwhelming in high states of anxiety. It is a wonderful practice. There are meditations around gratitude. I'm sure that Amishi can tell you all about. It is a wonderful practice that has direct effects on lowering your anxiety. And generosity has been studied in fMRI studies where they show that if people are given the opportunity to lower somebody else's tax rate without them knowing, dopamine goes up in their brain. You've all read this in the newspaper and in your favorite magazine, you know, pay for the person's coffee behind you, leave quarters in the play yard for the kids to find. Those unsung acts of generosity do lead to feelings of reward and immediate lowering of anxiety. It is a powerful tool. It's great that this is on the tip list that you have, Dan.

Speaker 1:
[52:10] Quick note on the penultimate tip, the gratitude tip. I mentioned earlier my bedtime routine. When I get in the shower, I make a list of all the good things that happened that day, since I'm so anxious and pessimistic that it's a counter programs against my nature. Okay, Amishi, tip number nine. This is also something I really am glad you're reminding me of because I don't do a good job at this. Tip number nine is to build in mental white space. Say more, please.

Speaker 2:
[52:39] Yes. We talked a lot about attention and the power of attention, the nature of attention, training it with contemplative practice. But we also know that attention is constantly being engaged in our modern world. In fact, if we think about social media, etc., modern technological landscape, it's called an attention economy. The nature of how we function these days is putting a burden on that, frankly, because we are constantly using this particular brain system knowingly or unknowingly. Keeping our attention engaged is not just neutral, it's actually the way in which many organizations are making a lot of money. The product in the social media context is your attention. A good tip for folks is just keep that in mind, is that if you're engaging with some platform and you aren't paying for it, probably your attention is the thing that's paying for it. Meaning, it is your attention getting exposed to the ads, that is the reason this platform is free for you. Just to empower ourselves in that way. Where does white space come in? In some sense, it's saying have a context, set up a period of time, set up a way in which you can give your directed flashlight being either pulled, pushed or yanked around a break by what I'm calling mental meandering. So that sounds a little bit strange, but the other term would be mind wandering. Let your mind wander when you go for a walk or when you daydream, you're letting your mind wander. I don't use the term mind wander because it actually is tied to a whole other literature, which is when we want to be doing something and our mind wanders away from that, which is actually quite bad for our ability to function well and feel well. But meandering in this way is allowing your mind, and that's what I mean by white space, to not have an agenda about what it's going to prioritize or think about, but allow the free flow of conscious thought to emerge. There are very good ways to do this, whether it is going for a walk in nature or while you're waiting, just anywhere, anytime you're waiting, waiting in line, waiting to go into a meeting, whatever it is. Instead of picking up your phone by default and engaging with whatever that is, because that is again, using that flashlight, just sit there and actually know that you are going to be benefiting yourself by allowing the mind to go where it will. How do we know this? Well, we know when people are allowed to have this white space, they report better mood, better problem-solving, better self-support in the way that they kind of orient to challenges that they face. We know that there are benefits to doing this, and we are particularly challenged in our modern world of freeing ourselves of the constant pull on our attention. Take it seriously and see it not as a waste of time, but as worthy of your time. This reminds me of one of my favorite book titles, Don't Just Do Something, Sit There. And I think we should take that to heart to add a little bit more of that into our daily lives.

Speaker 1:
[55:52] Well said. Okay, tip number 10. The vast majority of the tips today have been individual tips, Amishi on the importance of mental white space, Wendy on sleep, et cetera, et cetera. But tips number one and 10 are from both of you. Tip number one was to understand that you can change your brain. Tip number 10 is believe that you can change your brain. So Wendy, we'll only go to you. What's the difference between understanding you can change your brain and believing it?

Speaker 3:
[56:25] It is a question of agency. So I want people to leave with this thought, that the daily choices that you make are shaping the brain you will live with tomorrow. So go through our number 1 through 10, and this isn't about optimizing, it's making daily choices. How much sleep you have, how much social connection that you have, how much time do you spend doing loving kindness meditation that will enhance your day in many different ways. Talk about two-fer, it's like a three-fer or four-fer right there. These choices make a difference on the brain's biology. The brain is biological, it responds to repetition, what you do every single day. And what Amishi and I have tried to do is give people the biological basis of what makes their brain work and be healthiest for the longest period of their lives.

Speaker 1:
[57:28] Amishi, I'll give you the final word.

Speaker 2:
[57:29] Oh, beautifully, beautifully said. It's hard to follow that summary. What I would want to say about believing is actually tied to the way I respond to the word belief, which is usually like, no, show me the evidence. And we are at a moment, thankfully, through the effort of what we have in terms of a scientific understanding that we know that neuroplasticity is a reality of how the brain functions. Just to tell you how recent this is, when I started graduate school, which wasn't that long ago, we didn't know about neurogenesis. We actually had the understanding, I was even taught the understanding that you kind of have what you got, and then it kind of withers away as we age and that's it. And for me, knowing that that is not the case, that the adult brain, not only do we grow and proliferate neurons through the course of development and then kind of prune them away, but the adult brain is capable of birthing new brain cells as Wendy mentioned, is such a powerful thing for us to keep in mind. And we have seen over and over again, through the varieties of studies, whether it's about mindfulness training or exercise, that you can change the functioning of the brain. You can change the way brain networks connect to each other. You can change the way in the moment, the brain is functioning in an acute way, like meaning as people are practicing, you see brain changes kind of taking shape moment by moment. And those translate into what becomes the structural changes that are more stable. So if belief doesn't sit with you the way that it doesn't always sit with me, know that this scientific evidence should empower you to take seriously this fact about the brain. And that means that whatever you do repeatedly is going to change your brain, whether you want it to or not, it will. Make an active, as the term Wendy used, use your own agency to embody the way you live your life. And I think this is a beautiful way where exercise and mindfulness can again go hand in hand, to embody the way you live your life, not literally only in your body, but even in the way you orient to your body, to ensure that you live a full and meaningful life. And that's the way I would hold neuroplasticity, that it is a pathway to living a full and meaningful life, not some mandate to optimize.

Speaker 1:
[59:56] Amishi and Wendy, such a pleasure to have two powerful scientists here on the show. Thank you very much for coming on.

Speaker 2:
[60:04] Thanks so much, Dan.

Speaker 3:
[60:05] Thank you, Dan.

Speaker 1:
[60:11] Thanks again to Wendy and Amishi. I appreciate them celebrating the 10th anniversary of this podcast with me. Don't forget to check out my new app over at danharris.com, my new meditation app. It's called 10% with Dan Harris. We've got lots of great guided meditations from amazing teachers like Joseph Goldstein and Sebene Selassie and on and on. You should come join the party. Finally, thank you very much to everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.