recap/history/1773695002747-hlOA8ObQJXo.json

{"id":"1773695002747-hlOA8ObQJXo","videoId":"hlOA8ObQJXo","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlOA8ObQJXo","title":"Science-Based Meditation Tools to Improve Your Brain & Health | Dr. Richard Davidson","type":"youtube","topicCount":26,"segmentCount":331,"createdAt":"2026-03-16T21:03:22.747Z","uploadDate":"20260316","chunks":[{"title":"Introduction","summary":"Dr. Huberman introduces Dr. Richie Davidson, highlighting his pioneering research on the science of meditation, neuroplasticity, and the benefits of brief daily practices.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: We actually have really good data on this that at least for beginning meditators, if you do it for 30 days and you do it just for 5 minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety, and symptoms of stress. We've shown that repeatedly in randomized control trials. You'll see an increase on measures of well-being or flourishing, and we can talk about what those actually mean. You can even see, just with this amount of practice, a reduction in IL-6. IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine.","offset":0,"duration":39},{"text":"Huberman Lab Intro: Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.","offset":39,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Richie Davidson. Dr. Richie Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a pioneer in the study of how meditation impacts the brain both during meditations, but also how it changes your brain over time, what we refer to as neuroplasticity.","offset":49,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today, we discuss the incredible health and neuroplasticity benefits that come from regular meditation, including very brief meditations of just five minutes per day. Dr. Davidson also dispels many common myths about meditation. For example, contrary to what most people believe, the point of meditation is not to clear your mind or to feel inner peace during the meditation, but rather to observe your thoughts and any stress you might experience during the meditation, and in doing so, it's kind of like the final hard repetitions of resistance exercise or the burn you might feel during cardio which comes from lactate. In that sense, the stress you feel during meditation and your ability to observe it acts as a sort of lactate of the mind that in turn makes you adapt, it makes you more stress-resilient, focused, and peaceful outside of the meditation.","offset":78,"duration":44},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Dr. Davidson also explains how your brain changes during different types of meditation, such as open monitoring meditation, or eyes-open meditation, walking versus seated, and standing meditations and more. I've been doing meditation over many years, but this conversation with Dr. Richie Davidson changed my daily routine. Afterwards, I immediately started implementing a five-minute-per-day meditation of the sort that Dr. Davidson describes specifically for stress resilience, and I have to say it's had a profound impact on my levels of mental clarity, focus, and sleep, and in stress, just as he explained. In fact, it's proved to be one of the most beneficial practices I've taken on, especially on days when I wake up with tons to do, a little bit stressed or a lot stressed, and if I didn't sleep quite as well as I would have liked.","offset":122,"duration":47},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So today, you're going to hear about the incredible science of meditation, the brain and bodily changes that occur, but also how you can rewire your brain using meditation. Dr. Richie Davidson is a true pioneer in this field, being one of the first to bring brain imaging and studies of mindfulness and meditation to the West. He has of course authored some of the most impactful research papers on these topics, but also popular books, including a new book coming out later this month entitled \"Born to Flourish: How to Thrive in a Challenging World,\" which I myself look forward to reading.","offset":169,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: 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, today's episode does include sponsors.","offset":202,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And now, for my discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson. Dr. Richie Davidson, welcome.","offset":221,"duration":11},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Thank you Andrew, I'm honored to be here.","offset":232,"duration":3}],"startTime":0},{"title":"Brain States, Traits & Neuroplasticity","summary":"The discussion covers how recurring brain states lead to altered baseline traits over time, along with an overview of delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma brainwaves.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Oh, it's an honor to have you here. I am a long-time fan of your research, of what you've built at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the books you've written - we'll talk about your new book, I didn't even know you had a new book, this wasn't a book tour invite, I had seen you give a seminar at Stanford and I said great, here's my opportunity to finally get you on the podcast. But you really transformed the way that I think about not just meditation, but all states of mind and how that relates to our individual traits and how those can change over time. Today we'll talk about concept and protocols. But I'm curious how you think about states of mind generally. I think it's really important that we frame the discussion with this because we all know what sleep is, most people have heard that sleep has different components, REM sleep etc. We know what it is to be awake, stressed versus calm. But how should we think about states of mind and then once you tell us how you think about that, perhaps then we can better place this thing we call meditation into a particular bin.","offset":235,"duration":52},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So thank you first for having me Andrew, and I've just want to say I've been a long-term fan of yours so I'm really happy to be here. In terms of states of mind, I think that at the outset it's really important that we also remind listeners that there's a thing called traits too, and so we can't talk about states without also talking about traits, and we'll get to traits in a moment. But I think with regard to states, we can think of them as organized patterns of activity in the brain that have corresponding organized mental correlates if you will, or subjective correlates.","offset":287,"duration":46},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: And there are certain states that occur with regularity that are part of our biological rhythms, and so most human beings will have states of wakefulness, of deep sleep, and of REM sleep every day. And that is regulated by well-known kinds of biological rhythms. And then there are other kinds of states that are sometimes described that are states during what we normally think of as waking, although I think honestly the concept of state is often used loosely without rigorous boundary criteria for what constitutes a state and how it might be distinguished from another state.","offset":333,"duration":54},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: There are certain states which if they occur with regularity will lead to a trait. They'll lead to a shift in the baseline for the next state. There was a paper I wrote many, many years ago with my dear friend and colleague Daniel Goleman who I wrote the book Altered Traits with, and the origin of Altered Traits is really in a sentence that we wrote in a paper 20 years earlier where we said: the after is the before for the next during.","offset":387,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The after is the before for the next during. Let's drill into that for a second.","offset":421,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, so what we mean by that is that how you are after a state, say you do a little meditation practice and it leads to a state change, that state change may persist in some way and that becomes the next before for the next during, the during is the state, is the say the meditation state. And so it's a description of how a state can lead to a trait. In the domain of emotion, you might think that frequent bouts of anger, which you can think of as a state, can lead to the trait of irritability, which is sort of chronically having a low threshold. You can think of a trait in certain cases as altering the threshold for the elicitation of a state. So a trait of irritability would be a trait where you have a lowered threshold for the elicitation of anger, for example.","offset":425,"duration":64},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I love that example because I know that many people will resonate with it because so much of what we see online nowadays is designed to capture our attention by engaging negative affect - mild anger, frustration, or even outrage. There's other content online too of course, and this podcast is online after all. And many other sources of what I consider benevolent educational information. But it is so true that, you know, what we experience in one portion of our day impacts how we are in the rest of our day. And perhaps the simplest correlate for all of it for me anyway is sleep. You know, if I sleep really well for three or four nights in a row, I wake up in a certain state that certainly makes my day go differently. And the inverse is also true if I don't sleep well. I feel like we have such great nomenclature and understanding of brain activity and how that impacts emotionality for sleep. We know that REM sleep based dreams are very vivid, slow wave sleep based dreams are less vivid perhaps. We know the electrical activities associated with those different states of sleep. I'm aware of a lot less information about brain activities and clear definitions of waking states of mind. Do you mind if we talk about this for a little bit? It's been a few years since I've heard about and I don't think we've ever really talked on this podcast about, you know, alpha waves, beta waves, theta waves. Maybe just educate us a bit on some of the waking brain states that we've all experienced, perhaps are in right now, but that we just don't hear about that much anymore.","offset":489,"duration":104},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So yeah, we can talk about those oscillations of brain electrical activity, and there are broad suggestions for what kind of state they may reflect, and you know, I'll go through that, but it's also important to recognize that you can be showing alpha activity in one part of the brain and beta activity in another part of the brain simultaneously. And so it's a bit coarse to talk about these as general characteristics, but there could be times when we see predominantly one oscillation or another and so talking about generalized states in that context may be more reasonable.","offset":593,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So with that as a caveat, let me say that in humans we see a broad range of frequencies that go from approximately 1 Hz (one cycle per second) to approximately 40 Hz. And from roughly 1 to 4 Hz is delta activity, that is typically not seen during waking, it's predominant during deep sleep. And there is data that suggests that the density of delta activity or slow wave activity during deep sleep is actually diagnostic of how restorative that sleep is, which is a whole separate set of issues and super cool.","offset":638,"duration":41},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: And there are actually some really interesting highly novel strategies now using neurostimulation to actually boost slow wave activity during deep sleep which may actually help to potentiate some of the skill acquisition that we do during the day, including meditation. And we're doing some of that work now, which is actually you had asked earlier before we started about some novel new work that we're doing and that's also one of the really cool new things. So we can dive into that.","offset":679,"duration":36}],"startTime":235},{"title":"Sponsors: David Protein & Eight Sleep","summary":"Brief sponsor ad reads for David Protein bars and Eight Sleep mattress covers.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Their newest bar, the Bronze Bar, has 20 grams of protein, only 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. I have to say these are the best tasting protein bars I've ever had, and I've tried a lot of protein bars over the years. These new David bars have a marshmallow base and they're covered in chocolate coating and they're absolutely incredible. I of course eat regular whole foods - I eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, etc. But I also make it a point to eat one or two David bars per day as a snack, which makes it easy to hit my protein goal of one gram of protein per pound of body weight, and that allows me to take in the protein I need without consuming excess calories. I love all the David Bronze Bar flavors, including cookie dough, caramel chocolate, double chocolate, peanut butter chocolate, they all actually taste like candy bars. Again, they're amazing, but again they have no sugar and they have 20 grams of protein with just 150 calories. If you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com/huberman. Right now David is offering a deal where if you buy four cartons, you get the fifth carton for free. You can also find David on Amazon or in stores such as Target, Walmart, and Kroger. Again, to get the fifth carton for free, go to davidprotein.com/huberman.","offset":715,"duration":79},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure you get a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly five years now and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. The latest Eight Sleep model is the Pod 5. This is what I'm now sleeping on and I absolutely love it. It has so many incredible features. For instance, the Pod 5 has a feature called Autopilot, which is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns and then adjusts the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It'll even elevate your head if you're snoring and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com/huberman to get up to $350 off the new Pod 5. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $350.","offset":794,"duration":76}],"startTime":715},{"title":"Sleep Needs & When to Meditate","summary":"Exploring individual sleep needs, the Dalai Lama's sleep habits, and the optimal time of day to practice meditation to avoid sleepiness.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I saw a paper recently that described a, and forgive me if this was one of your papers, I don't think it was, it described a pre-sleep meditation that one could do to significantly increase the amount of growth hormone that's released once one gets to sleep. And I thought, [Dr. Richie Davidson: That wasn't ours] and I thought this makes total sense, right? I mean it's it has to do with, I forget the sentence you wrote, but that how we exit one state impacts how we encounter the next one and perhaps even our trait within that next event of life. So we'll definitely get back to this when we talk about protocols because I think that people vastly underestimate the extent to which different let's call them meditations, for lack of a better word right now, how they can impact how we show up to work, how we show up to relating, how we show up even to sleep. And it's not just about being calm so you can fall asleep. Turns out this meditation that was described boosts growth hormone in a, you know, incredible way without altering some of the other features of sleep.","offset":870,"duration":71},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: I saw that paper too, it wasn't ours, but yeah, super interesting. I agree. Yeah, so just to continue with the brain oscillations, I talked about delta. The next brain, the next faster brain rhythm is theta activity, which is roughly between 5 and 7 Hz. Theta activity is often seen during transition from wakefulness to sleep. And it's associated with these, as you were saying earlier, these liminal states. It's also been associated with certain kinds of meditation. Alpha activity is roughly between 8 and 13 cycles per second or Hz, and it's often characterized as quote relaxed wakefulness. Beta activity is typically defined as roughly 13 to roughly 20 Hz, and it's associated with activation. If there is a cognitive task that a person is engaged in, you will typically see increases in beta activity, particularly in the cortical regions that are engaged in those cognitive tasks. And then finally there's gamma activity. Gamma activity is especially interesting, we see that in meditators, long-term meditators. Gamma activity has as its peak frequency roughly 40 Hz. It is seen in a number of contexts. One of them is during what some have called insight. And insight is where I think most viewers have had the experience of working on a problem and all of a sudden they just have an aha moment and things sort of gel, they congeal, they come together. And there've been some clever experimental designs where investigators have created tasks that increase the likelihood of aha moments. They're sort of trivial in the experimental context, they're simple cognitive tasks where all of a sudden you just recognize the answer. It might be something like a crossword puzzle, and you're trying to get something, a word to fit, and suddenly you get the word. It comes in a moment and it's kind of an instantaneous recognition. And you typically would see a burst of gamma oscillations that is very short - the average duration would be around 250 milliseconds, really short. What we see in these long-term meditators is the prevalence of high amplitude gamma activity that goes on for seconds and minutes. When we first saw that by the way, and there's a lot of interesting history here, but we first reported this in 2004 with very long-term meditators where the average lifetime practice of this group was 34,000 hours. Listeners can do the arithmetic later, but 34,000 hours is a big number. And in these practitioners we saw these really high amplitude gamma oscillations that actually were visible to the naked eye, which is unusual for this kind of measurement. And in the original paper which was published in PNAS in 2004, we actually had a figure of the raw EEG from one practitioner just to illustrate how prominent it is that you can see it with the naked eye. And we've subsequently replicated that, it's been replicated by others. We've also seen that this gamma activity is found during slow wave sleep. It's actually superimposed on delta oscillations.","offset":941,"duration":225},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Is there any evidence that meditation can actually replace sleep or that it can offset some of the negative effects of sleep deprivation, mild sleep deprivation?","offset":1166,"duration":9},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: This is a great question. I think about it a lot. I don't think that the evidence is is clear on this at all. And I'll give several examples. First, the Dalai Lama, who probably meditates more than anybody I know, he has a practice of literally doing approximately four hours of meditation every day and he's been doing that for more than 60 years.","offset":1175,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm reassured by that. If you told me the Dalai Lama meditates for, you know, 40 minutes a week, I'd actually be concerned about the role of Dalai Lama, so that the title, you know.","offset":1198,"duration":10},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So that, and he very proudly says, \"I sleep nine hours a night.\" Wow, okay. Nine hours a night and he gets nine hours of sleep, that's his regular sleep, and he gets it all the time. And you know, I don't know whether he would say he needs it, but he gets nine hours a night, and he's very proud of that. Okay. That's one counter-example. You know, myself, I have done a bunch of sleep science with collaborating with some sleep researchers, and many years ago one of these people said to me, \"Richie, you really should give up an alarm clock, just don't use an alarm clock anymore.\" And I was getting at that time between five and a half and six hours a night of sleep, and I gave up the alarm clock and my average length of sleep increased by about 30 to 45 minutes. And I feel much better. Oh sure. Especially since the extra sleep tends to be toward morning, you're getting more REM sleep. But the difference for me between five and a half and six or six and a half is in terms of just subjective well-being and focus, etc. is tremendous.","offset":1208,"duration":71},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Slightly related question: if one were going to choose to meditate and had the option to do it at a sort of liminal state between let's say being awake and going to sleep at night or between sleep and what shortly after one wakes up and starts the day versus in the middle of the day or in the middle of the morning, is there any advantage to placing meditation in one of these what I'm calling liminal states or transition states between sleeping and awaking in either direction?","offset":1279,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: I would say probably for most people yes is the answer, but I think there's a lot of individual variability. In general, I would say it's useful to meditate when you're feeling most awake and less sleepy. Sleepiness is an important obstacle in meditation and there's a lot to say about that.","offset":1309,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I'm surprised to hear that. I expected you to say that one should meditate at a time when the brain is closest to sleep because you want to be in a state of mind that's less about controlling your thoughts. But then again, I could also see an argument for how meditation involves a redirect of attention. So let's actually drill into this a bit. What is the meditative state that one is seeking for quote-unquote effective meditation?","offset":1332,"duration":26}],"startTime":870},{"title":"Meditation Types & The State of Being","summary":"Dr. Davidson breaks down focused attention versus open monitoring meditation, and the value of shifting from a mode of \"doing\" to a mode of simply \"being.\"","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, so first let me say that just like there are hundreds of different kinds of sports, there are hundreds of different kinds of meditation. They don't all do the same thing, they have different effects on the brain and the body. And so I think it's really important that we not lump all of meditation together. So that's one really important thing.","offset":1358,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Can we divide it up? So for instance, if we were going to draw the parallel with exercise, and maybe we'll do that several times today. We can broadly lump exercise into cardiovascular and resistance training. There's also mobility work and then there's a bunch of other stuff. With meditation can we create some broad bins? And what are those broad bins? And then we can go into specific practices.","offset":1383,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, so yes, we can create some broad bins. So and we've done that, we've published some papers that offer typologies for classifying different meditation states. So one kind of meditation we call focused attention meditation. And focused attention meditation is where you are narrowing your aperture of awareness to a specific object. It could be an external object, it could also be an internal, it could be for example your respiration, it could be a sound. And there is a narrowing of the aperture. And this is all broadly within the category of practices that we would say are cultivating aspects of awareness. So another awareness practice is what we call open monitoring meditation. And open monitoring is where there is no specific focus but rather the aperture is broadened. And there is no specific intention to focus on any one thing or another. The invitation is to simply be aware of whatever is arising as it arises. One of the aspirations there or the invitations is not to try to get rid of thoughts because our minds and our brains are built to generate thoughts. So there's no goal if you will to get rid of thoughts, but rather to if thoughts arise, that's another object that you can be aware of. You know, we talked about sleep and sleepiness and that earlier, you can even, you can be aware of being sleepy, you can be aware of being distracted. The goal if you will is not to change or to fix anything. If you will, the invitation is to shift from a mode of doing to a mode of simply being.","offset":1408,"duration":116},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I want to talk about this thing about doing to being because the language can sound a bit mystical and vague to people. But as a long-time practitioner of Yoga Nidra, which I've talked a lot about on this podcast, there's this instruction inside of Yoga Nidra to shift from thinking and doing to being and feeling. [Dr. Richie Davidson: Exactly.] Which is beautiful language, poetic, etc. but also as neuroscientists and for the general public, I think it might be useful for us to just maybe just double click on that for one second. As a neuroscientist I think of thinking and doing as okay, doing is action, so that would the opposite of that would be stop moving the body. Thinking - well, there's a whole discussion to be had about what is thinking in neuroscience - but certainly you wouldn't want to plan, you wouldn't want to be ruminating on the past. Presumably you would want to be more in a state of sensation and perceiving what's happening right now. So is that an appropriate breakdown or is it wrong, is it insufficient? I'm not trying to score an A with the professor here, I'm just trying to figure out when we hear \"move from thinking and doing to being and feeling,\" what does that mean in terms of actionable steps that people can take?","offset":1524,"duration":86},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, so I think that the way you describe it is basically accurate with a little bit of perhaps tweak. So if when if one is invited to do this and one finds oneself ruminating or planning for example, which is supposedly an activity you're quote not supposed to be doing, you know, rather than trying to stop it, it's simply to be aware of it. Wow, I'm now planning or I'm now ruminating about something that happened in the past. What really is most important is the invitation not to change it, not to actively try to shift it, but to simply be aware. And one of the conjectures in all of this is that there's so much going on under the hood that we're typically not aware of. You know, our lives are moving at such a pace that the information that is transpiring is occurring at such a rapid rate that we are typically aware of only a small fraction of that. And this is a practice that's inviting you to simply be aware of that and and and you know, not doing is a helpful kind of thing because if we're if we're acting in the world, we obviously need to navigate and there are things we obviously need to do to be safe and to protect ourselves and so forth. And so that will engage other mechanisms.","offset":1610,"duration":101},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm interested in the possibility, or maybe you've seen this in the data, that there are at least two different types of people. People who for instance go through life feeling, doing, being, thinking and projecting things out into the world, or maybe they're quiet people and they don't project much out into the world but they're just doing their thing and they're not thinking about their thinking. They're not thinking about their doing, they're just doing. We know people like that. Then there are people who are always multi-tracking, like uh, you know, they're self-conscious, they're very self-aware. And I'm wondering whether or not a form of meditation where somebody arrives at the meditation very self-aware, like oh, there's my thought about that again, there's my thought about that again, and working perhaps on not judging it, could be beneficial. But perhaps what that person quote-unquote needs or would benefit from was just being in a state of a freedom from their self-monitoring, whereas the other person perhaps could afford to be a little more self-aware and realize, oh, you know, I'm in this mode where and see their thinking a little bit.","offset":1711,"duration":72},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Totally, and and you're naming something super important. And you know, I think that the way you characterize the second person who is more self-aware, there's more than just self-awareness in your description. There's a kind of holding back. It's not just monitoring, but there's a kind of suppression almost. It's a lot of work. [Dr. Richie Davidson: It's a lot of work.] And it kind of and it could be stifling for their creativity. Absolutely. We had my friend David Choe on the podcast, now we're friends, that was actually the first time we had met but we've become good friends and he's a brilliant artist, brilliant artist. And he talks about how the best art comes from just forgetting what anyone thinks or wants. Rick Rubin talks about this, just getting the audience out of your mind and just letting it flow through you. And I think great artists do that. And it's what we pay money to see. We want to see that form of expression. We don't want to see the self-monitoring artist. [Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah.] That's great. And I totally resonate with that. And there is a phrase in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that is called \"undistracted non-meditation.\" Undistracted non-meditation. And that's said to be the highest form of meditation, where you just drop all the crap, you know, all the techniques, all the control, all the tightness.","offset":1783,"duration":95},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: This is my goal in life. Watch out folks, if this ever happens.","offset":1878,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: But you're totally aware. You're fully aware. But there's no artifice, there's no uh, it's just complete freedom. And and there are, you know, I think there I've had the the honor of just hanging out with some people who I think are really in that as a trait. That's who they are. Rick Rubin's like that. He's a close friend and I can tell you I've spent a lot of time with Rick. And how he appears to people and his kind of mythical status, I think a lot of people his magnetism is because that's real. He can be in very, very close proximity to things, online, in person, he can see all of it. He's in real touch with it, but he's still him. It somehow it doesn't invade him in a way that changes the way he shows up. He, you know, like if if we were to paint little beams of energy - now we're really sounding woo - coming out, there's stuff coming out, there's stuff going in and they're interacting, but they're not contaminating one another. Where they interact it just makes both things better. And that's a very, very rare trait.","offset":1882,"duration":74},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, I agree. You know, there's a term that I often use which, you know, I can talk about how we can define this more technically, but for lack of a better word, I call stickiness. And it's kind of an affective hysteresis, if you will. It's where you know, you're hanging on to emotions that may not be useful. You're carrying stuff from a previous experience into a current experience and it muddles things. And you know, our emotional lives are so infused with this kind of stickiness, but with like with Rick Rubin, or with other people who are showing this, there's no stickiness. There's no stickiness. And you know, that's a kind of of freedom that I think is very much what we're talking about as the trait manifestation of these kinds of practices.","offset":1956,"duration":64},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's interesting. I think a lot of people mistakenly use drugs to try and access that state. And I also think that we have a real as a species, as a culture but also as a species, we have a real affinity to people who can embody this freedom that you're talking about. Great comedians - like when Richard Pryor was on, you're just like, I mean you maybe he had a subscript in there, maybe he was devoting like 2% of his prefrontal cortex to monitoring but it just seemed like we call it flow, but we're in their flow, they're in ours, whatever it is. There's a powerful interaction there that there seems to be very little self-monitoring from the perspective of performing arts or comedic arts.","offset":2020,"duration":53},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But for people who want to approach meditation, would it do you think it's useful at all to ask themselves before they go into the meditation, you know, are they in a are they in a mode of self-monitoring or are they in a kind of or are they feeling more free? More present to just whatever it is they're experiencing not questioning it. [Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah.] And asking them for do you think it's useful in order to get the most out of a meditation practice? I guess what I'm getting at indirectly here is most meditation practices involve shifting from doing one thing to maybe you're walking, maybe you're open eyes, but typically I think people either sit or lie down, close eyes and start focusing on their breathing and trying to quote-unquote get present. [Dr. Richie Davidson: Although the kind of practice that I most often do is actually with eyes open.] Really? Oh, well then just tell us about that. What what would be a good uh, let's use the parallel to cardio again. I would say if somebody's really out of shape and wants to get in shape, I would say the first thing is take two 20-minute walks a day. And then we could talk about getting on a exercise bike and then maybe doing some resistance you start layering things in, right? But what would be the equivalent of the 2 20-minute walks a day for meditation?","offset":2073,"duration":81}],"startTime":1358},{"title":"The 5-Minute Daily Meditation Protocol","summary":"Outlining a foundational meditation practice of just five minutes a day and its significant benefits for reducing stress, anxiety, and inflammation.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So this is the protocol question I guess. You know, I would say it's really important to start modestly and we often will ask a person, what's the minimum amount of meditation that you think you can commit to every single day and do it for 30 days consistently? [Andrew Huberman: 5 minutes.] Perfect. Whatever that number is, perfect. Start with that. And then the next question is, are you comfortable doing it formally as a seated practice or would you prefer to do it while you're walking or while you're doing another non-cognitively demanding activity? It could be commuting, it could be washing the dishes. There are lots of those kind of activities that we often do on a daily basis that you can actually intentionally use your mind in this way while you're also doing those activities. And by the way, we've shown - we actually have really good data on this - that at least for beginning meditators, it doesn't matter if you're doing it as a formal meditation practice or as an active practice. The benefits are absolutely comparable.","offset":2154,"duration":76},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And what are those benefits?","offset":2230,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So if you do it for 30 days and you do it just for 5 minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety, and symptoms of stress. We've shown that repeatedly in randomized control trials. You'll see an increase on measures of well-being or flourishing, and we can talk about what those actually mean. You can even see, just with this amount of practice, a reduction in IL-6. IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine that is important in systemic inflammation. And with just this minimal amount of practice you see a significant reduction in IL-6 over the course of 28 days, five minutes a day. We've actually seen changes in the microbiome. And we've seen changes in the brain with just this minimal amount of practice. But the important point is that you're doing it every day. When people ask me what's the best form of meditation that they should do if they're just beginning, I say the best form of meditation that you can possibly do is the form of meditation that you actually do. So figure out what that form of meditation is and then stick to it. Do it every single day.","offset":2232,"duration":81},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I love this. I actually am going to challenge our podcast audience to five minutes a day for 30 days. I'll put something out on social media. Rob, please remind me to put something out on social media to do five minutes a day for 30 days because what you describe are significant health effects. And as you described them, it made me remember this set of experiments from neuroplasticity. Do you mind if I share these? Because I have a this is a theoretical/practical question as we move into these protocols. But before we do that, what what should we call this protocol? It's the Richie Davidson five minutes a day. Richie's five meditation. I'm going to start that. Later I'll share what I've been doing but it's not even that. I've been doing 10 breaths upon waking. Ten breaths before I even get out of bed. I'm like if I can just do 10 breaths of focused meditation before I get out of bed, the whole day will go better and it and it tends to.","offset":2313,"duration":68},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: There's this wild set of findings in the neuroplasticity research that most people don't talk about because it's very inconvenient for neuroscientists. We're all familiar with the enriched environment thing where you give rats a bunch of toys or mice a bunch of toys or monkeys a bunch of toys, and the idea would be if you give kids a bunch of toys or listening to Mozart that their brains will develop more. You see more physical connections, you see improved cognition, etc. etc. A really smart guy down at University of California, Irvine, Ron Frostig, did an experiment where he said, \"Maybe this is all backwards. Maybe the normal cages they live in without all these toys are just deprived environments.\" And it turns out that's probably the case. So all this enriched environment stuff, it's not that it's BS, it's just that the experimental conditions were so deprived that what you had was most animals just deprived in a certain way, then you give them what they needed naturally and all of a sudden you saw more connections etc.","offset":2381,"duration":70},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: If we applied that to meditation - something that we think of as kind of an enriched mental environment - okay, I'm going to now do this exercise, I'm going to do five minutes a day or 10 or 20. We think of it as kind of adding exercise, but riding a treadmill, doing resistance training, I mean we used to just farm and go get water and do things. So in some sense all of that is a replacement for a quote-unquote deprived environment. So is it possible that what you're describing is not something that people developed over time, but rather something that was core to our experience as humans and that the brain needed, but that with the advent of technologies and busyness or whatever we've gotten away from? And so when you talk about doing 5 or 10 or 20 minutes of meditation a day and seeing all these health effects, what we're doing is we're actually just putting back what needed to be there in the first place. This is like the equivalent of you getting your 30 minutes more sleep because alarm clocks weren't really a thing 2,000 years ago. Does that make sense?","offset":2451,"duration":69},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: It makes sense, but you know, and I think that there's an element of truth to it, but I also think that there's some additional discussion that we should have about it and dialogue. So first of all, these practices have been around for, you know, 2,500 years or more. It's not like they've been invented in the modern era to deal with the the separation that has occurred between humans and the natural world that is a distinctly modern kind of invention. So that's one thing. The second thing is that yes, I agree with you that the characteristics that we're talking about as traits that are outcomes of these practices, there many ways to get there. And there are probably natural ways to get there that don't require meditation. And in fact, you know, when we in our early days we interviewed these practitioners around Dharamsala, India who were spending 30 years in retreat. They're called hermit monks. And you know, there you have to hike for three hours to find their cave. And we interviewed these these people. You know, they they told us, \"Well, you know, I need to meditate, but many others are just born or they're just naturally have these qualities. They don't need to meditate as much as me. I'm just a simple, you know, poor monk who really needs to do this because I'm inferior to those people,\" if you will.","offset":2520,"duration":90},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: And it's a kind of modesty but also, you know, there may be some truth to that. And so I think that that is is real. But I also think that the qualities like for example, kindness. I believe, and this is the subject of this new book that I wrote with my colleague Cortland Dahl, \"Born to Flourish,\" qualities like kindness are innate. They are part of our innate repertoire. But in order for them to be expressed, they require nurturing. And it's very similar to the way scientists talk about language. Language is innate, I think most scientists would agree with that, but we know that there have been case studies for example of feral children who are raised in the wild and they don't develop normal language. So in order for the language to develop normally it requires nurturing of some kind. And kindness is the same thing, it requires nurturing in order for it to be expressed. And similarly for other qualities that we're cultivating when we meditate. I think those qualities are innate, but they require nurturing. And and in certain cases, I think that in order for those qualities to really be expressed at high levels if you will, intentional nurturing may be required for at least the vast majority of people. There may be, you know, statistically very rare people who emerge who are like this from the start for whatever reasons.","offset":2610,"duration":90},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: reason. But for most of us, I think uh this kind of nurturing is important.","offset":2700,"duration":8}],"startTime":2154},{"title":"Sponsor: AG1","summary":"Brief sponsor ad read for the AG1 nutritional supplement.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking it, and the reason I still take it, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market.","offset":2708,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink and it tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy, and it does so by helping to fill any gaps you might have in your daily nutrition. Now, of course, everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods. I certainly do that every day.","offset":2730,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I'm often asked if you could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1, because it has just been oh-so-critical to supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance. I know this from my own experience with AG1, and I continually hear this from other people who use AG1 daily. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer.","offset":2751,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: For a limited time, AG1 is giving away six free travel packs of AG1 and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2 with your subscription. Again, that's drinkag1 with the numeral one dot com slash huberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2 with your subscription.","offset":2777,"duration":22}],"startTime":2708},{"title":"The 'Lactate' of the Mind","summary":"Discussing why sitting alone with our thoughts is difficult and how the initial anxiety of meditation acts like the beneficial \"burn\" of physical exercise.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Why do you think it is that so many people find it challenging to maintain a meditation practice? I mean, 5 minutes a day is nothing. 10 minutes a day is barely anything even for the very busiest of person. And the positive effects that you describe—and we could also layer in reduced stress, anxiety, lower resting heart rate, uh increase uh you know, um feelings of well-being and on and on—I mean, there there are just so many great studies now, including, like you said, you know, double-blind trials. I mean, it's it's incredible.","offset":2799,"duration":39},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Um, so why do you think it's so hard for people to maintain this practice of just saying, \"Okay, you know what, I'm going to just go into this atypical state. It's it's not being stimulated by anything in my environment. I have to do this internally. There aren't gyms to go to for this.\" although, I mean there are breathwork classes and things like that, but people don't tend to stick to it. That's the challenge.","offset":2838,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so I do have a theory about it, which I'll share. But before I do that, let me just say that uh I often use the analogy of brushing your teeth. When when humans first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And somehow, a very large swath of humanity has learned to brush their teeth every day. It's not part of our genome.","offset":2864,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I think most people brush their teeth so that their breath isn't bad. I think they like the idea that their teeth look cleaner and they get less um gum disease, et cetera. But all the scary stuff is actually very uh ineffective public health messaging. I mean, that's my guess.","offset":2890,"duration":23},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so actually that's quite interesting, um that that view. But getting back to your question, why do people find it so hard? So there was a study published in *Science* not too long ago by a group of social psychologists. And um it was a study of, quote, boredom. Um and what they did essentially in this study, the core of it was they took people into the lab and they said, um \"We had a little problem and you guys are going to have to wait for like 15 or 20 minutes before the experiment starts while we fix some piece of equipment.\" And they were in a waiting room.","offset":2913,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: There were magazines and books around and they also said that there's um you know, social psychologists are really good at creating these um scenarios. Um and so uh another experimenter came in and said, you know they're from another research group and they understand they have to wait a little while and we have another experiment that you can do in the meantime and it involves um receiving electric shocks. Um and of course it's completely voluntary, you are free to participate or not.","offset":2955,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And the bottom line is that these—particularly male undergraduates in the United States—preferred to shock themselves than to sit alone and not do anything. It's a robust finding. Uh people could not sit without doing something is the bottom line.","offset":2993,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And the reason, I think, is that once we actually begin to inspect our own minds, most people are frightened at the chaos that they see. One of the things we found when we look at a very in a very granular way is that when people start to meditate, we see a statistically reliable increase—increase—in anxiety in the first week.","offset":3018,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Interesting.","offset":3052,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And that's often when people say, \"I can't do this. It's making me crazy.\" Um and you know, what we tell them is that's exactly you're doing exactly the right thing, you're you know you're noticing the chaos in your own mind.","offset":3053,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: This is the soreness that comes from a new exercise program.","offset":3070,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, exactly.","offset":3073,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But people know to associate the soreness with, \"Okay, the exercise was effective, it's going to lead to an adaptation.\"","offset":3074,"duration":8},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And what we haven't changed the the narrative yet about this, but what we're trying to, where we say, \"It this is great that you're feeling anxious, it's exactly what you should be feeling.\"","offset":3082,"duration":13},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Forgive me, I'm I'm doing all this in real time, so if I if I'm slow, um there's a reason. The analogy to exercise feels ever more important now because thankfully the narrative has been embedded in people's minds that you lift objects or you cycle or run or row or swim, et cetera, to stimulate an adaptation.","offset":3095,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I think that the exercise scientists, the fields of health and wellness, whatever it is, has been very effective in getting the message out that the burn in your muscles is the thing that's going to lead to an easier run the next time, to more fitness, more longevity, more well-being, et cetera. But it's discomfort in the moment.","offset":3123,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: For a long while now, I've been trying to convince people because it's true that the agitation that one feels trying to solve a problem or read a hard uh page or passage in a book, the one that you have to return to three times that you can't wrap your head around, that that agitation is the stimulus for neuroplasticity. If you could just breeze right through it, the brain has no reason to change. It's not stimulated to change.","offset":3147,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I can after all just do the thing you're trying to do. So it becomes sort of a duh when you compare when you look at exercise or you look at um cognitive development. But somehow when it comes to meditation, maybe we can accomplish this today, I think you're doing this for us, just knowing for me, just knowing that in the first week anxiety is going to go up but that's the equivalent of lactate accumulating in the muscles, of of the burn—it's the lactate of the mind.","offset":3181,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah.","offset":3215,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Thank you.","offset":3216,"duration":0},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes.","offset":3216,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Perfect. I believe that languaging and messaging is so critical to get people to adopt practices that require this discomfort-adaptation loop that needs to be repeated over time. I love that. I knew we'd get someplace in that in that one. Thanks to you. So glad you're here. So week one, five minutes a day, expect and embrace the anxiety. Is it the thing that's going to produce the adaptation?","offset":3217,"duration":37}],"startTime":2799},{"title":"Meta-Awareness & Flow States","summary":"Defining meta-awareness and exploring how it differs from traditional flow states or \"experiential fusion,\" using the analogy of watching a movie.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I think it's contributing to it, yes. Um and you know it's also being aware of the anxiety without being hijacked by the anxiety, without being lost in the anxiety. So being able to see the anxiety um as it's arising um and that's um you know this is training in meta-awareness. Meta-awareness is super important. I actually think meta-awareness is a necessary prerequisite for any kind of human transformation, mental transformation.","offset":3254,"duration":43},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Um could you define it for us? Tell us a bit more about it. I'm very curious.","offset":3297,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so I would say meta-awareness is the faculty of knowing what our minds are doing. And to some listeners that may sound a little strange, but how many of you have had the experience of reading a book where you might be reading each word on a page and you read one page, a second page, and after a few minutes you have no idea what you've just read? Your mind is lost, it's somewhere else.","offset":3301,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But then you wake up. The moment you wake up is a moment of meta-awareness. And it turns out that that's a trainable skill. And that is one of the really important prerequisites um for all other forms of training, of mental training.","offset":3334,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Do we know where this meta-awareness resides in the brain? Is it prefrontal cortex?","offset":3364,"duration":6},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know, it's a network of um prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, um insula, um uh I think those are all structures that are participating in meta-awareness.","offset":3370,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's interesting because I feel like as we were discussing earlier, people crave forgetting about themselves and just being in experience, it's just such a powerfully and I think positive, seductive thing. I often think about, you know like I at a party, dancing, like like people who can just dance and enjoy themselves versus people who are self-conscious about how they're dancing. Even people who are good at dancing.","offset":3386,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You can be meta-aware without being awkwardly self-conscious, if you will. So um you know, you talked earlier about flow. Uh I didn't jump in then, but flow can occur with or without meta-awareness.","offset":3419,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Really?","offset":3437,"duration":0},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes. Um a lot of flow, I think, occurs without meta-awareness. So you know, Csikszentmihalyi who first studied flow, he studied rock climbers. And like a rock climber who is, I mean think about this, why do people do stuff like rock climbing? I think that the reason why people do stuff like that is to produce this state of flow where um most of those kinds of states of flow I think are states of flow without meta-awareness, where you're completely absorbed in the activity.","offset":3437,"duration":48},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And for a rock climber, if there's even a momentary lapse in attention, it could be potentially lethal. Uh and so by arranging one's physical environment in that way, you are basically forcing uh the default mode to be suppressed. Uh and the default mode is a mode that we know is associated with a lot of self-referential thought. And self-referential thought often is anxiety-provoking.","offset":3485,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um and so this is a way to transiently suppress the default mode. But flow can also occur with meta-awareness. Um and so and it doesn't diminish the quality of the flow. And one analogy that we can use is in a movie theater. I mean viewers have had the experience of being in a movie theater and I'm sure people have had the experience of being in a movie theater where you're so engrossed in the movie that you may actually you're not aware that you're in a theater and you may not be even aware that you're watching a movie. You're so you are totally absorbed in the plot.","offset":3525,"duration":56},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And we've actually come up with a term to define that and we call it \"experiential fusion\" where you're fused with the experience. And that is a kind of the analogous to flow without meta-awareness. But imagine being in the movie theater where your your attention is riveted and there's absolutely no lapse in attention, but in the kind of penumbra of awareness, you are aware you're in a movie theater, you're aware that you're watching a movie, but that doesn't diminish the quality of your attention.","offset":3581,"duration":55}],"startTime":3254},{"title":"Creativity & Capturing the Mind's Chaos","summary":"How paying attention to the mind's chaotic thoughts can lead to creative insights, and the benefit of capturing those ideas by writing them down.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I want to uh ask about this thing about chaos, noticing the chaos of one's mind, because you said that sort sits at the seat of the anxiety that people will feel when they first start to meditate. Now everyone knows in the Richie meditation of push through the first week, expect the the lactate of the mind, push through it. I love that so much, thank you.","offset":3636,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The idea that the mind is chaotic and getting comfortable with that and not reacting to it, not feeling like we have to get away from it, um we've heard this before, but I think it's somewhat of a novel concept to me to think that a goal of meditation is to be able to see that and sit with it, not necessarily eradicate it. You know I think you said you know the Dalai Lama. I think for most of us we see the Dalai Lama and other monks in robes and you said he sleeps nine hours per night and he's meditating four hours per day and we think, \"All right, he looks pretty blissed out and that's great for them.\"","offset":3666,"duration":45},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Do you think he has chaos in his mind? Is the idea that extreme meditators or even, you know well-practitioned meditators are free of the chaos or that they're just comfortable with the chaos?","offset":3711,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I would say that um it's a developmental process that changes longitudinally. So initially there's a lot of chaos and I think it gradually subsides. I don't think it it's like a step function. I think it really occurs gradually over time and the chaos just sort of naturally diminishes.","offset":3727,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um but that's a long-term process. Uh and I think for most of us, uh there's always going to be some chaos, uh but part of the chaos also is I think a source of creativity. And you know, when we talk about meta-awareness and awareness of all that's going on in our mind, you know I often give my students the the permission to I tell even if they're not meditators, to just spend a couple hours a week inspecting your mind. Just inspect your mind.","offset":3755,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Pay attention to what's going on in your mind. Don't do stuff outside, but and and if you come up with some interesting thought, write a little note to yourself as you're doing this, you know not a lot of words, but just a note to remind you when you're finished with this session. Um and my I have the conviction that there's a lot of creative work that humans do on a regular basis that's kind of like dreams.","offset":3799,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Most people don't remember their dreams, but they occur reliably. And I think that there's a lot of creative thought that occurs on a regular basis but we just don't pay attention to it and we we forget it just like we forget our dreams. But if we have the invitation to really inspect our mind in that way, I think um this chaos actually uh often can contain the seat of real creative insight that potentially could be valuable.","offset":3832,"duration":49},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I do too. I mean, I wake up every morning with at least one idea from the transition from sleep to waking. Sometimes it's from a dream. I often will record my dreams as voice memos. After I die, if somebody ever finds these voice memos, they're they're so crazy. Every once in a while I'll try and listen to one, I'm like, \"This is crazy,\" but I don't want to forget things and sometimes I don't want to wake up and turn the lights on and I'll go back to sleep.","offset":3881,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So I'll just record something in the voice memo, sometimes write it down. I think there's so much learning to be had from what's coming up from the unconscious mind in dreams, but also just having a mode of capture during the day. Some way to just capture the things that spring to mind. The great Joe Strummer from The Clash, he said this, he said you know, if you are walking along and an idea comes to mind, you have to write it down because you think you'll remember it later but you will remember it in a form that is not nearly as potent.","offset":3907,"duration":35},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: He said something like that, that this is the mind throwing you ideas and and you got to you have to capture them.","offset":3942,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I love that. I think it's it's wise advice.","offset":3949,"duration":5},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Friends of mine who are songwriters, poets, they they do this all the time. They're constantly writing things down that they may or may not develop something from, but they understand that there's information being like thrown up to the surface for them. And if you don't write it down or capture it in some other way, it's it goes, it's evanescent.","offset":3954,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I actually have—um I mean this may seem contrary to um views of how meditation is done—but when I meditate every morning, I actually have a a little notepad by my cushion and occasionally, I don't do this every session, but maybe twice a week, um I'll actually write down something during the meditation, one or two words just to remind me, because something comes up in my practice, um maybe an idea and I I want to remember it and I know also that I won't remember it after uh in in the same richness, and so I'll just jot jot it down and then go back to my practice.","offset":3976,"duration":51}],"startTime":3636},{"title":"Contagious Flourishing & Meditation for Kids","summary":"Highlighting a mindfulness curriculum for children and a study demonstrating that teachers trained in well-being positively impact their students' math scores.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Is meditation something that kids can do and benefit from? Has that been studied in a formal way?","offset":4027,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes, it's been studied. Um we actually developed a um what we've called a a \"mindfulness-based kindness curriculum\" for preschool kids.","offset":4034,"duration":12},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Preschool?","offset":4046,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Preschool. And we've actually published a randomized control trial in a public school system of this curriculum. And the curriculum is available freely on our website in both English and Spanish. So if any teachers are out there or you know teachers and want to use it, please please feel free to to download it and and see how it is.","offset":4047,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But yeah, so it looks very different. So for example, what we do with a three-year-old, one of the exercises that they love is we ring a bell in a classroom and we have them listen, tell them, \"Listen to this sound and as soon as you no longer hear sound, raise your hand.\" And it's it's amazing to see this because you can get 25 three- and four-year-olds sitting perfectly still for around 10 seconds.","offset":4076,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But you know, they could taste it. There's a palpable, you know sense of of quiet in that 10 seconds and then they all raise their hand excitedly. But they can really taste it. And so I I do think it's possible. The other thing is—and this is something really important—there's something we've discovered empirically recently, which is that flourishing is infectious. It's contagious. Flourishing is contagious.","offset":4114,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You explained what that means and how you study that?","offset":4147,"duration":5},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so um uh in the example of you asked about meditating in kids and the reason I'm bringing up in this context is one of the best things I can think a parent can do for a kid is not to have the kid meditate, but meditate yourself. And just be with the child and be fully present, be connected, and really show up in that way and you will osmotically transmit through your demeanor um and your your interaction, you'll transmit these qualities to the child in a completely implicit way.","offset":4152,"duration":52},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And that's what we mean when we say flourishing is contagious. But how we studied it—so let me actually share one of the this is a finding that we're super excited about and it's not yet published, but it's um the paper is just under review. So one of the things we're deeply interested in these days is how can we scale human flourishing? So we're doing this kind of sector by sector.","offset":4204,"duration":41},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And one sector that we're doing a lot of work with is educators. And educators around the world and particularly in the US—but we've done this in in Mexico too, so it's not just US-based—but they're super stressed, they're not well-paid, and all of that. Um uh so we did a study with public school educators in Louisville, Kentucky. And um there are many reasons why we went to Louisville, but Louisville is a complicated school system, it's diverse, there are a lot of problems in it, and um it's a big urban school district, the Jefferson County Public School District in Louisville.","offset":4245,"duration":57},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And we did a randomized control trial with 832 educators in Louisville. And we had them use our Healthy Minds program, which is uh uh a um a digital offering which is freely available as the Healthy Minds program, uh where we had them cultivate four key pillars of well-being: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. We can take a deeper dive into each of those after.","offset":4302,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But they practiced for around five minutes a day. The average was a little less than five minutes a day over the course of 28 days. And we measured standard outcomes like depression and anxiety and stress and measures of flourishing, and we find what we found in other studies, which is that depression and anxiety and stress went down and measures of well-being and flourishing went up.","offset":4334,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But the real kicker is that we by prior agreement had access to the um student-level data in the school system. So we were able to look at the performance of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training, and we compared them to students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to a control group. The the students had no idea that there was any research going on.","offset":4364,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And what we found is that on standardized tests—this is in middle school children and the sample size for these students was around 13,000—uh and what we found is that the math standardized math scores of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training was significantly greater than the scores of the students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to the control group.","offset":4408,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Same curriculum.","offset":4438,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Identical.","offset":4439,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So what do you think is being transmitted there? Is it that the teachers are calmer, therefore the students are calmer? Is it that the teachers are calmer, therefore they're clearer so the students are I mean, there are a lot of variables. And we don't need to isolate them. I mean, this isn't um we're not trying to do um you know, pharmacology here. Uh but what do you think could be going on?","offset":4441,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I think everything you said is likely to be going on. I think the students are the teachers are are likely calmer, they're more connected. Uh the and what we know is that, you know it was interesting because we looked at reading scores and the the data for the standardized reading measure was in the same direction, but it wasn't as robust. The the biggest signal was in math scores.","offset":4463,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And we know that math performance is degraded by stress more than reading performance uh uh in this age group. And so it you know, could be as something as simple as the kids who were taught by teachers that went through the well-being training are simply calmer and less stressed when they take the exam. Uh and so their true competence is more likely to be reflected in the test uh and not have it degraded by this kind of added stress and anxiety.","offset":4496,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um so this is, you know an illustration that flourishing is contagious in this way.","offset":4533,"duration":10}],"startTime":4027},{"title":"Sponsor: Joovv","summary":"Brief sponsor ad read for Joovv red light therapy devices.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors: Joovv. Joovv makes medical-grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology and our health. Now, in addition to sunlight, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near-infrared, and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health.","offset":4543,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improvements in vision. Nowadays there are a lot of red light devices out there. But what sets Joovv lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use the specific wavelengths of red light, near-infrared, and infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations.","offset":4576,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Personally, I use the Joovv whole-body panel about three to four times a week, usually for about 10 to 20 minutes per session, and I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you would like to try Joovv, they're offering up to $400 off select products for listeners of this podcast. To learn more, visit Joovv, spelled J-O-O-V-V dot com slash huberman. Again, that's J-O-O-V-V dot com slash huberman.","offset":4605,"duration":30}],"startTime":4543},{"title":"Escaping Stimulus-Response","summary":"Examining how taking time out of the daily stimulus-response cycle improves overall effectiveness and connects us to a deeper sense of spiritual meaning.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's so interesting. And again, there I can think of so many different variables that could be at play. Um we did an episode—one of our most popular episodes of ever—uh with a guy named James Hollis. Are you familiar with James Hollis?","offset":4635,"duration":19},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: No.","offset":4654,"duration":0},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: He's a probably by now 85-year-old Jungian analyst.","offset":4654,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Okay.","offset":4661,"duration":0},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Brilliant guy. He wrote he's written a number of of books, *The Eden Project*, which is about um relationships and relating, *Under Saturn's Shadow* on the um about trauma and healing, just just an incredible soul, incredible human, incredible educator. And um I'm not alone in in believing that, just spectacular. And I said, you know he's a Jungian analyst, so I said, \"You know like what's the key to a really good life, like but can we talk protocols?\"","offset":4661,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And he said something really interesting that I think will resonate uh with what you're saying and perhaps shed some light on what happened with these students and flourishing in general. He said, \"It's so important that we wake up each day and we suit up and we show up and we work. In school, in relationships, in life.\" He said, \"But it's also just as important that we take a short amount of time every day and get out of stimulus and response.\"","offset":4698,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Because by getting out of stimulus and response—and I'm not being nearly as eloquent as Hollis—we come to know ourselves in a certain way that lets ourselves show up so much more effectively for everything else. And so maybe, just maybe what these teachers achieved is by sitting in this anxiety—because now I'm thinking about the lactate of the mind—they're doing a practice which lets them experience the anxiety, not respond to it.","offset":4734,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: They're getting out of stimulus and response.","offset":4763,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Exactly.","offset":4766,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And perhaps in the classroom they're able to teach more. Teach more effectively because they're not paying attention to the things that don't matter. Mm-hmm. Or maybe it's because they're also paying attention to the things that do matter. They're signal-to-noise is higher, so to speak. Anyway, I couldn't help but reference the Hollis thing because to not do that would would be remiss. But also, you know here's a guy who's saying you got to go to work each day, this is essential to building a good life and you have to do all these things.","offset":4767,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And he's also saying, \"But getting out of stimulus response is what makes you effective in everything\" and of course improves your self-understanding. And I think what you're saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I think you're saying when you talk about meditation is that it's a way of getting out of stimulus and response.","offset":4800,"duration":19},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great analogy, yeah.","offset":4819,"duration":4},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Well, he deserves all the credit for all of that, um you deserve all the credit for running all these experiments because I feel like what's been so frustrating over the years has been to hear how powerful meditation is but that for people in the West, um the word meditation brings up ideas of mysticism and um ancient things and people think, \"Well that's not for me. That's not going to benefit me now in this world.\" But I would argue we need it even more so now.","offset":4823,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I agree. I think that um and I think that the divisiveness and polarization that is just eating away at our society is um underscores the the critical importance of this. I think it's needed now more than ever before in human history. And I think that it will, you know with just modest amounts of practice and and one of the other um you know kind of slogans that we think is really important is that it's easier than you think.","offset":4863,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: It really is. It it 5 minutes a day has a measurable impact. And so I think that if we really take this to heart, uh you know if everyone practiced for 5 minutes a day, I have the strong conviction that this world would really be a different place.","offset":4898,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Oh, absolutely. I I think the challenge is convincing people and and that's you know, you're doing it, we're trying to do that little by little. I mean, for a zero-cost tool, it's it's just outsized positive effects. I think most people come to the table because it will lower their blood pressure, they hear that it will reduce their stress, maybe make them more effective, make them smarter, sleep better.","offset":4920,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But there are also the higher-order effects um that people talk about, being gaining some understanding of consciousness and what it may or may not be. When do those effects tend to arise? Uh if they ever do? Or does is it true that by meditating, by getting out of the stimulus and response and just watching one's thoughts and not responding to them and just non-judgment, that we can actually gain some fundamental insight into how our minds work?","offset":4954,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I do think that that's possible and I think that it does occur and um you know I think that um if we're really good scientists, um there there is um an important element of humility uh as we approach this uh that underscores really how little we know. Um and I think that these kinds of practices help us tap into something that I think is part of what it means to be a human being um and and part of it is honestly, um you know we can use the words \"spiritual\" in some way.","offset":4988,"duration":52},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um and uh or \"transcendent\" and by that I mean something connected to something larger than oneself. And I know that this is getting into a little bit of woo territory um and uh uh but people do have a taste of this and it helps to give their life more meaning and and to infuse it with a kind of purpose that um I think is really beneficial.","offset":5040,"duration":46}],"startTime":4635},{"title":"Meditation and the Fear of Death","summary":"Dr. Davidson shares how decades of meditation practice and living intentionally have gradually eliminated his fear of mortality.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I wonder—and I'd love your thoughts on this—whether by doing meditation and seeing that the mind is chaotic and that it's difficult to control and that perhaps the best thing we can do is just observe and not respond to it but not try and control it, that inevitably in one's meditation practice that the reality surfaces that we're all going to die. And I think for a lot of people the fear of death is terrifying.","offset":5086,"duration":41},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I mean, it's inevitable and it's terrifying. And I do sometimes feel that a lot of the the stuff in the world that we're offered, whether or not it's drugs or alcohol or excessive work or whatever, just all the stuff is um that a deeper layer of that offering is that it it distracts us from that reality. Because it's terrifying, right? I don't most any healthy person doesn't want to die.","offset":5127,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Although I don't think it's terrifying for all people and I think that it's this is actually one of the dimensions that is shifted by long-term meditation practice unquestionably.","offset":5162,"duration":12},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Is it shifted because people come to some understanding of energy and the fact that they will likely become part of something else, or do you think it's that they can just accept the reality that we're here then we're not here?","offset":5174,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I think it's more the latter and also, um imagine that this is the last day we're living, right now.","offset":5190,"duration":9},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Friday the 13th, of all days.","offset":5199,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Of all days, it happens to be Friday the 13th. Uh and you know, are we um are we showing up in a way that feels right for us? Um and making the most of our lives and not squandering the opportunity that we have? And if we can live every day in that way, uh it really will change, I think, how we approach our mortality.","offset":5201,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And I know for me personally, I mean we I'm not well, it I I feel very differently about dying today than I did like 15 years ago. It's that that's one dimension where there's been a dramatic shift.","offset":5229,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Would you mind elaborating on that? How so? How did you feel about it 15, 20 years ago?","offset":5250,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I was terrified, you know in the same way. I, you know had a family, I have two kids, I have all these, you know responsibilities and um I reflect on this. I really do. And um you know if I died today, I would feel like I've lived a very fulfilling life. Um and uh uh and I'm fine with that.","offset":5254,"duration":39},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That's a great thing to be able to say. That's a great thing to be able to say. I don't think most people would probably be able to say the same wholeheartedly. Yeah. And you attribute some of that sense to meditation?","offset":5293,"duration":15}],"startTime":5086},{"title":"Consistency, Discipline & Social Zeitgebers","summary":"Dr. Davidson details his personal daily practice and suggests tying meditation to daily habits (social zeitgebers) to effortlessly build consistent discipline.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Definitely, but it's been gradual. You know I've been at this my I my very first meditation retreat was in 1974. Um and I've been practicing daily ever since.","offset":5308,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Every single day?","offset":5324,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Well, I may have missed, you know one or two days a year when I had a 6 a.m. flight, but other than that, yes.","offset":5326,"duration":8},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And what has your practice um your most consistent practice been?","offset":5334,"duration":6},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know my practice has changed many times over these the course of these years and very different traditions in which I've practiced um so.","offset":5340,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: What about time of day? Is it typically morning?","offset":5350,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Always been morning for me.","offset":5354,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You get up, you use the bathroom, have a drink of water and start, or you go right into it?","offset":5355,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: No, I get up um and I make myself these days a cup of strong black tea um and I drink the tea, which takes maybe 15 minutes, um and then I meditate.","offset":5359,"duration":13},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Got it. Do you set a timer or a chime?","offset":5372,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I do set a timer. And you know, I meditate at various lengths, but I my modal time sitting is about 45 minutes a day. Um sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter but usually around 45 minutes a day. And maybe three or four days a week I do a really short practice at night, maybe 5 minutes before I go to sleep.","offset":5374,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Since everyone that takes on the 5-minute-a-day 30-day meditation challenge will do it, um once they reach 30 days, would does it make sense to update that to a longer meditation, or would you just suggest that people stay with that as long as possible?","offset":5410,"duration":18},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: What I would suggest is check in with yourself um and see how you're feeling about it and um how it's resonating with you and um uh and if you feel like you can't really do much more, just stick with 5 minutes a day and keep doing that. The important thing is to stick with a daily practice. And one of the things that um we talk about in this new book, *Born to Flourish*, is a lot of people have a really difficult time coming up with a being able to do this daily.","offset":5428,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And one of the things that we talk about based on our finding that it doesn't matter, at least in the early stages, whether you're meditating uh as a formal practice or doing it while doing other activities of daily living that are not demanding, like walking or commuting, you tie this to regular activities that you do every day, whatever those activities are. And we talk about this idea of social zeitgebers.","offset":5464,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: A zeitgeber, as you know, uh is um an environmental event, a signal um that is that marks a in the classical literature a biological rhythm like um light is a zeitgeber um to set our biological rhythms. But we in the modern world we have social zeitgebers that are human-created zeitgebers. So eating, for example, is a zeitgeber.","offset":5500,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um we eat typically at roughly similar times every day, at least most people. And that's an opportunity. Uh you do that every day, you can pair a little practice with that. Um and you know one of the practices that you can do, which I do every time I eat, virtually, unless I'm eating with someone and it's awkward. Um but I do it at home, is do a little appreciation practice. Spend just a um 30 to to 90 seconds reflecting on all the people it took to have food on your plate.","offset":5529,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um and it also gives you a sense of interdependence. And when I sit down, you know and have my breakfast, uh it's a cue for me. It's a social zeitgeber. I do my appreciation practice every single time. Um and then you there are crazy things you can do like I have a cat at home. Um I'm the one who scoops the litter every night. I actually do that as a practice.","offset":5565,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um uh and it it literally takes no extra time. I do it while I'm doing the the scooping of the litter. But I I honestly do this in in a very authentic genuine way. I reflect on, \"You know the cat really appreciates this, my wife appreciates this.\"","offset":5594,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I bet.","offset":5614,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um \"People who go into the room with the cat litter appreciate that it's clean and scooped on a regular basis.\" And you know, I just reflect on that intentionally. Um it doesn't take much, it's easier than you think.","offset":5615,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, I don't want to um contort the message you're you're offering because it's a powerful one about bringing awareness to the things that we have to do anyway and allowing that to make us more effective and happier and more present. But there's also this idea around disciplines, and the word discipline gets is kind of heavy, nobody really likes it because we got disciplined or something.","offset":5633,"duration":32},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But uh I used to pride myself on working longer hours than everyone and and as the years have gone on, I pride myself in just uh consistency is my superpower. I may not show up with the most intensity every time, although sometimes, but intensity uh kind of waxes and wanes. But there's something about just showing up anyway and just doing it anyway that is so powerful. And I I sometimes wonder whether or not the mind is just it's our foe until we embrace that piece. It's kind of a little bit of what you're saying.","offset":5665,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah. And I love the consistency uh theme and also the discipline. And yes, I think you're naming something real and important. And there's a delicate calculus uh that ranges between kind of um letting go and discipline. And each person, I think, falls at a different point in this continuum. Uh and what works for one person may not work for for another.","offset":5710,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know, with regard to meditation, I always say that what's best for one person isn't necessarily what's best for others and we have to discover what works for us. Um you know what we do know is that in in terms of meditation that consistency is really important.","offset":5746,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I was never a particularly good athlete or bad athlete, but I've just been really consistent at exercise and I mean I play fewer sports these days than than I did, but just the continuing to show up uh allows you to be the person among your peers—not that it's competitive where you go everyone else seems to have quit and they're talking about how much this hurts and that hurts and you're like and all you really had to do was just kind of keep keep going.","offset":5768,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And I sometimes think that the people that are max intensity and they you know it's like gold medal or bust, they're always the ones or often the ones that we don't hear from anymore, they're like gone. Uh burn out. Yeah. So I love the examples of the Dalai Lama and, you know the Michael Jordans of every domain. But I don't know, I mean I'm more interested in um being the person that at 50, 60 I mean, you're in your mid-70s, you look incredible, you're super vital, cognitively sharp, you're in shape, you're excited about life, you're not afraid of death, clearly you're onto something, you know.","offset":5791,"duration":40},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So and I doubt it's just the black tea. I'm guessing it's to some extent, I mean you have all the other aspects of your life, but this consistency of meditation practice.","offset":5831,"duration":10},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, no I think it's been super important. I do think that the discipline that you're talking about is really important and it is part of it. Uh uh but again, I think we need to find the right balance for each person and initially it's really important to um have people embrace invite them to taste this with the lowest possible friction so that they can really uh experience the benefit and then it can gradually progress and and they can, you know um harness some discipline which eventually will be important.","offset":5841,"duration":52}],"startTime":5308},{"title":"Digital Hygiene & The 'No-Go' Response","summary":"Addressing the cognitive cost of smartphones and how practicing the \"no-go\" impulse by restricting phone use can dramatically improve focus.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'd like to talk about online culture and social media just briefly because I don't want to demonize it...","offset":5893,"duration":9},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so, um, these are, um, really complicated issues. I think that, um, you know, I certainly don't, um, in any way pretend to have the answer, but I do think that, um, we need to take digital hygiene seriously. And we need to figure out ways of, as part of standard school curricula, of educating our youth in how to change their relationship or how to be, to say it a different way, how to be in healthy relationship with their digital devices and the products and features that are available on those devices.","offset":5902,"duration":57},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, I have the conviction that it's a trainable skill. Um, but we need particularly in youth to start early before they get their first phone.","offset":5959,"duration":15},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Is there any evidence that meditation because it allows somebody to sit with the lactate of the mind can also, um, afford someone less impulsivity and, um, sort of being less prone to getting hooked by the chaos of the world around them?","offset":5974,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I, um, you know, I don't think there's any hard data on that, but I think it's a great question. I think it's actually empirically tractable. And I think it's really worth studying. My conviction is yes.","offset":5996,"duration":19},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, I think it's, um, it would be helpful, but the data don't exist.","offset":6015,"duration":9},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: What would an experiment like that look like? I feel like we should run that experiment.","offset":6024,"duration":6},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: That would be cool, I'd love to collaborate.","offset":6030,"duration":3},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I feel like there's got to be established in-lab measures of impulsivity.","offset":6033,"duration":5},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, there are good measures of impulsivity. And actually with impulsivity, um, there, there are measures that go beyond self-report measures. They are behavioral measures of impulsivity, which may have more validity. And so it would be extremely interesting and, you know, with, um, device use and with, with a person's consent you can actually get backend data so you don't rely on self-report so it can be really, um, robust kind of evidence.","offset":6038,"duration":42},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The word discipline comes to mind again and I think so many people when they hear discipline they think about doing certain things. Waking up at five, exercising, meditating, eating clean, etc. But to me the most interesting aspect of discipline are the don't dos. It's all the stuff you don't do.","offset":6080,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You know we're in the Winter Olympics now and I haven't been watching it, I like the Summer Olympics, but um, inevitably when they do the Olympics they interview the people who win gold medals or they'll do a day in the life of and they'll say you know um, they wake up at 5 a.m. and then they train. And they always want to say what do they eat? You know they go well I have four eggs and my oatmeal or whatever it is. Um, what they really need to show is all the things they don't eat. Right because sure what they eat is interesting perhaps, but far more relevant to their performance is all the things they don't eat.","offset":6108,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah. It's all the things they're not doing. And of course that makes for much less entertaining um, shows, so they don't do that. But I feel like the, the training that would be so valuable is the, to train up the no-go response.","offset":6145,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Absolutely. One of the things in my own life that I'm very aware of is an apropos not doing is not taking out my phone. Um, and I'm very intentionally aware of that. I actually do a little practice of feeling my phone in my pocket. And I really, um, will not take it out unless I actually need it.","offset":6161,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, I remind people when I have meetings at our center, you know, often it's just the cultural habit particularly with young people, you know, they put their phone on the table. And there are data showing that even if you have all your notifications turned off the simple presence of the device is enough to, um, impair the interaction in some way to have a discernable impact.","offset":6192,"duration":44},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And cognitive ability. There's this really, I don't know if you've seen this study, it's pretty cool. They um, they looked at cognitive performance in people that had the phone upside down on the table, in their backpack beneath their chair, or in a different room. And only by having it in a different room, um, do you see the, the normal level of cognitive focus, not even an improvement.","offset":6236,"duration":31},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It turns out that people can focus just as well, it's really interesting, they focus just as well if the phone is on the table or under, um, their chair in their backpack. But that the brain is using additional resources to keep suppressing the thought about the phone. So their cognitive performance is diminished. So the phone is really a cognitive detractor under those conditions.","offset":6267,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Um, and I think about that a lot. It's also why I have a lockbox for my phone. I keep it in a separate room. It's one of the reasons I love this podcast more and more with every passing week, because no phones in here, um, we can really drop into things. Yeah, I think that, um, training the no-go response, having that level of discipline, is the superpower.","offset":6300,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah. All the other stuff, the to-dos, I mean yeah it's, it's important. Can't just not do anything obviously. But we focus so much on what to take, what to do. People always want to know what should I take? You know what should I do? What's the ideal workout routine? What's the... and here we have this five minute a day meditation, great. But it's also all the things you're not doing when you can sit for five minutes. You're not responding to the impulse to get up.","offset":6326,"duration":38}],"startTime":5893},{"title":"Pain, Retreats & Emotional Reactivity","summary":"Exploring how meditation alters the secondary emotional response to physical pain, especially after intense retreat practice.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yes. The discomfort of body that can come up during meditation. A pain in the back, um, your hip getting tight. Should we look at those as an opportunity to train up the mind and our ability to not go into stimulus response or should we get comfortable?","offset":6364,"duration":21},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: It's a great question. And, um, uh, you know my very first meditation retreat in 1974 that I just went into this cold and it was like meditation boot camp. Uh, it was a kind of retreat where we were practicing for 16 hours a day and my body was on fire. I, it was so painful physically.","offset":6385,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, that was, you know, the most predominant experience that I had, just intense, intense physical pain. And then in this style of practice after the third day you had to make a vow that you're not going to move during each hour-long session. So the meditation sessions were hour-long and you had to make a vow that you're not going to move.","offset":6418,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Man the pain was so intense, the physical pain. And you know, eventually um, after the like the fourth day there's a kind of breakthrough that most people have, um, which is this remarkable kind of experiential insight where you directly look at the pain and you see that it's not exactly what it's cracked up to be and it's actually much more differentiated. And you begin to see all of its constituents. And that's when there's a kind of relief.","offset":6453,"duration":49},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: The other thing to say is that we've done imaging work with physical pain and meditation. Um, it's um, one of the most robust kind of probes that you can use to interrogate the quality of the practice and also the longer term trait effects if you will.","offset":6502,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, and I liken it by the way, you know when you go to a cardiologist you'll often do a cardiac stress test, um, and so one of the best ways to probe the integrity of a system is by challenging it. Um, um, and not just looking at it at baseline so to speak. And it's true of the mind and the brain. And one of the best challenges is physical pain.","offset":6544,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So we've done work where we've primarily used heat, um, as a um, a painful stimulus because it can be delivered very precisely and very safely. Um, in imaging data there is a signature that is quite specifically tied to the physical pain itself and that there's another signature that is associated with the emotional reaction to the pain.","offset":6573,"duration":38},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The interpretation of it.","offset":6611,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: The interpretation.","offset":6612,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Got it.","offset":6613,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And when we subjectively experience distress in response to pain it's actually mostly contributed by the secondary response. That is the emotional response to the initial noxious stimulus itself. And that is the set of neural changes that we most dramatically see transformed by meditation, uh, as a trait effect.","offset":6614,"duration":48},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, and it's um, particularly in this particular and this is published data, we've we this was done with long-term meditation practitioners and we show that actually it's specifically retreat practice. Um, so we can have two people who are matched on the total number of hours that they've practiced in a lifetime where in one person it is much more um, during retreat compared to another person. And it's specifically retreat practice where you're doing more intensive practice that contributes to the transformation of this emotional pain signature.","offset":6662,"duration":61},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: What would a good retreat practice look like? It would be presumably a course. But I guess if somebody didn't have the resources they could take a weekend and what does that look like? They're meditating a couple hours a day?","offset":6723,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: More than a couple hours a day.","offset":6739,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Okay, so it would be kind of hard to self-direct.","offset":6741,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, although there are a lot of online resources um, for this. And actually for a person who is unable for whatever reason to go physically to retreat there are online resources. Um, but of course, you know, I think it's probably more beneficial to do it in person, um, because you're more likely to comply with the, uh, with the expectations of like not checking your phone and things of that sort and being silent.","offset":6745,"duration":42},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm always impressed by people that can sort of self-direct so much discipline. Um, it's pretty cool. I have rules in my house like I have a study area in my basement where I draw and prepare podcasts and I I don't allow phones down there. Mine or anyone else's.","offset":6787,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: That's wonderful, I love that.","offset":6809,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's just an electronic free zone. I also now um, I noticed I I like working out, it's a pleasure for me. Um, and I noticed that my workouts would take much longer if I brought my phone in. So now I allow myself to turn on an album or two and leave the phone outside, but there's no phones allowed there either. And now I'm thinking about also making that the rule for the loft, for the bedroom. Like no phones.","offset":6810,"duration":32},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So there's fewer and fewer areas where where things are allowed. But I think unless you set real constraints that it just starts to permeate everywhere. And I don't think I'm alone in that. And I grew up in Silicon Valley so I'm not anti-technology. I just want to have the richest experience of life possible. And so I just find that harder and harder to do when it's like inviting all these other things and people into the room when you when you have a phone there.","offset":6842,"duration":53},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Well I love those examples and I think uh you know you are setting an inspiring example for others. Um, and I think uh things have gotten so bad with uh the deleterious impact of technology that uh you know we've we've been led to to do those kinds of things which I think are so important and I think the more examples of that the better.","offset":6895,"duration":39},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah I feel like um it took us a while to um become the country with such um excessively high rates of obesity that we finally went oh my goodness, you know and we need to do something about this. So better eating, exercise of course critical, the GLP drugs have been, I believe have been very helpful for a lot of people. I don't I would hope people first embrace lifestyle tools and then and in any case embrace lifestyle tools.","offset":6934,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I don't think we're going to have the so-called Ozempic for uh addiction to devices. There isn't going to be something to come along and knock us off that um place. I think it just requires a lot of self-control. But I can promise everyone that the your workouts get way better, way better. Your work gets way better. I actually think that for the younger generation it's become easier than ever to excel simply by not doing a lot of the things that other people around you are doing.","offset":6970,"duration":61},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Totally, totally.","offset":7031,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Totally. You know it used to be you know how do I succeed? How do I succeed? And the joking these days, the shortest, um, you know, how to become the best at your craft book is going to be by turning off your phone 22 hours a day. You will become best in class. I I know it. I absolutely know it. And people say well then you can't access certain things. There are ways around it. And um, because it's really the presence that you bring to things that um allows you to be effective.","offset":7032,"duration":53}],"startTime":6364},{"title":"Self-Control & The Dunedin Study","summary":"Highlighting a longitudinal study from New Zealand showing how childhood self-control strongly predicts success, health, and wealth in adulthood.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, absolutely. And regarding self-control, I think that self-control is a trainable skill. Um, and it is a byproduct of flourishing. Um, and one of the central capacities, I mean I we talked about meta-awareness earlier, and I think meta-awareness is really a key ingredient for self-control. And self-control will or self-regulation will improve as a consequence of that. And that's a superpower.","offset":7085,"duration":50},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know there was a study done by these two psychologists, Moffitt and Caspi, who um, are um, developmental sort of life-span psychologists, and they've been studying this cohort in Dunedin, New Zealand. Uh, it's a birth cohort, so these folks have been studied since birth, they're now I think in their 60s. But there's amazing longitudinal data on on these people. And um, they had a paper in PNAS uh a number of years ago that looked at measure behavioral measures of self-control in f in these in this cohort when these people were four and five years of age.","offset":7135,"duration":63},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And this particular paper was looking at outcomes when they were 32 years of age. And what they found is that the individuals who are in the upper quintile of self-control at four f four and five years of age had significantly less drug abuse, were significantly less likely to be involved in um, in uh court proceedings. Uh, they earned on average $6,000 US dollars more per year, and they were matched on socioeconomic status of their families at birth.","offset":7198,"duration":48},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So they were more successful.","offset":7246,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: More successful. So all these amazing outcomes. Um, and they I remember this paper was published many years ago, but I remember the there's a line in the paper that says um, uh strategies which will improve self-control will lead to all these these important outcomes and save taxpayers money.","offset":7247,"duration":34}],"startTime":7085},{"title":"Sponsor: Waking Up App","summary":"Brief sponsor ad read for the Waking Up meditation application.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’d like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now there are thousands of quality peer reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice both from the perspective of novelty, you never get tired of those meditations, there's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation, and you can always fit meditation into your schedule even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. If you’d like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com/huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial. Again, that’s wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial.","offset":7281,"duration":99}],"startTime":7281},{"title":"Making Friends With Your Mind","summary":"Shifting the approach to meditation from fighting the mind with rigid discipline to gently accepting and making friends with it.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Super impressive. Uh, and I do think that um nowadays we hear so much about the dos. You exercise, you eat this, and do and we five minutes a day meditation, great. I think the self-control component that's an outgrowth of meditation seems like a distinct benefit of meditation.","offset":7380,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Because when you're exercising, yeah, I suppose if you if you really hate it and you're constantly forcing yourself not to quit, that's a form of self-control. But I feel like most people once they get going they're kind of moving through it, but who knows? I do want to um use this this notion of self-control as an opportunity to look at the other side of it. And I was planning on doing this at some point. I think now's the point.","offset":7416,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm fundamentally confused about something about life, maybe you can help me. Um, I'm still not sure how much of life, of a really good life, should be forcing ourselves to do things versus um, kind of quote unquote honoring what what's right for us. Now obviously you know with respect to morality, with respect to the the big stuff in life that's those are easy answers. Okay.","offset":7453,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But when it comes to moving through the day, we're now talking here today about starting the day doing something that you probably don't want to do or that you would reflexively not do as a means to gain some other larger benefit. Um, we're talking about going against the reflex, against the impulse.","offset":7487,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: In the Buddhist traditions, in the field of meditation, how is this kind of thought about? And just personally, how do you think about this? Because I think a lot of people listening are probably thinking, okay great like I'll do this if it gives me some benefits, I'll lower my heart rate, I'll have less stress, I'll learn some additional self-control.","offset":7510,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I think people are also feeling overwhelmed with all the stuff they feel like they have to do and fight themselves. And I think people are tired of fighting. And I think part of the reason they're tired of fighting is that they're not picking up the phone and going oh this is cool this is good this is great this is great. I think that they're they feel slightly out of control that they're just can't resist it and it's just happening. And so we've lost the muscle so to speak, the mental muscle of resistance, but I think that of overcoming resistance. Um, but it's also kind of a philosophical question. I mean how much of our lives should we be forcing things upon ourselves to be better and how much of life should we just live and and be free like a like a bulldog which is the best breed of dog.","offset":7536,"duration":64},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: When I first started meditating I was fighting with my mind. Um, and I thought that that was great, you know, I'm this is uh means I'm really doing the work that's necessary and sitting through the physical pain, you know, forcing myself to sit for an hour while my, you know, feeling like my knee was on fire um, and my back was killing me. Um, and you know, I had a kind of sense of pride, I'm able to just uh tough this out. Um, and I was miserable.","offset":7600,"duration":54},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know I did that kind of practice for quite some time and it may have had some benefit uh in shaping my skills of self-control. But you know, at some point I discovered that maybe there's another strategy that can be effective that is um, that that's not about fighting with your mind. And not about fixing anything, but it's the invitation is really to make friends with your mind.","offset":7654,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: To welcome this. Uh, to have a completely different stance toward it and to do it with ease rather than with, you know, um, this kind of tension-ridden uh stance. I think that that is possible. Um, and the approach that we are taking in the Healthy Minds program, for example, is we're trying to do that. So there is a bit of discipline involved, but it's kind of um, really at the at the most minimal.","offset":7698,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: It's inviting people to um, to be where they are not and not and to really um, make friends with their mind. Um, and not to fight against it. It's not about pushing away thoughts, it's not about um, you know, sitting down to meditate if you if you're restless and can't sit, that's fine. Do it while you're walking.","offset":7742,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So the discipline is the intentional use of the mind. Um, and there is discipline involved in that, but it's kind of um, what is the minimum level of discipline to begin to get these networks going? Um, and that's kind of the question that we've asked.","offset":7774,"duration":30}],"startTime":7380},{"title":"Brain Connectivity Changes","summary":"Discussing neuroimaging data that reveals structural changes in the brain's white matter tracts after just a month of five-minute daily meditation.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, because your lab has been focused heavily on the neuroimaging and understanding what brain networks are activated as well as the positive outcomes. So this five minute a day meditation could be done eyes open, could be done eyes closed, could be done while you're walking, while you're commuting, and it shuts down the sort of default mode network and brings higher levels of activity in these awareness and attentional networks? Is that I'm broadly speaking. I'm a neuroscientist but I want to translate this for for people because the names of the structures actually are somewhat meaningless right unless we're we've got someone in a stereotax, right? So yeah.","offset":7804,"duration":59},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Exactly. Yeah. So um, just to be transparently honest, there's been very little imaging work on the five minutes per day. We've done some, um, and what we've seen in the work we've done is the biggest and in general I think this is true, the biggest changes that you see particularly in the early stages of practice are in measures of connectivity.","offset":7863,"duration":39},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And it could be functional connectivity which um uh has to do with the functional integration across different networks, or it could be in measures of actual structural connectivity that we can image with diffusion weighted imaging uh and looking at white matter uh connectivity.","offset":7902,"duration":20},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And what we've actually seen with the five minutes a day is changes in um, in diffusion weighted imaging looking uh at, I mean the biggest change we see is in the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which um, as you know Andrew, connects the the prefrontal and the parietal regions, and it's basically a major pathway through which the central executive network is um, interacting with the default mode. And that's what we see with just five minutes a day of practice. We can see measurable changes in diffusion weighted parameters in with just five minutes a day for a month.","offset":7922,"duration":64},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That's super impressive. More and more incentive to doing the five minute a day meditation. I guess that's the protocol we're weaving through this entire episode. And of course people could do seven, could do ten. I'd like to see people do six months every day, that would be impressive. That's what I'm going to shoot for.","offset":7986,"duration":24}],"startTime":7804},{"title":"Sleepiness Meditation & Self-Awareness","summary":"How to handle sleepiness during meditation by observing it curiously, and a look at self-awareness in animals via the elephant mirror test.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Six months every day?","offset":8010,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Just do five minutes a day for you know hit 30 days and then six months later. I don't know, I feel like if it's just the repeated showing up. I that's really it. I mean I have a prayer practice I do every night before I go to sleep. If I fall asleep, I get out of bed. My girlfriend knows this. I'll get out of bed and I pray. Like I've not missed a night since I started doing this.","offset":8011,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I love that. I think that's beautiful. And I you know, I'd love to see a study done with pre-sleep prayer and see how it affects sleep.","offset":8044,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: My sleep is definitely better than ever but there are probably a variety of reasons for that. I'm sure. But sometimes I find that I'm falling asleep while I'm praying and I just tell myself, okay just it's the consistency. It's like I I have this script in my head that I'm showing devotion by showing up.","offset":8054,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah.","offset":8078,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's just the repeated showing up and it's one of the few areas of my life that I was able to really remove the the need to do it perfectly. I mean what what would that even look like? I realize how ridiculous that is, right? But um some perfectionist tendencies in in me. You know we're showing up. Um, so for me the the um, I won't even say the the pride in it, the joy in it is from the consistency.","offset":8079,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I love that. And I feel exactly the same way in my consistent practice. Um, I think that's so important. I wanted to mention one thing about sleepiness because you mentioned that sometimes when you're doing the nightly prayer you're sleepy.","offset":8110,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And sleep sleepiness is is often uh something reported when people are meditating and particularly in the early stages of practice. And uh you know I've uh dealt with sleepiness a lot. Uh, uh and particularly before I changed my routine of and when I gave up the alarm clock because I was getting too little sleep.","offset":8135,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You were sleep deprived.","offset":8163,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, exactly. And I felt it and I struggled with it. So I have this meditation uh teacher Mingyur Rinpoche who uh one of the things he's taught is um is sleepiness meditation. Uh and sleepiness meditation is simply to be aware of sleepiness.","offset":8164,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Hm. Just be aware of sleepiness. Uh and uh and don't try to fight it. Just simply notice what it what is sleepiness, what is how is it feeling, and um investigate it with curiosity. Uh and that completely changed things for me.","offset":8198,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: There just seems to be this this thing where when we fight our state or our nature it it gains power.","offset":8228,"duration":11},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah.","offset":8239,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But when we we don't want to give in to it but when you acknowledge it but you don't completely give in to it somehow it it changes. Martha Beck was the first person to really teach me this, first in her books and then on the podcast. This idea that like if a feeling sucks or you don't want it to be there that rather than trying to suppress it you really look at it and let yourself feel it until it changes shape just a little bit, her language.","offset":8240,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah.","offset":8271,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And then you start to look at it through that different slightly different lens and then it morphs and it goes away.","offset":8272,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Exactly, exactly.","offset":8279,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And I think in her descrip- I didn't again didn't describe it as well as as she did or would or could but um what we're talking about over and over again today is the mind looking at the mind. And it does seem to have this ability to, you know, humans have this ability to... do you think other animals have this ability? I know you can't answer that quest- question for sure. But do you think one of the reasons dogs are so wonderful is because they're not self-conscious?","offset":8280,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: My conjecture is that um that our ability to uh look at our minds is way more developed than in any other species. And there may be some rudimentary kinds of meta-awareness in other species and you know some scientists have suggested that it may be correlated with successful performance on the self test, you know recogn- recognizing yourself in the mirror.","offset":8316,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um you know there's a recent report of elephants passing the self-test. Hm. So they are smart after all. Yeah. Uh and you know that's an interesting story. They did this actually in the Bronx Zoo in New York and they had to construct a mirror that was the size of an elephant to how do they know if the elephant knows it's itself because they don't attack it if it's itself. So they they put rouge on the trunk and they expose the elephant to the mirror. And if the elephant touches the point where the rouge is it's recognizing itself in the mirror.","offset":8352,"duration":48},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And there are very few species that uh pass the self-test in that way. Most species don't.","offset":8400,"duration":13}],"startTime":8010},{"title":"The Four Pillars of Human Flourishing","summary":"Breaking down the four trainable components of flourishing: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, along with a guided compassion practice.","entries":[{"text":"Andrew Huberman: We were talking offline a little bit earlier about a course that you're teaching about this very thing that you're calling flourishing. So what do the students get in that course and what components could you possibly educate us on right here right now so that we can benefit without having the opportunity to take the course?","offset":8413,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, absolutely. So the course is built on a framework that uh we've developed on the plasticity of flourishing. Um. It holds that there are four key pillars of human flourishing. And each of these pillars exhibits plasticity. Uh and these are the key trainable ingredients that constitute human flourishing.","offset":8437,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So what are these four pillars? The first pillar is and we've talked about some in the course of our conversation already but the first we call awareness. And awareness is where mindfulness is would be, it's where voluntary attention the capacity to focus resides, and it also includes our capacity for self-awareness and for meta-awareness which we've spoken about.","offset":8469,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: The second pillar we call connection. And connection is about the qualities which are important for healthy social relationships, uh qualities like appreciation and gratitude and kindness and compassion. You can think of the the opposite of that being um at least in part social isolation and loneliness. Again these are elements that we know can be trained, they are importantly connected to our well-being.","offset":8509,"duration":41},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: The third pillar we call insight. And insight is about a curiosity driven understanding of the narrative that all human beings have about themselves. Uh the narrative that we carry around in our minds. And we know that we all have a set of beliefs and expectations of ourselves. And we know that at one extreme of the continuum there are people that have very negative beliefs and expectations of themselves and of course that's a prescription for depression.","offset":8550,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But what's really critical for well-being is not so much changing the narrative, particularly at first, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative. So that we can see the narrative for what it is, which is a set of beliefs and thoughts and expectations.","offset":8594,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And then finally the last pillar is purpose. And purpose here is not necessarily about finding something grand to do with your life that's more meaningful and purposeful, but rather how can we find meaning and purpose in even the most pedestrian activities of daily living?","offset":8618,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And we actually talked about some of this earlier, but can taking out the garbage be connected to our sense of purpose? Cleaning the kitty litter. Cleaning the kitty litter. And of course it can be, it just requires a little bit of reframing and that's a learnable skill.","offset":8646,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: There are really three things that we've discovered in this work uh uh that can be easily summarized. The first is that flourishing is a skill, the second is that it's easier than you think, and the third is that flourishing is contagious so that when you're flourishing it's going to have beneficial impact on the people around you.","offset":8668,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And our course, the Art and Science of Human Flourishing, is built on each of these pillars to give students not just um an intellectual understanding, but an experiential um uh practice, a taste, uh of what these pillars actually are.","offset":8705,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: One of the important insights that the course is built on is that there are two major forms of learning that we know from modern neuroscience. One we can think of as declarative learning, which is learning about stuff, it's conceptual learning. The other we call procedural learning. And procedural learning is learning that is skill-based, it's acquired through practice, and we know that it's instantiated in different brain networks compared to declarative learning.","offset":8740,"duration":60},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And human flourishing requires both. Um and most of the academy privileges declarative learning over procedural learning. Uh and so this course that we teach is an unusual course because it includes a lab every week, so to speak, um a little section where students do the procedural learning for the stuff that they're learning declaratively in the lecture part of the class.","offset":8800,"duration":51},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I love that. I've long wanted to do a course that had information and practices involved. Sounds like you've built that course. Um if people who are not able to take the course wanted to access these different bins with some practical tools, um you already gave us um a tool for awareness, so meditation, um five minutes would be a great place to start done daily, um and just to be aware of what's of the chaos and be able to observe it but not go not follow it.","offset":8851,"duration":43},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: How does one incorporate connection?","offset":8894,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So I actually talked a little bit about connection in in uh earlier, but there's a lot more to say. But one kind of connection is doing a little appreciation practice when we eat, that's one I talked about earlier, um where we connect to the people even if we don't know them who have brought us food to the table. Some we some we may know, some we might not know.","offset":8896,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: There are formal kinds of connection practices that we there are meditation practices that we call loving kindness and compassion practices. And so we can um we've shown in a randomized control trial uh that just a few hours of this practice over two weeks is sufficient to produce a measurable change in the brain.","offset":8931,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Uh and so here's a a way you can do this. You can begin with a loved one and bring the loved one into your mind and your heart and envision a time in their life when they may have had some challenge or difficulty and then cultivate the strong aspiration that they be relieved of that difficulty and that they have um a life of ease.","offset":8966,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: That's it. And you can use a simple phrase that you can repeat to yourself um that embodies that captures that theme. It could be something as simple as may you be happy, may you be free of suffering. But the words don't matter whatever words are most well-suited for each person.","offset":9008,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um but then you move on to different categories of people. So you start with a loved one, you then move on to yourself, you then move on to to a category of person that we call a stranger. And a stranger is someone you recognize whose face you recognize but you don't know them well.","offset":9038,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: It could be someone that works in the same building that you work in, it could be a classmate, it could be a bus driver, it could be the cashier at a local um store that you go to, a barista. Um you don't know anything about them but you recognize them. And you can envision a time in their life when they may have had some difficulty even if you don't know anything about their life. So you do that with the stranger.","offset":9067,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And then finally you move on to what's probably the most important category which is a difficult person. Someone who pushes your buttons. And you genuinely bring them into your mind and your heart and you recognize a time, you imagine a time when they have been having some challenge and you cultivate the aspiration that they be relieved of that suffering.","offset":9109,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And that practice just done a few minutes a day can change your brain and it changes your behavior.","offset":9141,"duration":12},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And it changes the brain how? Makes it um a capable of more empathy?","offset":9153,"duration":8},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So one of the key regions of the brain that's been implicated in empathy is the um the temporal parietal junction. What we see is that in this kind of compassion practice there's significantly enhanced activation of the temporal parietal junction particularly in response to stimuli of people in distress. Hm. There's also uh networks in the brain that are involved in positive affect that are activated by this kind of practice.","offset":9161,"duration":57},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And behaviorally we've shown using hard-nosed um tasks that are derived from behavioral economics and...","offset":9218,"duration":42}],"startTime":8413},{"title":"Enhancing Slow-Wave Sleep","summary":"A look at preliminary research combining imperceptible electrical brain stimulation and pre-sleep meditation to boost restorative slow-wave sleep.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Davidson: And we're doing—and this—the other cool thing about this stimulation is you cannot feel it. It has no subjective sensations. So, it's very different than TMS which is, you know, you feel it big time. You don't feel a thing. So, we are delivering this during sleep. People don't know when they're getting stimulated. They of course know they're being stimulated because they're giving informed consent, but it doesn't wake them up.","offset":9260,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: And it increases slow wave sleep?","offset":9284,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: We've definitively demonstrated that it increases the density of slow wave activity during deep sleep.","offset":9287,"duration":6},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: How do they feel in their wakeful subjective life? Better?","offset":9293,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Yes.","offset":9297,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: And how do I become a participant in the study? I mean, I get plenty of slow wave sleep, my sleep is great lately and has been for a while, but what—are you recruiting subjects?","offset":9298,"duration":10},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: This is a—yeah, it's a big complicated protocol.","offset":9308,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: I don't care, are you recruiting subjects? I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. I do care. I'm just teasing. People are probably thinking, \"How do I get that?\" Well, maybe this pre-sleep meditation protocol should be looked at, because that's something anyone can do. I'll provide a link to that paper.","offset":9311,"duration":12},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: So, that's exactly what we're doing in this study now. We're using a—this is a little technical, but we're using a micro-randomized design where, so in a single participant on some nights they get pre-sleep meditation, just before sleep, just a five-minute practice. And in other nights, they do not receive that.","offset":9323,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: And we are looking at the impact of that on slow wave sleep and also looking at the synergistic effects of pre-sleep meditation with the Testi stimulation to increase slow wave activity. And we're getting experience sampling measures during the next day to see if the pre-sleep meditation has a demonstrable impact on their mood the next day and how that interacts with our boosting of slow wave activity.","offset":9347,"duration":27},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Very, very cool. I should just say this is work that's being done collaboratively with Giulio Tononi and his group at in Wisconsin. He's a very well-known sleep and consciousness scientist, neuroscientist.","offset":9374,"duration":15},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Great lab.","offset":9389,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Yeah, great lab.","offset":9390,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Are you able to share any preliminary findings about what the pre-sleep five-minute meditation does to deep sleep?","offset":9391,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: We don't know yet. And honestly, it's not me being, you know, super cautious. We just this is a new study that we're just in the middle of. We have roughly 20-something participants who've completed the protocol, but it's it's ongoing right now.","offset":9398,"duration":15},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Well, given what you just described, and given that this other paper described that some pre-sleep meditation can have a really impressive impact on growth hormone release, I'm encouraged to do the five minutes before sleep. So, I suppose that if you want to double up on the benefits, you could just do the five minute per day meditation, folks, right in the hour before sleep.","offset":9413,"duration":21},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Why not? I think it would be great.","offset":9434,"duration":2}],"startTime":9260},{"title":"Open Monitoring Meditation & Creativity","summary":"Dr. Davidson explains how open monitoring meditation can enhance creative thought by making us more aware of passing associative ideas.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Huberman: What are your thoughts on open monitoring meditation for increasing creativity?","offset":9436,"duration":5},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Honestly, the data on open monitoring meditation or for that matter any meditation and creativity, I would say are very limited. In part, it's because the measures of creativity that are used by psychologists typically are honestly, I think pretty crappy measures of creativity. So we're quite limited by the measurement tools that we have.","offset":9441,"duration":39},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Having said all that, I do think that open monitoring meditation can really boost creativity primarily by helping people become more aware of the associative thoughts that they have. And this relates to something we talked about earlier. I often tell students of mine to spend time inspecting their own mind, just watching their own mind and writing down thoughts that may occur that may be interesting.","offset":9480,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: And this is a kind of open monitoring meditation. It's having no specific object and just being open, aware, awake, and not distracted, not getting lost in a train of thought, but simply being aware. I believe that we probably have much more creative thought occurring than we give ourselves credit for, and it's simply because we forget. And I think this can really improve that. But the data are pretty meager.","offset":9512,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: But you still recommend it if people want to increase their creativity.","offset":9547,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Yes, I do, because this is one of those things where there's essentially no downside to it. We know there'll be other benefits that have been empirically documented.","offset":9550,"duration":16}],"startTime":9436},{"title":"Conclusion & Outro","summary":"Dr. Huberman thanks Dr. Davidson, promotes his upcoming book, and provides closing remarks and social media links.","entries":[{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Awesome. Well, Richie, thank you so much for coming here today and educating us on meditation, but really much more than that. You've educated us on states of mind, how to access different states of mind, what they mean, how they impact the state of being and our traits that we will enter after we meditate. And now everyone should be inspired to do at least five minutes per day of meditation, maybe in the morning, maybe before sleep.","offset":9566,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Would love to get the update on this study that you described looking at slow wave sleep. And I'm really excited about your book. It's so great that you have a new book coming out because I, of course, read *Altered Traits*. I've talked about it on the podcast. I love, love, love the book. We'll put a link to that. But *Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving* by you and we should give credit to your co-author, Cortland Dahl.","offset":9592,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: And he is a neuroscientist as well?","offset":9617,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Yes, he's a neuroscientist, contemplative scientist, and chief contemplative officer of our non-profit human.org.","offset":9619,"duration":10},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Awesome. Well, you're a real pioneer in this space. The field, as it were, of meditation really needed a serious scientist to break in and study and share so that everyone could learn about and adopt meditation and you've just done so much to educate so many people and coming here today you've just done more of that, so I have immense gratitude for you and I know millions of other people do as well. So, thank you so much.","offset":9629,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Thank you. And I want to express my immense gratitude to you for bringing science that can make our lives better to so many people, and that is such a gift and such a wonderful service that you are providing, so thank you.","offset":9654,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson. To learn more about his work and to find a link to his new book, *Born to Flourish*, please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple.","offset":9670,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.","offset":9695,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled *Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body*. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's been based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.","offset":9721,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called *Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body*. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast.","offset":9745,"duration":331},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one-to-three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.","offset":10076,"duration":23},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero-cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. [2:48:47]","offset":10099,"duration":15}],"startTime":9566}],"entries":[{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: We actually have really good data on this that at least for beginning meditators, if you do it for 30 days and you do it just for 5 minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety, and symptoms of stress. We've shown that repeatedly in randomized control trials. You'll see an increase on measures of well-being or flourishing, and we can talk about what those actually mean. You can even see, just with this amount of practice, a reduction in IL-6. IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine.","offset":0,"duration":39},{"text":"Huberman Lab Intro: Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.","offset":39,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Richie Davidson. Dr. Richie Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a pioneer in the study of how meditation impacts the brain both during meditations, but also how it changes your brain over time, what we refer to as neuroplasticity.","offset":49,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today, we discuss the incredible health and neuroplasticity benefits that come from regular meditation, including very brief meditations of just five minutes per day. Dr. Davidson also dispels many common myths about meditation. For example, contrary to what most people believe, the point of meditation is not to clear your mind or to feel inner peace during the meditation, but rather to observe your thoughts and any stress you might experience during the meditation, and in doing so, it's kind of like the final hard repetitions of resistance exercise or the burn you might feel during cardio which comes from lactate. In that sense, the stress you feel during meditation and your ability to observe it acts as a sort of lactate of the mind that in turn makes you adapt, it makes you more stress-resilient, focused, and peaceful outside of the meditation.","offset":78,"duration":44},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Dr. Davidson also explains how your brain changes during different types of meditation, such as open monitoring meditation, or eyes-open meditation, walking versus seated, and standing meditations and more. I've been doing meditation over many years, but this conversation with Dr. Richie Davidson changed my daily routine. Afterwards, I immediately started implementing a five-minute-per-day meditation of the sort that Dr. Davidson describes specifically for stress resilience, and I have to say it's had a profound impact on my levels of mental clarity, focus, and sleep, and in stress, just as he explained. In fact, it's proved to be one of the most beneficial practices I've taken on, especially on days when I wake up with tons to do, a little bit stressed or a lot stressed, and if I didn't sleep quite as well as I would have liked.","offset":122,"duration":47},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So today, you're going to hear about the incredible science of meditation, the brain and bodily changes that occur, but also how you can rewire your brain using meditation. Dr. Richie Davidson is a true pioneer in this field, being one of the first to bring brain imaging and studies of mindfulness and meditation to the West. He has of course authored some of the most impactful research papers on these topics, but also popular books, including a new book coming out later this month entitled \"Born to Flourish: How to Thrive in a Challenging World,\" which I myself look forward to reading.","offset":169,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: 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, today's episode does include sponsors.","offset":202,"duration":19},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And now, for my discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson. Dr. Richie Davidson, welcome.","offset":221,"duration":11},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Thank you Andrew, I'm honored to be here.","offset":232,"duration":3},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Oh, it's an honor to have you here. I am a long-time fan of your research, of what you've built at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the books you've written - we'll talk about your new book, I didn't even know you had a new book, this wasn't a book tour invite, I had seen you give a seminar at Stanford and I said great, here's my opportunity to finally get you on the podcast. But you really transformed the way that I think about not just meditation, but all states of mind and how that relates to our individual traits and how those can change over time. Today we'll talk about concept and protocols. But I'm curious how you think about states of mind generally. I think it's really important that we frame the discussion with this because we all know what sleep is, most people have heard that sleep has different components, REM sleep etc. We know what it is to be awake, stressed versus calm. But how should we think about states of mind and then once you tell us how you think about that, perhaps then we can better place this thing we call meditation into a particular bin.","offset":235,"duration":52},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So thank you first for having me Andrew, and I've just want to say I've been a long-term fan of yours so I'm really happy to be here. In terms of states of mind, I think that at the outset it's really important that we also remind listeners that there's a thing called traits too, and so we can't talk about states without also talking about traits, and we'll get to traits in a moment. But I think with regard to states, we can think of them as organized patterns of activity in the brain that have corresponding organized mental correlates if you will, or subjective correlates.","offset":287,"duration":46},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: And there are certain states that occur with regularity that are part of our biological rhythms, and so most human beings will have states of wakefulness, of deep sleep, and of REM sleep every day. And that is regulated by well-known kinds of biological rhythms. And then there are other kinds of states that are sometimes described that are states during what we normally think of as waking, although I think honestly the concept of state is often used loosely without rigorous boundary criteria for what constitutes a state and how it might be distinguished from another state.","offset":333,"duration":54},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: There are certain states which if they occur with regularity will lead to a trait. They'll lead to a shift in the baseline for the next state. There was a paper I wrote many, many years ago with my dear friend and colleague Daniel Goleman who I wrote the book Altered Traits with, and the origin of Altered Traits is really in a sentence that we wrote in a paper 20 years earlier where we said: the after is the before for the next during.","offset":387,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The after is the before for the next during. Let's drill into that for a second.","offset":421,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, so what we mean by that is that how you are after a state, say you do a little meditation practice and it leads to a state change, that state change may persist in some way and that becomes the next before for the next during, the during is the state, is the say the meditation state. And so it's a description of how a state can lead to a trait. In the domain of emotion, you might think that frequent bouts of anger, which you can think of as a state, can lead to the trait of irritability, which is sort of chronically having a low threshold. You can think of a trait in certain cases as altering the threshold for the elicitation of a state. So a trait of irritability would be a trait where you have a lowered threshold for the elicitation of anger, for example.","offset":425,"duration":64},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I love that example because I know that many people will resonate with it because so much of what we see online nowadays is designed to capture our attention by engaging negative affect - mild anger, frustration, or even outrage. There's other content online too of course, and this podcast is online after all. And many other sources of what I consider benevolent educational information. But it is so true that, you know, what we experience in one portion of our day impacts how we are in the rest of our day. And perhaps the simplest correlate for all of it for me anyway is sleep. You know, if I sleep really well for three or four nights in a row, I wake up in a certain state that certainly makes my day go differently. And the inverse is also true if I don't sleep well. I feel like we have such great nomenclature and understanding of brain activity and how that impacts emotionality for sleep. We know that REM sleep based dreams are very vivid, slow wave sleep based dreams are less vivid perhaps. We know the electrical activities associated with those different states of sleep. I'm aware of a lot less information about brain activities and clear definitions of waking states of mind. Do you mind if we talk about this for a little bit? It's been a few years since I've heard about and I don't think we've ever really talked on this podcast about, you know, alpha waves, beta waves, theta waves. Maybe just educate us a bit on some of the waking brain states that we've all experienced, perhaps are in right now, but that we just don't hear about that much anymore.","offset":489,"duration":104},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So yeah, we can talk about those oscillations of brain electrical activity, and there are broad suggestions for what kind of state they may reflect, and you know, I'll go through that, but it's also important to recognize that you can be showing alpha activity in one part of the brain and beta activity in another part of the brain simultaneously. And so it's a bit coarse to talk about these as general characteristics, but there could be times when we see predominantly one oscillation or another and so talking about generalized states in that context may be more reasonable.","offset":593,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So with that as a caveat, let me say that in humans we see a broad range of frequencies that go from approximately 1 Hz (one cycle per second) to approximately 40 Hz. And from roughly 1 to 4 Hz is delta activity, that is typically not seen during waking, it's predominant during deep sleep. And there is data that suggests that the density of delta activity or slow wave activity during deep sleep is actually diagnostic of how restorative that sleep is, which is a whole separate set of issues and super cool.","offset":638,"duration":41},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: And there are actually some really interesting highly novel strategies now using neurostimulation to actually boost slow wave activity during deep sleep which may actually help to potentiate some of the skill acquisition that we do during the day, including meditation. And we're doing some of that work now, which is actually you had asked earlier before we started about some novel new work that we're doing and that's also one of the really cool new things. So we can dive into that.","offset":679,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Their newest bar, the Bronze Bar, has 20 grams of protein, only 150 calories, and zero grams of sugar. I have to say these are the best tasting protein bars I've ever had, and I've tried a lot of protein bars over the years. These new David bars have a marshmallow base and they're covered in chocolate coating and they're absolutely incredible. I of course eat regular whole foods - I eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, etc. But I also make it a point to eat one or two David bars per day as a snack, which makes it easy to hit my protein goal of one gram of protein per pound of body weight, and that allows me to take in the protein I need without consuming excess calories. I love all the David Bronze Bar flavors, including cookie dough, caramel chocolate, double chocolate, peanut butter chocolate, they all actually taste like candy bars. Again, they're amazing, but again they have no sugar and they have 20 grams of protein with just 150 calories. If you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com/huberman. Right now David is offering a deal where if you buy four cartons, you get the fifth carton for free. You can also find David on Amazon or in stores such as Target, Walmart, and Kroger. Again, to get the fifth carton for free, go to davidprotein.com/huberman.","offset":715,"duration":79},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure you get a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall asleep and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep automatically regulates the temperature of your bed throughout the night according to your unique needs. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly five years now and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. The latest Eight Sleep model is the Pod 5. This is what I'm now sleeping on and I absolutely love it. It has so many incredible features. For instance, the Pod 5 has a feature called Autopilot, which is an AI engine that learns your sleep patterns and then adjusts the temperature of your sleeping environment across different sleep stages. It'll even elevate your head if you're snoring and it makes other shifts to optimize your sleep. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com/huberman to get up to $350 off the new Pod 5. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $350.","offset":794,"duration":76},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I saw a paper recently that described a, and forgive me if this was one of your papers, I don't think it was, it described a pre-sleep meditation that one could do to significantly increase the amount of growth hormone that's released once one gets to sleep. And I thought, [Dr. Richie Davidson: That wasn't ours] and I thought this makes total sense, right? I mean it's it has to do with, I forget the sentence you wrote, but that how we exit one state impacts how we encounter the next one and perhaps even our trait within that next event of life. So we'll definitely get back to this when we talk about protocols because I think that people vastly underestimate the extent to which different let's call them meditations, for lack of a better word right now, how they can impact how we show up to work, how we show up to relating, how we show up even to sleep. And it's not just about being calm so you can fall asleep. Turns out this meditation that was described boosts growth hormone in a, you know, incredible way without altering some of the other features of sleep.","offset":870,"duration":71},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: I saw that paper too, it wasn't ours, but yeah, super interesting. I agree. Yeah, so just to continue with the brain oscillations, I talked about delta. The next brain, the next faster brain rhythm is theta activity, which is roughly between 5 and 7 Hz. Theta activity is often seen during transition from wakefulness to sleep. And it's associated with these, as you were saying earlier, these liminal states. It's also been associated with certain kinds of meditation. Alpha activity is roughly between 8 and 13 cycles per second or Hz, and it's often characterized as quote relaxed wakefulness. Beta activity is typically defined as roughly 13 to roughly 20 Hz, and it's associated with activation. If there is a cognitive task that a person is engaged in, you will typically see increases in beta activity, particularly in the cortical regions that are engaged in those cognitive tasks. And then finally there's gamma activity. Gamma activity is especially interesting, we see that in meditators, long-term meditators. Gamma activity has as its peak frequency roughly 40 Hz. It is seen in a number of contexts. One of them is during what some have called insight. And insight is where I think most viewers have had the experience of working on a problem and all of a sudden they just have an aha moment and things sort of gel, they congeal, they come together. And there've been some clever experimental designs where investigators have created tasks that increase the likelihood of aha moments. They're sort of trivial in the experimental context, they're simple cognitive tasks where all of a sudden you just recognize the answer. It might be something like a crossword puzzle, and you're trying to get something, a word to fit, and suddenly you get the word. It comes in a moment and it's kind of an instantaneous recognition. And you typically would see a burst of gamma oscillations that is very short - the average duration would be around 250 milliseconds, really short. What we see in these long-term meditators is the prevalence of high amplitude gamma activity that goes on for seconds and minutes. When we first saw that by the way, and there's a lot of interesting history here, but we first reported this in 2004 with very long-term meditators where the average lifetime practice of this group was 34,000 hours. Listeners can do the arithmetic later, but 34,000 hours is a big number. And in these practitioners we saw these really high amplitude gamma oscillations that actually were visible to the naked eye, which is unusual for this kind of measurement. And in the original paper which was published in PNAS in 2004, we actually had a figure of the raw EEG from one practitioner just to illustrate how prominent it is that you can see it with the naked eye. And we've subsequently replicated that, it's been replicated by others. We've also seen that this gamma activity is found during slow wave sleep. It's actually superimposed on delta oscillations.","offset":941,"duration":225},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Is there any evidence that meditation can actually replace sleep or that it can offset some of the negative effects of sleep deprivation, mild sleep deprivation?","offset":1166,"duration":9},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: This is a great question. I think about it a lot. I don't think that the evidence is is clear on this at all. And I'll give several examples. First, the Dalai Lama, who probably meditates more than anybody I know, he has a practice of literally doing approximately four hours of meditation every day and he's been doing that for more than 60 years.","offset":1175,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm reassured by that. If you told me the Dalai Lama meditates for, you know, 40 minutes a week, I'd actually be concerned about the role of Dalai Lama, so that the title, you know.","offset":1198,"duration":10},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So that, and he very proudly says, \"I sleep nine hours a night.\" Wow, okay. Nine hours a night and he gets nine hours of sleep, that's his regular sleep, and he gets it all the time. And you know, I don't know whether he would say he needs it, but he gets nine hours a night, and he's very proud of that. Okay. That's one counter-example. You know, myself, I have done a bunch of sleep science with collaborating with some sleep researchers, and many years ago one of these people said to me, \"Richie, you really should give up an alarm clock, just don't use an alarm clock anymore.\" And I was getting at that time between five and a half and six hours a night of sleep, and I gave up the alarm clock and my average length of sleep increased by about 30 to 45 minutes. And I feel much better. Oh sure. Especially since the extra sleep tends to be toward morning, you're getting more REM sleep. But the difference for me between five and a half and six or six and a half is in terms of just subjective well-being and focus, etc. is tremendous.","offset":1208,"duration":71},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Slightly related question: if one were going to choose to meditate and had the option to do it at a sort of liminal state between let's say being awake and going to sleep at night or between sleep and what shortly after one wakes up and starts the day versus in the middle of the day or in the middle of the morning, is there any advantage to placing meditation in one of these what I'm calling liminal states or transition states between sleeping and awaking in either direction?","offset":1279,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: I would say probably for most people yes is the answer, but I think there's a lot of individual variability. In general, I would say it's useful to meditate when you're feeling most awake and less sleepy. Sleepiness is an important obstacle in meditation and there's a lot to say about that.","offset":1309,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I'm surprised to hear that. I expected you to say that one should meditate at a time when the brain is closest to sleep because you want to be in a state of mind that's less about controlling your thoughts. But then again, I could also see an argument for how meditation involves a redirect of attention. So let's actually drill into this a bit. What is the meditative state that one is seeking for quote-unquote effective meditation?","offset":1332,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, so first let me say that just like there are hundreds of different kinds of sports, there are hundreds of different kinds of meditation. They don't all do the same thing, they have different effects on the brain and the body. And so I think it's really important that we not lump all of meditation together. So that's one really important thing.","offset":1358,"duration":25},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Can we divide it up? So for instance, if we were going to draw the parallel with exercise, and maybe we'll do that several times today. We can broadly lump exercise into cardiovascular and resistance training. There's also mobility work and then there's a bunch of other stuff. With meditation can we create some broad bins? And what are those broad bins? And then we can go into specific practices.","offset":1383,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, so yes, we can create some broad bins. So and we've done that, we've published some papers that offer typologies for classifying different meditation states. So one kind of meditation we call focused attention meditation. And focused attention meditation is where you are narrowing your aperture of awareness to a specific object. It could be an external object, it could also be an internal, it could be for example your respiration, it could be a sound. And there is a narrowing of the aperture. And this is all broadly within the category of practices that we would say are cultivating aspects of awareness. So another awareness practice is what we call open monitoring meditation. And open monitoring is where there is no specific focus but rather the aperture is broadened. And there is no specific intention to focus on any one thing or another. The invitation is to simply be aware of whatever is arising as it arises. One of the aspirations there or the invitations is not to try to get rid of thoughts because our minds and our brains are built to generate thoughts. So there's no goal if you will to get rid of thoughts, but rather to if thoughts arise, that's another object that you can be aware of. You know, we talked about sleep and sleepiness and that earlier, you can even, you can be aware of being sleepy, you can be aware of being distracted. The goal if you will is not to change or to fix anything. If you will, the invitation is to shift from a mode of doing to a mode of simply being.","offset":1408,"duration":116},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I want to talk about this thing about doing to being because the language can sound a bit mystical and vague to people. But as a long-time practitioner of Yoga Nidra, which I've talked a lot about on this podcast, there's this instruction inside of Yoga Nidra to shift from thinking and doing to being and feeling. [Dr. Richie Davidson: Exactly.] Which is beautiful language, poetic, etc. but also as neuroscientists and for the general public, I think it might be useful for us to just maybe just double click on that for one second. As a neuroscientist I think of thinking and doing as okay, doing is action, so that would the opposite of that would be stop moving the body. Thinking - well, there's a whole discussion to be had about what is thinking in neuroscience - but certainly you wouldn't want to plan, you wouldn't want to be ruminating on the past. Presumably you would want to be more in a state of sensation and perceiving what's happening right now. So is that an appropriate breakdown or is it wrong, is it insufficient? I'm not trying to score an A with the professor here, I'm just trying to figure out when we hear \"move from thinking and doing to being and feeling,\" what does that mean in terms of actionable steps that people can take?","offset":1524,"duration":86},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, so I think that the way you describe it is basically accurate with a little bit of perhaps tweak. So if when if one is invited to do this and one finds oneself ruminating or planning for example, which is supposedly an activity you're quote not supposed to be doing, you know, rather than trying to stop it, it's simply to be aware of it. Wow, I'm now planning or I'm now ruminating about something that happened in the past. What really is most important is the invitation not to change it, not to actively try to shift it, but to simply be aware. And one of the conjectures in all of this is that there's so much going on under the hood that we're typically not aware of. You know, our lives are moving at such a pace that the information that is transpiring is occurring at such a rapid rate that we are typically aware of only a small fraction of that. And this is a practice that's inviting you to simply be aware of that and and and you know, not doing is a helpful kind of thing because if we're if we're acting in the world, we obviously need to navigate and there are things we obviously need to do to be safe and to protect ourselves and so forth. And so that will engage other mechanisms.","offset":1610,"duration":101},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm interested in the possibility, or maybe you've seen this in the data, that there are at least two different types of people. People who for instance go through life feeling, doing, being, thinking and projecting things out into the world, or maybe they're quiet people and they don't project much out into the world but they're just doing their thing and they're not thinking about their thinking. They're not thinking about their doing, they're just doing. We know people like that. Then there are people who are always multi-tracking, like uh, you know, they're self-conscious, they're very self-aware. And I'm wondering whether or not a form of meditation where somebody arrives at the meditation very self-aware, like oh, there's my thought about that again, there's my thought about that again, and working perhaps on not judging it, could be beneficial. But perhaps what that person quote-unquote needs or would benefit from was just being in a state of a freedom from their self-monitoring, whereas the other person perhaps could afford to be a little more self-aware and realize, oh, you know, I'm in this mode where and see their thinking a little bit.","offset":1711,"duration":72},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Totally, and and you're naming something super important. And you know, I think that the way you characterize the second person who is more self-aware, there's more than just self-awareness in your description. There's a kind of holding back. It's not just monitoring, but there's a kind of suppression almost. It's a lot of work. [Dr. Richie Davidson: It's a lot of work.] And it kind of and it could be stifling for their creativity. Absolutely. We had my friend David Choe on the podcast, now we're friends, that was actually the first time we had met but we've become good friends and he's a brilliant artist, brilliant artist. And he talks about how the best art comes from just forgetting what anyone thinks or wants. Rick Rubin talks about this, just getting the audience out of your mind and just letting it flow through you. And I think great artists do that. And it's what we pay money to see. We want to see that form of expression. We don't want to see the self-monitoring artist. [Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah.] That's great. And I totally resonate with that. And there is a phrase in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that is called \"undistracted non-meditation.\" Undistracted non-meditation. And that's said to be the highest form of meditation, where you just drop all the crap, you know, all the techniques, all the control, all the tightness.","offset":1783,"duration":95},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: This is my goal in life. Watch out folks, if this ever happens.","offset":1878,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: But you're totally aware. You're fully aware. But there's no artifice, there's no uh, it's just complete freedom. And and there are, you know, I think there I've had the the honor of just hanging out with some people who I think are really in that as a trait. That's who they are. Rick Rubin's like that. He's a close friend and I can tell you I've spent a lot of time with Rick. And how he appears to people and his kind of mythical status, I think a lot of people his magnetism is because that's real. He can be in very, very close proximity to things, online, in person, he can see all of it. He's in real touch with it, but he's still him. It somehow it doesn't invade him in a way that changes the way he shows up. He, you know, like if if we were to paint little beams of energy - now we're really sounding woo - coming out, there's stuff coming out, there's stuff going in and they're interacting, but they're not contaminating one another. Where they interact it just makes both things better. And that's a very, very rare trait.","offset":1882,"duration":74},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah, I agree. You know, there's a term that I often use which, you know, I can talk about how we can define this more technically, but for lack of a better word, I call stickiness. And it's kind of an affective hysteresis, if you will. It's where you know, you're hanging on to emotions that may not be useful. You're carrying stuff from a previous experience into a current experience and it muddles things. And you know, our emotional lives are so infused with this kind of stickiness, but with like with Rick Rubin, or with other people who are showing this, there's no stickiness. There's no stickiness. And you know, that's a kind of of freedom that I think is very much what we're talking about as the trait manifestation of these kinds of practices.","offset":1956,"duration":64},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's interesting. I think a lot of people mistakenly use drugs to try and access that state. And I also think that we have a real as a species, as a culture but also as a species, we have a real affinity to people who can embody this freedom that you're talking about. Great comedians - like when Richard Pryor was on, you're just like, I mean you maybe he had a subscript in there, maybe he was devoting like 2% of his prefrontal cortex to monitoring but it just seemed like we call it flow, but we're in their flow, they're in ours, whatever it is. There's a powerful interaction there that there seems to be very little self-monitoring from the perspective of performing arts or comedic arts.","offset":2020,"duration":53},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But for people who want to approach meditation, would it do you think it's useful at all to ask themselves before they go into the meditation, you know, are they in a are they in a mode of self-monitoring or are they in a kind of or are they feeling more free? More present to just whatever it is they're experiencing not questioning it. [Dr. Richie Davidson: Yeah.] And asking them for do you think it's useful in order to get the most out of a meditation practice? I guess what I'm getting at indirectly here is most meditation practices involve shifting from doing one thing to maybe you're walking, maybe you're open eyes, but typically I think people either sit or lie down, close eyes and start focusing on their breathing and trying to quote-unquote get present. [Dr. Richie Davidson: Although the kind of practice that I most often do is actually with eyes open.] Really? Oh, well then just tell us about that. What what would be a good uh, let's use the parallel to cardio again. I would say if somebody's really out of shape and wants to get in shape, I would say the first thing is take two 20-minute walks a day. And then we could talk about getting on a exercise bike and then maybe doing some resistance you start layering things in, right? But what would be the equivalent of the 2 20-minute walks a day for meditation?","offset":2073,"duration":81},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So this is the protocol question I guess. You know, I would say it's really important to start modestly and we often will ask a person, what's the minimum amount of meditation that you think you can commit to every single day and do it for 30 days consistently? [Andrew Huberman: 5 minutes.] Perfect. Whatever that number is, perfect. Start with that. And then the next question is, are you comfortable doing it formally as a seated practice or would you prefer to do it while you're walking or while you're doing another non-cognitively demanding activity? It could be commuting, it could be washing the dishes. There are lots of those kind of activities that we often do on a daily basis that you can actually intentionally use your mind in this way while you're also doing those activities. And by the way, we've shown - we actually have really good data on this - that at least for beginning meditators, it doesn't matter if you're doing it as a formal meditation practice or as an active practice. The benefits are absolutely comparable.","offset":2154,"duration":76},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And what are those benefits?","offset":2230,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: So if you do it for 30 days and you do it just for 5 minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety, and symptoms of stress. We've shown that repeatedly in randomized control trials. You'll see an increase on measures of well-being or flourishing, and we can talk about what those actually mean. You can even see, just with this amount of practice, a reduction in IL-6. IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine that is important in systemic inflammation. And with just this minimal amount of practice you see a significant reduction in IL-6 over the course of 28 days, five minutes a day. We've actually seen changes in the microbiome. And we've seen changes in the brain with just this minimal amount of practice. But the important point is that you're doing it every day. When people ask me what's the best form of meditation that they should do if they're just beginning, I say the best form of meditation that you can possibly do is the form of meditation that you actually do. So figure out what that form of meditation is and then stick to it. Do it every single day.","offset":2232,"duration":81},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I love this. I actually am going to challenge our podcast audience to five minutes a day for 30 days. I'll put something out on social media. Rob, please remind me to put something out on social media to do five minutes a day for 30 days because what you describe are significant health effects. And as you described them, it made me remember this set of experiments from neuroplasticity. Do you mind if I share these? Because I have a this is a theoretical/practical question as we move into these protocols. But before we do that, what what should we call this protocol? It's the Richie Davidson five minutes a day. Richie's five meditation. I'm going to start that. Later I'll share what I've been doing but it's not even that. I've been doing 10 breaths upon waking. Ten breaths before I even get out of bed. I'm like if I can just do 10 breaths of focused meditation before I get out of bed, the whole day will go better and it and it tends to.","offset":2313,"duration":68},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: There's this wild set of findings in the neuroplasticity research that most people don't talk about because it's very inconvenient for neuroscientists. We're all familiar with the enriched environment thing where you give rats a bunch of toys or mice a bunch of toys or monkeys a bunch of toys, and the idea would be if you give kids a bunch of toys or listening to Mozart that their brains will develop more. You see more physical connections, you see improved cognition, etc. etc. A really smart guy down at University of California, Irvine, Ron Frostig, did an experiment where he said, \"Maybe this is all backwards. Maybe the normal cages they live in without all these toys are just deprived environments.\" And it turns out that's probably the case. So all this enriched environment stuff, it's not that it's BS, it's just that the experimental conditions were so deprived that what you had was most animals just deprived in a certain way, then you give them what they needed naturally and all of a sudden you saw more connections etc.","offset":2381,"duration":70},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: If we applied that to meditation - something that we think of as kind of an enriched mental environment - okay, I'm going to now do this exercise, I'm going to do five minutes a day or 10 or 20. We think of it as kind of adding exercise, but riding a treadmill, doing resistance training, I mean we used to just farm and go get water and do things. So in some sense all of that is a replacement for a quote-unquote deprived environment. So is it possible that what you're describing is not something that people developed over time, but rather something that was core to our experience as humans and that the brain needed, but that with the advent of technologies and busyness or whatever we've gotten away from? And so when you talk about doing 5 or 10 or 20 minutes of meditation a day and seeing all these health effects, what we're doing is we're actually just putting back what needed to be there in the first place. This is like the equivalent of you getting your 30 minutes more sleep because alarm clocks weren't really a thing 2,000 years ago. Does that make sense?","offset":2451,"duration":69},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: It makes sense, but you know, and I think that there's an element of truth to it, but I also think that there's some additional discussion that we should have about it and dialogue. So first of all, these practices have been around for, you know, 2,500 years or more. It's not like they've been invented in the modern era to deal with the the separation that has occurred between humans and the natural world that is a distinctly modern kind of invention. So that's one thing. The second thing is that yes, I agree with you that the characteristics that we're talking about as traits that are outcomes of these practices, there many ways to get there. And there are probably natural ways to get there that don't require meditation. And in fact, you know, when we in our early days we interviewed these practitioners around Dharamsala, India who were spending 30 years in retreat. They're called hermit monks. And you know, there you have to hike for three hours to find their cave. And we interviewed these these people. You know, they they told us, \"Well, you know, I need to meditate, but many others are just born or they're just naturally have these qualities. They don't need to meditate as much as me. I'm just a simple, you know, poor monk who really needs to do this because I'm inferior to those people,\" if you will.","offset":2520,"duration":90},{"text":"Dr. Richie Davidson: And it's a kind of modesty but also, you know, there may be some truth to that. And so I think that that is is real. But I also think that the qualities like for example, kindness. I believe, and this is the subject of this new book that I wrote with my colleague Cortland Dahl, \"Born to Flourish,\" qualities like kindness are innate. They are part of our innate repertoire. But in order for them to be expressed, they require nurturing. And it's very similar to the way scientists talk about language. Language is innate, I think most scientists would agree with that, but we know that there have been case studies for example of feral children who are raised in the wild and they don't develop normal language. So in order for the language to develop normally it requires nurturing of some kind. And kindness is the same thing, it requires nurturing in order for it to be expressed. And similarly for other qualities that we're cultivating when we meditate. I think those qualities are innate, but they require nurturing. And and in certain cases, I think that in order for those qualities to really be expressed at high levels if you will, intentional nurturing may be required for at least the vast majority of people. There may be, you know, statistically very rare people who emerge who are like this from the start for whatever reasons.","offset":2610,"duration":90},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: reason. But for most of us, I think uh this kind of nurturing is important.","offset":2700,"duration":8},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 for nearly 15 years now. I discovered it way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, and I've been taking it every day since. The reason I started taking it, and the reason I still take it, is because AG1 is, to my knowledge, the highest quality and most comprehensive of the foundational nutritional supplements on the market.","offset":2708,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It combines vitamins, minerals, prebiotics, probiotics, and adaptogens into a single scoop that's easy to drink and it tastes great. It's designed to support things like gut health, immune health, and overall energy, and it does so by helping to fill any gaps you might have in your daily nutrition. Now, of course, everyone should strive to eat nutritious whole foods. I certainly do that every day.","offset":2730,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I'm often asked if you could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? And my answer is always AG1, because it has just been oh-so-critical to supporting all aspects of my physical health, mental health, and performance. I know this from my own experience with AG1, and I continually hear this from other people who use AG1 daily. If you would like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer.","offset":2751,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: For a limited time, AG1 is giving away six free travel packs of AG1 and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2 with your subscription. Again, that's drinkag1 with the numeral one dot com slash huberman to get six free travel packs and a bottle of Vitamin D3K2 with your subscription.","offset":2777,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Why do you think it is that so many people find it challenging to maintain a meditation practice? I mean, 5 minutes a day is nothing. 10 minutes a day is barely anything even for the very busiest of person. And the positive effects that you describe—and we could also layer in reduced stress, anxiety, lower resting heart rate, uh increase uh you know, um feelings of well-being and on and on—I mean, there there are just so many great studies now, including, like you said, you know, double-blind trials. I mean, it's it's incredible.","offset":2799,"duration":39},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Um, so why do you think it's so hard for people to maintain this practice of just saying, \"Okay, you know what, I'm going to just go into this atypical state. It's it's not being stimulated by anything in my environment. I have to do this internally. There aren't gyms to go to for this.\" although, I mean there are breathwork classes and things like that, but people don't tend to stick to it. That's the challenge.","offset":2838,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so I do have a theory about it, which I'll share. But before I do that, let me just say that uh I often use the analogy of brushing your teeth. When when humans first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And somehow, a very large swath of humanity has learned to brush their teeth every day. It's not part of our genome.","offset":2864,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I think most people brush their teeth so that their breath isn't bad. I think they like the idea that their teeth look cleaner and they get less um gum disease, et cetera. But all the scary stuff is actually very uh ineffective public health messaging. I mean, that's my guess.","offset":2890,"duration":23},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so actually that's quite interesting, um that that view. But getting back to your question, why do people find it so hard? So there was a study published in *Science* not too long ago by a group of social psychologists. And um it was a study of, quote, boredom. Um and what they did essentially in this study, the core of it was they took people into the lab and they said, um \"We had a little problem and you guys are going to have to wait for like 15 or 20 minutes before the experiment starts while we fix some piece of equipment.\" And they were in a waiting room.","offset":2913,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: There were magazines and books around and they also said that there's um you know, social psychologists are really good at creating these um scenarios. Um and so uh another experimenter came in and said, you know they're from another research group and they understand they have to wait a little while and we have another experiment that you can do in the meantime and it involves um receiving electric shocks. Um and of course it's completely voluntary, you are free to participate or not.","offset":2955,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And the bottom line is that these—particularly male undergraduates in the United States—preferred to shock themselves than to sit alone and not do anything. It's a robust finding. Uh people could not sit without doing something is the bottom line.","offset":2993,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And the reason, I think, is that once we actually begin to inspect our own minds, most people are frightened at the chaos that they see. One of the things we found when we look at a very in a very granular way is that when people start to meditate, we see a statistically reliable increase—increase—in anxiety in the first week.","offset":3018,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Interesting.","offset":3052,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And that's often when people say, \"I can't do this. It's making me crazy.\" Um and you know, what we tell them is that's exactly you're doing exactly the right thing, you're you know you're noticing the chaos in your own mind.","offset":3053,"duration":17},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: This is the soreness that comes from a new exercise program.","offset":3070,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, exactly.","offset":3073,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But people know to associate the soreness with, \"Okay, the exercise was effective, it's going to lead to an adaptation.\"","offset":3074,"duration":8},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And what we haven't changed the the narrative yet about this, but what we're trying to, where we say, \"It this is great that you're feeling anxious, it's exactly what you should be feeling.\"","offset":3082,"duration":13},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Forgive me, I'm I'm doing all this in real time, so if I if I'm slow, um there's a reason. The analogy to exercise feels ever more important now because thankfully the narrative has been embedded in people's minds that you lift objects or you cycle or run or row or swim, et cetera, to stimulate an adaptation.","offset":3095,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I think that the exercise scientists, the fields of health and wellness, whatever it is, has been very effective in getting the message out that the burn in your muscles is the thing that's going to lead to an easier run the next time, to more fitness, more longevity, more well-being, et cetera. But it's discomfort in the moment.","offset":3123,"duration":24},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: For a long while now, I've been trying to convince people because it's true that the agitation that one feels trying to solve a problem or read a hard uh page or passage in a book, the one that you have to return to three times that you can't wrap your head around, that that agitation is the stimulus for neuroplasticity. If you could just breeze right through it, the brain has no reason to change. It's not stimulated to change.","offset":3147,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I can after all just do the thing you're trying to do. So it becomes sort of a duh when you compare when you look at exercise or you look at um cognitive development. But somehow when it comes to meditation, maybe we can accomplish this today, I think you're doing this for us, just knowing for me, just knowing that in the first week anxiety is going to go up but that's the equivalent of lactate accumulating in the muscles, of of the burn—it's the lactate of the mind.","offset":3181,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah.","offset":3215,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Thank you.","offset":3216,"duration":0},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes.","offset":3216,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Perfect. I believe that languaging and messaging is so critical to get people to adopt practices that require this discomfort-adaptation loop that needs to be repeated over time. I love that. I knew we'd get someplace in that in that one. Thanks to you. So glad you're here. So week one, five minutes a day, expect and embrace the anxiety. Is it the thing that's going to produce the adaptation?","offset":3217,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I think it's contributing to it, yes. Um and you know it's also being aware of the anxiety without being hijacked by the anxiety, without being lost in the anxiety. So being able to see the anxiety um as it's arising um and that's um you know this is training in meta-awareness. Meta-awareness is super important. I actually think meta-awareness is a necessary prerequisite for any kind of human transformation, mental transformation.","offset":3254,"duration":43},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Um could you define it for us? Tell us a bit more about it. I'm very curious.","offset":3297,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so I would say meta-awareness is the faculty of knowing what our minds are doing. And to some listeners that may sound a little strange, but how many of you have had the experience of reading a book where you might be reading each word on a page and you read one page, a second page, and after a few minutes you have no idea what you've just read? Your mind is lost, it's somewhere else.","offset":3301,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But then you wake up. The moment you wake up is a moment of meta-awareness. And it turns out that that's a trainable skill. And that is one of the really important prerequisites um for all other forms of training, of mental training.","offset":3334,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Do we know where this meta-awareness resides in the brain? Is it prefrontal cortex?","offset":3364,"duration":6},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know, it's a network of um prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, um insula, um uh I think those are all structures that are participating in meta-awareness.","offset":3370,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's interesting because I feel like as we were discussing earlier, people crave forgetting about themselves and just being in experience, it's just such a powerfully and I think positive, seductive thing. I often think about, you know like I at a party, dancing, like like people who can just dance and enjoy themselves versus people who are self-conscious about how they're dancing. Even people who are good at dancing.","offset":3386,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You can be meta-aware without being awkwardly self-conscious, if you will. So um you know, you talked earlier about flow. Uh I didn't jump in then, but flow can occur with or without meta-awareness.","offset":3419,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Really?","offset":3437,"duration":0},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes. Um a lot of flow, I think, occurs without meta-awareness. So you know, Csikszentmihalyi who first studied flow, he studied rock climbers. And like a rock climber who is, I mean think about this, why do people do stuff like rock climbing? I think that the reason why people do stuff like that is to produce this state of flow where um most of those kinds of states of flow I think are states of flow without meta-awareness, where you're completely absorbed in the activity.","offset":3437,"duration":48},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And for a rock climber, if there's even a momentary lapse in attention, it could be potentially lethal. Uh and so by arranging one's physical environment in that way, you are basically forcing uh the default mode to be suppressed. Uh and the default mode is a mode that we know is associated with a lot of self-referential thought. And self-referential thought often is anxiety-provoking.","offset":3485,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um and so this is a way to transiently suppress the default mode. But flow can also occur with meta-awareness. Um and so and it doesn't diminish the quality of the flow. And one analogy that we can use is in a movie theater. I mean viewers have had the experience of being in a movie theater and I'm sure people have had the experience of being in a movie theater where you're so engrossed in the movie that you may actually you're not aware that you're in a theater and you may not be even aware that you're watching a movie. You're so you are totally absorbed in the plot.","offset":3525,"duration":56},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And we've actually come up with a term to define that and we call it \"experiential fusion\" where you're fused with the experience. And that is a kind of the analogous to flow without meta-awareness. But imagine being in the movie theater where your your attention is riveted and there's absolutely no lapse in attention, but in the kind of penumbra of awareness, you are aware you're in a movie theater, you're aware that you're watching a movie, but that doesn't diminish the quality of your attention.","offset":3581,"duration":55},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I want to uh ask about this thing about chaos, noticing the chaos of one's mind, because you said that sort sits at the seat of the anxiety that people will feel when they first start to meditate. Now everyone knows in the Richie meditation of push through the first week, expect the the lactate of the mind, push through it. I love that so much, thank you.","offset":3636,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The idea that the mind is chaotic and getting comfortable with that and not reacting to it, not feeling like we have to get away from it, um we've heard this before, but I think it's somewhat of a novel concept to me to think that a goal of meditation is to be able to see that and sit with it, not necessarily eradicate it. You know I think you said you know the Dalai Lama. I think for most of us we see the Dalai Lama and other monks in robes and you said he sleeps nine hours per night and he's meditating four hours per day and we think, \"All right, he looks pretty blissed out and that's great for them.\"","offset":3666,"duration":45},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Do you think he has chaos in his mind? Is the idea that extreme meditators or even, you know well-practitioned meditators are free of the chaos or that they're just comfortable with the chaos?","offset":3711,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I would say that um it's a developmental process that changes longitudinally. So initially there's a lot of chaos and I think it gradually subsides. I don't think it it's like a step function. I think it really occurs gradually over time and the chaos just sort of naturally diminishes.","offset":3727,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um but that's a long-term process. Uh and I think for most of us, uh there's always going to be some chaos, uh but part of the chaos also is I think a source of creativity. And you know, when we talk about meta-awareness and awareness of all that's going on in our mind, you know I often give my students the the permission to I tell even if they're not meditators, to just spend a couple hours a week inspecting your mind. Just inspect your mind.","offset":3755,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Pay attention to what's going on in your mind. Don't do stuff outside, but and and if you come up with some interesting thought, write a little note to yourself as you're doing this, you know not a lot of words, but just a note to remind you when you're finished with this session. Um and my I have the conviction that there's a lot of creative work that humans do on a regular basis that's kind of like dreams.","offset":3799,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Most people don't remember their dreams, but they occur reliably. And I think that there's a lot of creative thought that occurs on a regular basis but we just don't pay attention to it and we we forget it just like we forget our dreams. But if we have the invitation to really inspect our mind in that way, I think um this chaos actually uh often can contain the seat of real creative insight that potentially could be valuable.","offset":3832,"duration":49},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I do too. I mean, I wake up every morning with at least one idea from the transition from sleep to waking. Sometimes it's from a dream. I often will record my dreams as voice memos. After I die, if somebody ever finds these voice memos, they're they're so crazy. Every once in a while I'll try and listen to one, I'm like, \"This is crazy,\" but I don't want to forget things and sometimes I don't want to wake up and turn the lights on and I'll go back to sleep.","offset":3881,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So I'll just record something in the voice memo, sometimes write it down. I think there's so much learning to be had from what's coming up from the unconscious mind in dreams, but also just having a mode of capture during the day. Some way to just capture the things that spring to mind. The great Joe Strummer from The Clash, he said this, he said you know, if you are walking along and an idea comes to mind, you have to write it down because you think you'll remember it later but you will remember it in a form that is not nearly as potent.","offset":3907,"duration":35},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: He said something like that, that this is the mind throwing you ideas and and you got to you have to capture them.","offset":3942,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I love that. I think it's it's wise advice.","offset":3949,"duration":5},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Friends of mine who are songwriters, poets, they they do this all the time. They're constantly writing things down that they may or may not develop something from, but they understand that there's information being like thrown up to the surface for them. And if you don't write it down or capture it in some other way, it's it goes, it's evanescent.","offset":3954,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I actually have—um I mean this may seem contrary to um views of how meditation is done—but when I meditate every morning, I actually have a a little notepad by my cushion and occasionally, I don't do this every session, but maybe twice a week, um I'll actually write down something during the meditation, one or two words just to remind me, because something comes up in my practice, um maybe an idea and I I want to remember it and I know also that I won't remember it after uh in in the same richness, and so I'll just jot jot it down and then go back to my practice.","offset":3976,"duration":51},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Is meditation something that kids can do and benefit from? Has that been studied in a formal way?","offset":4027,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yes, it's been studied. Um we actually developed a um what we've called a a \"mindfulness-based kindness curriculum\" for preschool kids.","offset":4034,"duration":12},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Preschool?","offset":4046,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Preschool. And we've actually published a randomized control trial in a public school system of this curriculum. And the curriculum is available freely on our website in both English and Spanish. So if any teachers are out there or you know teachers and want to use it, please please feel free to to download it and and see how it is.","offset":4047,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But yeah, so it looks very different. So for example, what we do with a three-year-old, one of the exercises that they love is we ring a bell in a classroom and we have them listen, tell them, \"Listen to this sound and as soon as you no longer hear sound, raise your hand.\" And it's it's amazing to see this because you can get 25 three- and four-year-olds sitting perfectly still for around 10 seconds.","offset":4076,"duration":38},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But you know, they could taste it. There's a palpable, you know sense of of quiet in that 10 seconds and then they all raise their hand excitedly. But they can really taste it. And so I I do think it's possible. The other thing is—and this is something really important—there's something we've discovered empirically recently, which is that flourishing is infectious. It's contagious. Flourishing is contagious.","offset":4114,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You explained what that means and how you study that?","offset":4147,"duration":5},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so um uh in the example of you asked about meditating in kids and the reason I'm bringing up in this context is one of the best things I can think a parent can do for a kid is not to have the kid meditate, but meditate yourself. And just be with the child and be fully present, be connected, and really show up in that way and you will osmotically transmit through your demeanor um and your your interaction, you'll transmit these qualities to the child in a completely implicit way.","offset":4152,"duration":52},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And that's what we mean when we say flourishing is contagious. But how we studied it—so let me actually share one of the this is a finding that we're super excited about and it's not yet published, but it's um the paper is just under review. So one of the things we're deeply interested in these days is how can we scale human flourishing? So we're doing this kind of sector by sector.","offset":4204,"duration":41},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And one sector that we're doing a lot of work with is educators. And educators around the world and particularly in the US—but we've done this in in Mexico too, so it's not just US-based—but they're super stressed, they're not well-paid, and all of that. Um uh so we did a study with public school educators in Louisville, Kentucky. And um there are many reasons why we went to Louisville, but Louisville is a complicated school system, it's diverse, there are a lot of problems in it, and um it's a big urban school district, the Jefferson County Public School District in Louisville.","offset":4245,"duration":57},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And we did a randomized control trial with 832 educators in Louisville. And we had them use our Healthy Minds program, which is uh uh a um a digital offering which is freely available as the Healthy Minds program, uh where we had them cultivate four key pillars of well-being: awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. We can take a deeper dive into each of those after.","offset":4302,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But they practiced for around five minutes a day. The average was a little less than five minutes a day over the course of 28 days. And we measured standard outcomes like depression and anxiety and stress and measures of flourishing, and we find what we found in other studies, which is that depression and anxiety and stress went down and measures of well-being and flourishing went up.","offset":4334,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But the real kicker is that we by prior agreement had access to the um student-level data in the school system. So we were able to look at the performance of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training, and we compared them to students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to a control group. The the students had no idea that there was any research going on.","offset":4364,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And what we found is that on standardized tests—this is in middle school children and the sample size for these students was around 13,000—uh and what we found is that the math standardized math scores of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well-being training was significantly greater than the scores of the students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to the control group.","offset":4408,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Same curriculum.","offset":4438,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Identical.","offset":4439,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So what do you think is being transmitted there? Is it that the teachers are calmer, therefore the students are calmer? Is it that the teachers are calmer, therefore they're clearer so the students are I mean, there are a lot of variables. And we don't need to isolate them. I mean, this isn't um we're not trying to do um you know, pharmacology here. Uh but what do you think could be going on?","offset":4441,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I think everything you said is likely to be going on. I think the students are the teachers are are likely calmer, they're more connected. Uh the and what we know is that, you know it was interesting because we looked at reading scores and the the data for the standardized reading measure was in the same direction, but it wasn't as robust. The the biggest signal was in math scores.","offset":4463,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And we know that math performance is degraded by stress more than reading performance uh uh in this age group. And so it you know, could be as something as simple as the kids who were taught by teachers that went through the well-being training are simply calmer and less stressed when they take the exam. Uh and so their true competence is more likely to be reflected in the test uh and not have it degraded by this kind of added stress and anxiety.","offset":4496,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um so this is, you know an illustration that flourishing is contagious in this way.","offset":4533,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I would like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors: Joovv. Joovv makes medical-grade red light therapy devices. Now, if there's one thing that I have consistently emphasized on this podcast, it's the incredible impact that light can have on our biology and our health. Now, in addition to sunlight, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, red light, near-infrared, and infrared light have been specifically shown to have positive effects on improving numerous aspects of cellular and organ health.","offset":4543,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: These include faster muscle recovery, improved skin health, wound healing, improvements in acne, reduced pain and inflammation, improved mitochondrial function, and even improvements in vision. Nowadays there are a lot of red light devices out there. But what sets Joovv lights apart and why they're my preferred red light therapy device is that they use clinically proven wavelengths, meaning they use the specific wavelengths of red light, near-infrared, and infrared light in combination to trigger the optimal cellular adaptations.","offset":4576,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Personally, I use the Joovv whole-body panel about three to four times a week, usually for about 10 to 20 minutes per session, and I use the Joovv handheld light both at home and when I travel. If you would like to try Joovv, they're offering up to $400 off select products for listeners of this podcast. To learn more, visit Joovv, spelled J-O-O-V-V dot com slash huberman. Again, that's J-O-O-V-V dot com slash huberman.","offset":4605,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's so interesting. And again, there I can think of so many different variables that could be at play. Um we did an episode—one of our most popular episodes of ever—uh with a guy named James Hollis. Are you familiar with James Hollis?","offset":4635,"duration":19},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: No.","offset":4654,"duration":0},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: He's a probably by now 85-year-old Jungian analyst.","offset":4654,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Okay.","offset":4661,"duration":0},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Brilliant guy. He wrote he's written a number of of books, *The Eden Project*, which is about um relationships and relating, *Under Saturn's Shadow* on the um about trauma and healing, just just an incredible soul, incredible human, incredible educator. And um I'm not alone in in believing that, just spectacular. And I said, you know he's a Jungian analyst, so I said, \"You know like what's the key to a really good life, like but can we talk protocols?\"","offset":4661,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And he said something really interesting that I think will resonate uh with what you're saying and perhaps shed some light on what happened with these students and flourishing in general. He said, \"It's so important that we wake up each day and we suit up and we show up and we work. In school, in relationships, in life.\" He said, \"But it's also just as important that we take a short amount of time every day and get out of stimulus and response.\"","offset":4698,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Because by getting out of stimulus and response—and I'm not being nearly as eloquent as Hollis—we come to know ourselves in a certain way that lets ourselves show up so much more effectively for everything else. And so maybe, just maybe what these teachers achieved is by sitting in this anxiety—because now I'm thinking about the lactate of the mind—they're doing a practice which lets them experience the anxiety, not respond to it.","offset":4734,"duration":29},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: They're getting out of stimulus and response.","offset":4763,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Exactly.","offset":4766,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And perhaps in the classroom they're able to teach more. Teach more effectively because they're not paying attention to the things that don't matter. Mm-hmm. Or maybe it's because they're also paying attention to the things that do matter. They're signal-to-noise is higher, so to speak. Anyway, I couldn't help but reference the Hollis thing because to not do that would would be remiss. But also, you know here's a guy who's saying you got to go to work each day, this is essential to building a good life and you have to do all these things.","offset":4767,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And he's also saying, \"But getting out of stimulus response is what makes you effective in everything\" and of course improves your self-understanding. And I think what you're saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I think you're saying when you talk about meditation is that it's a way of getting out of stimulus and response.","offset":4800,"duration":19},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great analogy, yeah.","offset":4819,"duration":4},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Well, he deserves all the credit for all of that, um you deserve all the credit for running all these experiments because I feel like what's been so frustrating over the years has been to hear how powerful meditation is but that for people in the West, um the word meditation brings up ideas of mysticism and um ancient things and people think, \"Well that's not for me. That's not going to benefit me now in this world.\" But I would argue we need it even more so now.","offset":4823,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I agree. I think that um and I think that the divisiveness and polarization that is just eating away at our society is um underscores the the critical importance of this. I think it's needed now more than ever before in human history. And I think that it will, you know with just modest amounts of practice and and one of the other um you know kind of slogans that we think is really important is that it's easier than you think.","offset":4863,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: It really is. It it 5 minutes a day has a measurable impact. And so I think that if we really take this to heart, uh you know if everyone practiced for 5 minutes a day, I have the strong conviction that this world would really be a different place.","offset":4898,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Oh, absolutely. I I think the challenge is convincing people and and that's you know, you're doing it, we're trying to do that little by little. I mean, for a zero-cost tool, it's it's just outsized positive effects. I think most people come to the table because it will lower their blood pressure, they hear that it will reduce their stress, maybe make them more effective, make them smarter, sleep better.","offset":4920,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But there are also the higher-order effects um that people talk about, being gaining some understanding of consciousness and what it may or may not be. When do those effects tend to arise? Uh if they ever do? Or does is it true that by meditating, by getting out of the stimulus and response and just watching one's thoughts and not responding to them and just non-judgment, that we can actually gain some fundamental insight into how our minds work?","offset":4954,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I do think that that's possible and I think that it does occur and um you know I think that um if we're really good scientists, um there there is um an important element of humility uh as we approach this uh that underscores really how little we know. Um and I think that these kinds of practices help us tap into something that I think is part of what it means to be a human being um and and part of it is honestly, um you know we can use the words \"spiritual\" in some way.","offset":4988,"duration":52},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um and uh or \"transcendent\" and by that I mean something connected to something larger than oneself. And I know that this is getting into a little bit of woo territory um and uh uh but people do have a taste of this and it helps to give their life more meaning and and to infuse it with a kind of purpose that um I think is really beneficial.","offset":5040,"duration":46},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I wonder—and I'd love your thoughts on this—whether by doing meditation and seeing that the mind is chaotic and that it's difficult to control and that perhaps the best thing we can do is just observe and not respond to it but not try and control it, that inevitably in one's meditation practice that the reality surfaces that we're all going to die. And I think for a lot of people the fear of death is terrifying.","offset":5086,"duration":41},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I mean, it's inevitable and it's terrifying. And I do sometimes feel that a lot of the the stuff in the world that we're offered, whether or not it's drugs or alcohol or excessive work or whatever, just all the stuff is um that a deeper layer of that offering is that it it distracts us from that reality. Because it's terrifying, right? I don't most any healthy person doesn't want to die.","offset":5127,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Although I don't think it's terrifying for all people and I think that it's this is actually one of the dimensions that is shifted by long-term meditation practice unquestionably.","offset":5162,"duration":12},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Is it shifted because people come to some understanding of energy and the fact that they will likely become part of something else, or do you think it's that they can just accept the reality that we're here then we're not here?","offset":5174,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I think it's more the latter and also, um imagine that this is the last day we're living, right now.","offset":5190,"duration":9},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Friday the 13th, of all days.","offset":5199,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Of all days, it happens to be Friday the 13th. Uh and you know, are we um are we showing up in a way that feels right for us? Um and making the most of our lives and not squandering the opportunity that we have? And if we can live every day in that way, uh it really will change, I think, how we approach our mortality.","offset":5201,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And I know for me personally, I mean we I'm not well, it I I feel very differently about dying today than I did like 15 years ago. It's that that's one dimension where there's been a dramatic shift.","offset":5229,"duration":21},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Would you mind elaborating on that? How so? How did you feel about it 15, 20 years ago?","offset":5250,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I was terrified, you know in the same way. I, you know had a family, I have two kids, I have all these, you know responsibilities and um I reflect on this. I really do. And um you know if I died today, I would feel like I've lived a very fulfilling life. Um and uh uh and I'm fine with that.","offset":5254,"duration":39},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That's a great thing to be able to say. That's a great thing to be able to say. I don't think most people would probably be able to say the same wholeheartedly. Yeah. And you attribute some of that sense to meditation?","offset":5293,"duration":15},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Definitely, but it's been gradual. You know I've been at this my I my very first meditation retreat was in 1974. Um and I've been practicing daily ever since.","offset":5308,"duration":16},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Every single day?","offset":5324,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Well, I may have missed, you know one or two days a year when I had a 6 a.m. flight, but other than that, yes.","offset":5326,"duration":8},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And what has your practice um your most consistent practice been?","offset":5334,"duration":6},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know my practice has changed many times over these the course of these years and very different traditions in which I've practiced um so.","offset":5340,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: What about time of day? Is it typically morning?","offset":5350,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Always been morning for me.","offset":5354,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You get up, you use the bathroom, have a drink of water and start, or you go right into it?","offset":5355,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: No, I get up um and I make myself these days a cup of strong black tea um and I drink the tea, which takes maybe 15 minutes, um and then I meditate.","offset":5359,"duration":13},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Got it. Do you set a timer or a chime?","offset":5372,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I do set a timer. And you know, I meditate at various lengths, but I my modal time sitting is about 45 minutes a day. Um sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter but usually around 45 minutes a day. And maybe three or four days a week I do a really short practice at night, maybe 5 minutes before I go to sleep.","offset":5374,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Since everyone that takes on the 5-minute-a-day 30-day meditation challenge will do it, um once they reach 30 days, would does it make sense to update that to a longer meditation, or would you just suggest that people stay with that as long as possible?","offset":5410,"duration":18},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: What I would suggest is check in with yourself um and see how you're feeling about it and um how it's resonating with you and um uh and if you feel like you can't really do much more, just stick with 5 minutes a day and keep doing that. The important thing is to stick with a daily practice. And one of the things that um we talk about in this new book, *Born to Flourish*, is a lot of people have a really difficult time coming up with a being able to do this daily.","offset":5428,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And one of the things that we talk about based on our finding that it doesn't matter, at least in the early stages, whether you're meditating uh as a formal practice or doing it while doing other activities of daily living that are not demanding, like walking or commuting, you tie this to regular activities that you do every day, whatever those activities are. And we talk about this idea of social zeitgebers.","offset":5464,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: A zeitgeber, as you know, uh is um an environmental event, a signal um that is that marks a in the classical literature a biological rhythm like um light is a zeitgeber um to set our biological rhythms. But we in the modern world we have social zeitgebers that are human-created zeitgebers. So eating, for example, is a zeitgeber.","offset":5500,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um we eat typically at roughly similar times every day, at least most people. And that's an opportunity. Uh you do that every day, you can pair a little practice with that. Um and you know one of the practices that you can do, which I do every time I eat, virtually, unless I'm eating with someone and it's awkward. Um but I do it at home, is do a little appreciation practice. Spend just a um 30 to to 90 seconds reflecting on all the people it took to have food on your plate.","offset":5529,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um and it also gives you a sense of interdependence. And when I sit down, you know and have my breakfast, uh it's a cue for me. It's a social zeitgeber. I do my appreciation practice every single time. Um and then you there are crazy things you can do like I have a cat at home. Um I'm the one who scoops the litter every night. I actually do that as a practice.","offset":5565,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um uh and it it literally takes no extra time. I do it while I'm doing the the scooping of the litter. But I I honestly do this in in a very authentic genuine way. I reflect on, \"You know the cat really appreciates this, my wife appreciates this.\"","offset":5594,"duration":20},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I bet.","offset":5614,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um \"People who go into the room with the cat litter appreciate that it's clean and scooped on a regular basis.\" And you know, I just reflect on that intentionally. Um it doesn't take much, it's easier than you think.","offset":5615,"duration":18},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, I don't want to um contort the message you're you're offering because it's a powerful one about bringing awareness to the things that we have to do anyway and allowing that to make us more effective and happier and more present. But there's also this idea around disciplines, and the word discipline gets is kind of heavy, nobody really likes it because we got disciplined or something.","offset":5633,"duration":32},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But uh I used to pride myself on working longer hours than everyone and and as the years have gone on, I pride myself in just uh consistency is my superpower. I may not show up with the most intensity every time, although sometimes, but intensity uh kind of waxes and wanes. But there's something about just showing up anyway and just doing it anyway that is so powerful. And I I sometimes wonder whether or not the mind is just it's our foe until we embrace that piece. It's kind of a little bit of what you're saying.","offset":5665,"duration":45},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah. And I love the consistency uh theme and also the discipline. And yes, I think you're naming something real and important. And there's a delicate calculus uh that ranges between kind of um letting go and discipline. And each person, I think, falls at a different point in this continuum. Uh and what works for one person may not work for for another.","offset":5710,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know, with regard to meditation, I always say that what's best for one person isn't necessarily what's best for others and we have to discover what works for us. Um you know what we do know is that in in terms of meditation that consistency is really important.","offset":5746,"duration":22},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I was never a particularly good athlete or bad athlete, but I've just been really consistent at exercise and I mean I play fewer sports these days than than I did, but just the continuing to show up uh allows you to be the person among your peers—not that it's competitive where you go everyone else seems to have quit and they're talking about how much this hurts and that hurts and you're like and all you really had to do was just kind of keep keep going.","offset":5768,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And I sometimes think that the people that are max intensity and they you know it's like gold medal or bust, they're always the ones or often the ones that we don't hear from anymore, they're like gone. Uh burn out. Yeah. So I love the examples of the Dalai Lama and, you know the Michael Jordans of every domain. But I don't know, I mean I'm more interested in um being the person that at 50, 60 I mean, you're in your mid-70s, you look incredible, you're super vital, cognitively sharp, you're in shape, you're excited about life, you're not afraid of death, clearly you're onto something, you know.","offset":5791,"duration":40},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So and I doubt it's just the black tea. I'm guessing it's to some extent, I mean you have all the other aspects of your life, but this consistency of meditation practice.","offset":5831,"duration":10},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, no I think it's been super important. I do think that the discipline that you're talking about is really important and it is part of it. Uh uh but again, I think we need to find the right balance for each person and initially it's really important to um have people embrace invite them to taste this with the lowest possible friction so that they can really uh experience the benefit and then it can gradually progress and and they can, you know um harness some discipline which eventually will be important.","offset":5841,"duration":52},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'd like to talk about online culture and social media just briefly because I don't want to demonize it...","offset":5893,"duration":9},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, so, um, these are, um, really complicated issues. I think that, um, you know, I certainly don't, um, in any way pretend to have the answer, but I do think that, um, we need to take digital hygiene seriously. And we need to figure out ways of, as part of standard school curricula, of educating our youth in how to change their relationship or how to be, to say it a different way, how to be in healthy relationship with their digital devices and the products and features that are available on those devices.","offset":5902,"duration":57},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, I have the conviction that it's a trainable skill. Um, but we need particularly in youth to start early before they get their first phone.","offset":5959,"duration":15},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Is there any evidence that meditation because it allows somebody to sit with the lactate of the mind can also, um, afford someone less impulsivity and, um, sort of being less prone to getting hooked by the chaos of the world around them?","offset":5974,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I, um, you know, I don't think there's any hard data on that, but I think it's a great question. I think it's actually empirically tractable. And I think it's really worth studying. My conviction is yes.","offset":5996,"duration":19},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, I think it's, um, it would be helpful, but the data don't exist.","offset":6015,"duration":9},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: What would an experiment like that look like? I feel like we should run that experiment.","offset":6024,"duration":6},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: That would be cool, I'd love to collaborate.","offset":6030,"duration":3},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I feel like there's got to be established in-lab measures of impulsivity.","offset":6033,"duration":5},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, there are good measures of impulsivity. And actually with impulsivity, um, there, there are measures that go beyond self-report measures. They are behavioral measures of impulsivity, which may have more validity. And so it would be extremely interesting and, you know, with, um, device use and with, with a person's consent you can actually get backend data so you don't rely on self-report so it can be really, um, robust kind of evidence.","offset":6038,"duration":42},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The word discipline comes to mind again and I think so many people when they hear discipline they think about doing certain things. Waking up at five, exercising, meditating, eating clean, etc. But to me the most interesting aspect of discipline are the don't dos. It's all the stuff you don't do.","offset":6080,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You know we're in the Winter Olympics now and I haven't been watching it, I like the Summer Olympics, but um, inevitably when they do the Olympics they interview the people who win gold medals or they'll do a day in the life of and they'll say you know um, they wake up at 5 a.m. and then they train. And they always want to say what do they eat? You know they go well I have four eggs and my oatmeal or whatever it is. Um, what they really need to show is all the things they don't eat. Right because sure what they eat is interesting perhaps, but far more relevant to their performance is all the things they don't eat.","offset":6108,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah. It's all the things they're not doing. And of course that makes for much less entertaining um, shows, so they don't do that. But I feel like the, the training that would be so valuable is the, to train up the no-go response.","offset":6145,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Absolutely. One of the things in my own life that I'm very aware of is an apropos not doing is not taking out my phone. Um, and I'm very intentionally aware of that. I actually do a little practice of feeling my phone in my pocket. And I really, um, will not take it out unless I actually need it.","offset":6161,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, I remind people when I have meetings at our center, you know, often it's just the cultural habit particularly with young people, you know, they put their phone on the table. And there are data showing that even if you have all your notifications turned off the simple presence of the device is enough to, um, impair the interaction in some way to have a discernable impact.","offset":6192,"duration":44},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And cognitive ability. There's this really, I don't know if you've seen this study, it's pretty cool. They um, they looked at cognitive performance in people that had the phone upside down on the table, in their backpack beneath their chair, or in a different room. And only by having it in a different room, um, do you see the, the normal level of cognitive focus, not even an improvement.","offset":6236,"duration":31},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It turns out that people can focus just as well, it's really interesting, they focus just as well if the phone is on the table or under, um, their chair in their backpack. But that the brain is using additional resources to keep suppressing the thought about the phone. So their cognitive performance is diminished. So the phone is really a cognitive detractor under those conditions.","offset":6267,"duration":33},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Um, and I think about that a lot. It's also why I have a lockbox for my phone. I keep it in a separate room. It's one of the reasons I love this podcast more and more with every passing week, because no phones in here, um, we can really drop into things. Yeah, I think that, um, training the no-go response, having that level of discipline, is the superpower.","offset":6300,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah. All the other stuff, the to-dos, I mean yeah it's, it's important. Can't just not do anything obviously. But we focus so much on what to take, what to do. People always want to know what should I take? You know what should I do? What's the ideal workout routine? What's the... and here we have this five minute a day meditation, great. But it's also all the things you're not doing when you can sit for five minutes. You're not responding to the impulse to get up.","offset":6326,"duration":38},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yes. The discomfort of body that can come up during meditation. A pain in the back, um, your hip getting tight. Should we look at those as an opportunity to train up the mind and our ability to not go into stimulus response or should we get comfortable?","offset":6364,"duration":21},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: It's a great question. And, um, uh, you know my very first meditation retreat in 1974 that I just went into this cold and it was like meditation boot camp. Uh, it was a kind of retreat where we were practicing for 16 hours a day and my body was on fire. I, it was so painful physically.","offset":6385,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, that was, you know, the most predominant experience that I had, just intense, intense physical pain. And then in this style of practice after the third day you had to make a vow that you're not going to move during each hour-long session. So the meditation sessions were hour-long and you had to make a vow that you're not going to move.","offset":6418,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Man the pain was so intense, the physical pain. And you know, eventually um, after the like the fourth day there's a kind of breakthrough that most people have, um, which is this remarkable kind of experiential insight where you directly look at the pain and you see that it's not exactly what it's cracked up to be and it's actually much more differentiated. And you begin to see all of its constituents. And that's when there's a kind of relief.","offset":6453,"duration":49},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: The other thing to say is that we've done imaging work with physical pain and meditation. Um, it's um, one of the most robust kind of probes that you can use to interrogate the quality of the practice and also the longer term trait effects if you will.","offset":6502,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, and I liken it by the way, you know when you go to a cardiologist you'll often do a cardiac stress test, um, and so one of the best ways to probe the integrity of a system is by challenging it. Um, um, and not just looking at it at baseline so to speak. And it's true of the mind and the brain. And one of the best challenges is physical pain.","offset":6544,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So we've done work where we've primarily used heat, um, as a um, a painful stimulus because it can be delivered very precisely and very safely. Um, in imaging data there is a signature that is quite specifically tied to the physical pain itself and that there's another signature that is associated with the emotional reaction to the pain.","offset":6573,"duration":38},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: The interpretation of it.","offset":6611,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: The interpretation.","offset":6612,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Got it.","offset":6613,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And when we subjectively experience distress in response to pain it's actually mostly contributed by the secondary response. That is the emotional response to the initial noxious stimulus itself. And that is the set of neural changes that we most dramatically see transformed by meditation, uh, as a trait effect.","offset":6614,"duration":48},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um, and it's um, particularly in this particular and this is published data, we've we this was done with long-term meditation practitioners and we show that actually it's specifically retreat practice. Um, so we can have two people who are matched on the total number of hours that they've practiced in a lifetime where in one person it is much more um, during retreat compared to another person. And it's specifically retreat practice where you're doing more intensive practice that contributes to the transformation of this emotional pain signature.","offset":6662,"duration":61},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: What would a good retreat practice look like? It would be presumably a course. But I guess if somebody didn't have the resources they could take a weekend and what does that look like? They're meditating a couple hours a day?","offset":6723,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: More than a couple hours a day.","offset":6739,"duration":2},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Okay, so it would be kind of hard to self-direct.","offset":6741,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, although there are a lot of online resources um, for this. And actually for a person who is unable for whatever reason to go physically to retreat there are online resources. Um, but of course, you know, I think it's probably more beneficial to do it in person, um, because you're more likely to comply with the, uh, with the expectations of like not checking your phone and things of that sort and being silent.","offset":6745,"duration":42},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm always impressed by people that can sort of self-direct so much discipline. Um, it's pretty cool. I have rules in my house like I have a study area in my basement where I draw and prepare podcasts and I I don't allow phones down there. Mine or anyone else's.","offset":6787,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: That's wonderful, I love that.","offset":6809,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's just an electronic free zone. I also now um, I noticed I I like working out, it's a pleasure for me. Um, and I noticed that my workouts would take much longer if I brought my phone in. So now I allow myself to turn on an album or two and leave the phone outside, but there's no phones allowed there either. And now I'm thinking about also making that the rule for the loft, for the bedroom. Like no phones.","offset":6810,"duration":32},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So there's fewer and fewer areas where where things are allowed. But I think unless you set real constraints that it just starts to permeate everywhere. And I don't think I'm alone in that. And I grew up in Silicon Valley so I'm not anti-technology. I just want to have the richest experience of life possible. And so I just find that harder and harder to do when it's like inviting all these other things and people into the room when you when you have a phone there.","offset":6842,"duration":53},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Well I love those examples and I think uh you know you are setting an inspiring example for others. Um, and I think uh things have gotten so bad with uh the deleterious impact of technology that uh you know we've we've been led to to do those kinds of things which I think are so important and I think the more examples of that the better.","offset":6895,"duration":39},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah I feel like um it took us a while to um become the country with such um excessively high rates of obesity that we finally went oh my goodness, you know and we need to do something about this. So better eating, exercise of course critical, the GLP drugs have been, I believe have been very helpful for a lot of people. I don't I would hope people first embrace lifestyle tools and then and in any case embrace lifestyle tools.","offset":6934,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I don't think we're going to have the so-called Ozempic for uh addiction to devices. There isn't going to be something to come along and knock us off that um place. I think it just requires a lot of self-control. But I can promise everyone that the your workouts get way better, way better. Your work gets way better. I actually think that for the younger generation it's become easier than ever to excel simply by not doing a lot of the things that other people around you are doing.","offset":6970,"duration":61},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Totally, totally.","offset":7031,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Totally. You know it used to be you know how do I succeed? How do I succeed? And the joking these days, the shortest, um, you know, how to become the best at your craft book is going to be by turning off your phone 22 hours a day. You will become best in class. I I know it. I absolutely know it. And people say well then you can't access certain things. There are ways around it. And um, because it's really the presence that you bring to things that um allows you to be effective.","offset":7032,"duration":53},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, absolutely. And regarding self-control, I think that self-control is a trainable skill. Um, and it is a byproduct of flourishing. Um, and one of the central capacities, I mean I we talked about meta-awareness earlier, and I think meta-awareness is really a key ingredient for self-control. And self-control will or self-regulation will improve as a consequence of that. And that's a superpower.","offset":7085,"duration":50},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know there was a study done by these two psychologists, Moffitt and Caspi, who um, are um, developmental sort of life-span psychologists, and they've been studying this cohort in Dunedin, New Zealand. Uh, it's a birth cohort, so these folks have been studied since birth, they're now I think in their 60s. But there's amazing longitudinal data on on these people. And um, they had a paper in PNAS uh a number of years ago that looked at measure behavioral measures of self-control in f in these in this cohort when these people were four and five years of age.","offset":7135,"duration":63},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And this particular paper was looking at outcomes when they were 32 years of age. And what they found is that the individuals who are in the upper quintile of self-control at four f four and five years of age had significantly less drug abuse, were significantly less likely to be involved in um, in uh court proceedings. Uh, they earned on average $6,000 US dollars more per year, and they were matched on socioeconomic status of their families at birth.","offset":7198,"duration":48},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: So they were more successful.","offset":7246,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: More successful. So all these amazing outcomes. Um, and they I remember this paper was published many years ago, but I remember the there's a line in the paper that says um, uh strategies which will improve self-control will lead to all these these important outcomes and save taxpayers money.","offset":7247,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I’d like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now there are thousands of quality peer reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice both from the perspective of novelty, you never get tired of those meditations, there's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation, and you can always fit meditation into your schedule even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. If you’d like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com/huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial. Again, that’s wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial.","offset":7281,"duration":99},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Super impressive. Uh, and I do think that um nowadays we hear so much about the dos. You exercise, you eat this, and do and we five minutes a day meditation, great. I think the self-control component that's an outgrowth of meditation seems like a distinct benefit of meditation.","offset":7380,"duration":36},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Because when you're exercising, yeah, I suppose if you if you really hate it and you're constantly forcing yourself not to quit, that's a form of self-control. But I feel like most people once they get going they're kind of moving through it, but who knows? I do want to um use this this notion of self-control as an opportunity to look at the other side of it. And I was planning on doing this at some point. I think now's the point.","offset":7416,"duration":37},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I'm fundamentally confused about something about life, maybe you can help me. Um, I'm still not sure how much of life, of a really good life, should be forcing ourselves to do things versus um, kind of quote unquote honoring what what's right for us. Now obviously you know with respect to morality, with respect to the the big stuff in life that's those are easy answers. Okay.","offset":7453,"duration":34},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But when it comes to moving through the day, we're now talking here today about starting the day doing something that you probably don't want to do or that you would reflexively not do as a means to gain some other larger benefit. Um, we're talking about going against the reflex, against the impulse.","offset":7487,"duration":23},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: In the Buddhist traditions, in the field of meditation, how is this kind of thought about? And just personally, how do you think about this? Because I think a lot of people listening are probably thinking, okay great like I'll do this if it gives me some benefits, I'll lower my heart rate, I'll have less stress, I'll learn some additional self-control.","offset":7510,"duration":26},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But I think people are also feeling overwhelmed with all the stuff they feel like they have to do and fight themselves. And I think people are tired of fighting. And I think part of the reason they're tired of fighting is that they're not picking up the phone and going oh this is cool this is good this is great this is great. I think that they're they feel slightly out of control that they're just can't resist it and it's just happening. And so we've lost the muscle so to speak, the mental muscle of resistance, but I think that of overcoming resistance. Um, but it's also kind of a philosophical question. I mean how much of our lives should we be forcing things upon ourselves to be better and how much of life should we just live and and be free like a like a bulldog which is the best breed of dog.","offset":7536,"duration":64},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: When I first started meditating I was fighting with my mind. Um, and I thought that that was great, you know, I'm this is uh means I'm really doing the work that's necessary and sitting through the physical pain, you know, forcing myself to sit for an hour while my, you know, feeling like my knee was on fire um, and my back was killing me. Um, and you know, I had a kind of sense of pride, I'm able to just uh tough this out. Um, and I was miserable.","offset":7600,"duration":54},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: You know I did that kind of practice for quite some time and it may have had some benefit uh in shaping my skills of self-control. But you know, at some point I discovered that maybe there's another strategy that can be effective that is um, that that's not about fighting with your mind. And not about fixing anything, but it's the invitation is really to make friends with your mind.","offset":7654,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: To welcome this. Uh, to have a completely different stance toward it and to do it with ease rather than with, you know, um, this kind of tension-ridden uh stance. I think that that is possible. Um, and the approach that we are taking in the Healthy Minds program, for example, is we're trying to do that. So there is a bit of discipline involved, but it's kind of um, really at the at the most minimal.","offset":7698,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: It's inviting people to um, to be where they are not and not and to really um, make friends with their mind. Um, and not to fight against it. It's not about pushing away thoughts, it's not about um, you know, sitting down to meditate if you if you're restless and can't sit, that's fine. Do it while you're walking.","offset":7742,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So the discipline is the intentional use of the mind. Um, and there is discipline involved in that, but it's kind of um, what is the minimum level of discipline to begin to get these networks going? Um, and that's kind of the question that we've asked.","offset":7774,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Yeah, because your lab has been focused heavily on the neuroimaging and understanding what brain networks are activated as well as the positive outcomes. So this five minute a day meditation could be done eyes open, could be done eyes closed, could be done while you're walking, while you're commuting, and it shuts down the sort of default mode network and brings higher levels of activity in these awareness and attentional networks? Is that I'm broadly speaking. I'm a neuroscientist but I want to translate this for for people because the names of the structures actually are somewhat meaningless right unless we're we've got someone in a stereotax, right? So yeah.","offset":7804,"duration":59},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Exactly. Yeah. So um, just to be transparently honest, there's been very little imaging work on the five minutes per day. We've done some, um, and what we've seen in the work we've done is the biggest and in general I think this is true, the biggest changes that you see particularly in the early stages of practice are in measures of connectivity.","offset":7863,"duration":39},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And it could be functional connectivity which um uh has to do with the functional integration across different networks, or it could be in measures of actual structural connectivity that we can image with diffusion weighted imaging uh and looking at white matter uh connectivity.","offset":7902,"duration":20},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And what we've actually seen with the five minutes a day is changes in um, in diffusion weighted imaging looking uh at, I mean the biggest change we see is in the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which um, as you know Andrew, connects the the prefrontal and the parietal regions, and it's basically a major pathway through which the central executive network is um, interacting with the default mode. And that's what we see with just five minutes a day of practice. We can see measurable changes in diffusion weighted parameters in with just five minutes a day for a month.","offset":7922,"duration":64},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: That's super impressive. More and more incentive to doing the five minute a day meditation. I guess that's the protocol we're weaving through this entire episode. And of course people could do seven, could do ten. I'd like to see people do six months every day, that would be impressive. That's what I'm going to shoot for.","offset":7986,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Six months every day?","offset":8010,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: Just do five minutes a day for you know hit 30 days and then six months later. I don't know, I feel like if it's just the repeated showing up. I that's really it. I mean I have a prayer practice I do every night before I go to sleep. If I fall asleep, I get out of bed. My girlfriend knows this. I'll get out of bed and I pray. Like I've not missed a night since I started doing this.","offset":8011,"duration":33},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: I love that. I think that's beautiful. And I you know, I'd love to see a study done with pre-sleep prayer and see how it affects sleep.","offset":8044,"duration":10},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: My sleep is definitely better than ever but there are probably a variety of reasons for that. I'm sure. But sometimes I find that I'm falling asleep while I'm praying and I just tell myself, okay just it's the consistency. It's like I I have this script in my head that I'm showing devotion by showing up.","offset":8054,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah.","offset":8078,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: It's just the repeated showing up and it's one of the few areas of my life that I was able to really remove the the need to do it perfectly. I mean what what would that even look like? I realize how ridiculous that is, right? But um some perfectionist tendencies in in me. You know we're showing up. Um, so for me the the um, I won't even say the the pride in it, the joy in it is from the consistency.","offset":8079,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, I love that. And I feel exactly the same way in my consistent practice. Um, I think that's so important. I wanted to mention one thing about sleepiness because you mentioned that sometimes when you're doing the nightly prayer you're sleepy.","offset":8110,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And sleep sleepiness is is often uh something reported when people are meditating and particularly in the early stages of practice. And uh you know I've uh dealt with sleepiness a lot. Uh, uh and particularly before I changed my routine of and when I gave up the alarm clock because I was getting too little sleep.","offset":8135,"duration":28},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: You were sleep deprived.","offset":8163,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, exactly. And I felt it and I struggled with it. So I have this meditation uh teacher Mingyur Rinpoche who uh one of the things he's taught is um is sleepiness meditation. Uh and sleepiness meditation is simply to be aware of sleepiness.","offset":8164,"duration":34},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Hm. Just be aware of sleepiness. Uh and uh and don't try to fight it. Just simply notice what it what is sleepiness, what is how is it feeling, and um investigate it with curiosity. Uh and that completely changed things for me.","offset":8198,"duration":30},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: There just seems to be this this thing where when we fight our state or our nature it it gains power.","offset":8228,"duration":11},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah.","offset":8239,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: But when we we don't want to give in to it but when you acknowledge it but you don't completely give in to it somehow it it changes. Martha Beck was the first person to really teach me this, first in her books and then on the podcast. This idea that like if a feeling sucks or you don't want it to be there that rather than trying to suppress it you really look at it and let yourself feel it until it changes shape just a little bit, her language.","offset":8240,"duration":31},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah.","offset":8271,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And then you start to look at it through that different slightly different lens and then it morphs and it goes away.","offset":8272,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Exactly, exactly.","offset":8279,"duration":1},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And I think in her descrip- I didn't again didn't describe it as well as as she did or would or could but um what we're talking about over and over again today is the mind looking at the mind. And it does seem to have this ability to, you know, humans have this ability to... do you think other animals have this ability? I know you can't answer that quest- question for sure. But do you think one of the reasons dogs are so wonderful is because they're not self-conscious?","offset":8280,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: My conjecture is that um that our ability to uh look at our minds is way more developed than in any other species. And there may be some rudimentary kinds of meta-awareness in other species and you know some scientists have suggested that it may be correlated with successful performance on the self test, you know recogn- recognizing yourself in the mirror.","offset":8316,"duration":36},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um you know there's a recent report of elephants passing the self-test. Hm. So they are smart after all. Yeah. Uh and you know that's an interesting story. They did this actually in the Bronx Zoo in New York and they had to construct a mirror that was the size of an elephant to how do they know if the elephant knows it's itself because they don't attack it if it's itself. So they they put rouge on the trunk and they expose the elephant to the mirror. And if the elephant touches the point where the rouge is it's recognizing itself in the mirror.","offset":8352,"duration":48},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And there are very few species that uh pass the self-test in that way. Most species don't.","offset":8400,"duration":13},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: We were talking offline a little bit earlier about a course that you're teaching about this very thing that you're calling flourishing. So what do the students get in that course and what components could you possibly educate us on right here right now so that we can benefit without having the opportunity to take the course?","offset":8413,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Yeah, absolutely. So the course is built on a framework that uh we've developed on the plasticity of flourishing. Um. It holds that there are four key pillars of human flourishing. And each of these pillars exhibits plasticity. Uh and these are the key trainable ingredients that constitute human flourishing.","offset":8437,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So what are these four pillars? The first pillar is and we've talked about some in the course of our conversation already but the first we call awareness. And awareness is where mindfulness is would be, it's where voluntary attention the capacity to focus resides, and it also includes our capacity for self-awareness and for meta-awareness which we've spoken about.","offset":8469,"duration":40},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: The second pillar we call connection. And connection is about the qualities which are important for healthy social relationships, uh qualities like appreciation and gratitude and kindness and compassion. You can think of the the opposite of that being um at least in part social isolation and loneliness. Again these are elements that we know can be trained, they are importantly connected to our well-being.","offset":8509,"duration":41},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: The third pillar we call insight. And insight is about a curiosity driven understanding of the narrative that all human beings have about themselves. Uh the narrative that we carry around in our minds. And we know that we all have a set of beliefs and expectations of ourselves. And we know that at one extreme of the continuum there are people that have very negative beliefs and expectations of themselves and of course that's a prescription for depression.","offset":8550,"duration":44},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: But what's really critical for well-being is not so much changing the narrative, particularly at first, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative. So that we can see the narrative for what it is, which is a set of beliefs and thoughts and expectations.","offset":8594,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And then finally the last pillar is purpose. And purpose here is not necessarily about finding something grand to do with your life that's more meaningful and purposeful, but rather how can we find meaning and purpose in even the most pedestrian activities of daily living?","offset":8618,"duration":28},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And we actually talked about some of this earlier, but can taking out the garbage be connected to our sense of purpose? Cleaning the kitty litter. Cleaning the kitty litter. And of course it can be, it just requires a little bit of reframing and that's a learnable skill.","offset":8646,"duration":22},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: There are really three things that we've discovered in this work uh uh that can be easily summarized. The first is that flourishing is a skill, the second is that it's easier than you think, and the third is that flourishing is contagious so that when you're flourishing it's going to have beneficial impact on the people around you.","offset":8668,"duration":37},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And our course, the Art and Science of Human Flourishing, is built on each of these pillars to give students not just um an intellectual understanding, but an experiential um uh practice, a taste, uh of what these pillars actually are.","offset":8705,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: One of the important insights that the course is built on is that there are two major forms of learning that we know from modern neuroscience. One we can think of as declarative learning, which is learning about stuff, it's conceptual learning. The other we call procedural learning. And procedural learning is learning that is skill-based, it's acquired through practice, and we know that it's instantiated in different brain networks compared to declarative learning.","offset":8740,"duration":60},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And human flourishing requires both. Um and most of the academy privileges declarative learning over procedural learning. Uh and so this course that we teach is an unusual course because it includes a lab every week, so to speak, um a little section where students do the procedural learning for the stuff that they're learning declaratively in the lecture part of the class.","offset":8800,"duration":51},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: I love that. I've long wanted to do a course that had information and practices involved. Sounds like you've built that course. Um if people who are not able to take the course wanted to access these different bins with some practical tools, um you already gave us um a tool for awareness, so meditation, um five minutes would be a great place to start done daily, um and just to be aware of what's of the chaos and be able to observe it but not go not follow it.","offset":8851,"duration":43},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: How does one incorporate connection?","offset":8894,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So I actually talked a little bit about connection in in uh earlier, but there's a lot more to say. But one kind of connection is doing a little appreciation practice when we eat, that's one I talked about earlier, um where we connect to the people even if we don't know them who have brought us food to the table. Some we some we may know, some we might not know.","offset":8896,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: There are formal kinds of connection practices that we there are meditation practices that we call loving kindness and compassion practices. And so we can um we've shown in a randomized control trial uh that just a few hours of this practice over two weeks is sufficient to produce a measurable change in the brain.","offset":8931,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Uh and so here's a a way you can do this. You can begin with a loved one and bring the loved one into your mind and your heart and envision a time in their life when they may have had some challenge or difficulty and then cultivate the strong aspiration that they be relieved of that difficulty and that they have um a life of ease.","offset":8966,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: That's it. And you can use a simple phrase that you can repeat to yourself um that embodies that captures that theme. It could be something as simple as may you be happy, may you be free of suffering. But the words don't matter whatever words are most well-suited for each person.","offset":9008,"duration":30},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: Um but then you move on to different categories of people. So you start with a loved one, you then move on to yourself, you then move on to to a category of person that we call a stranger. And a stranger is someone you recognize whose face you recognize but you don't know them well.","offset":9038,"duration":29},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: It could be someone that works in the same building that you work in, it could be a classmate, it could be a bus driver, it could be the cashier at a local um store that you go to, a barista. Um you don't know anything about them but you recognize them. And you can envision a time in their life when they may have had some difficulty even if you don't know anything about their life. So you do that with the stranger.","offset":9067,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And then finally you move on to what's probably the most important category which is a difficult person. Someone who pushes your buttons. And you genuinely bring them into your mind and your heart and you recognize a time, you imagine a time when they have been having some challenge and you cultivate the aspiration that they be relieved of that suffering.","offset":9109,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And that practice just done a few minutes a day can change your brain and it changes your behavior.","offset":9141,"duration":12},{"text":"Andrew Huberman: And it changes the brain how? Makes it um a capable of more empathy?","offset":9153,"duration":8},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: So one of the key regions of the brain that's been implicated in empathy is the um the temporal parietal junction. What we see is that in this kind of compassion practice there's significantly enhanced activation of the temporal parietal junction particularly in response to stimuli of people in distress. Hm. There's also uh networks in the brain that are involved in positive affect that are activated by this kind of practice.","offset":9161,"duration":57},{"text":"Dr. Richard Davidson: And behaviorally we've shown using hard-nosed um tasks that are derived from behavioral economics and...","offset":9218,"duration":42},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: And we're doing—and this—the other cool thing about this stimulation is you cannot feel it. It has no subjective sensations. So, it's very different than TMS which is, you know, you feel it big time. You don't feel a thing. So, we are delivering this during sleep. People don't know when they're getting stimulated. They of course know they're being stimulated because they're giving informed consent, but it doesn't wake them up.","offset":9260,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: And it increases slow wave sleep?","offset":9284,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: We've definitively demonstrated that it increases the density of slow wave activity during deep sleep.","offset":9287,"duration":6},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: How do they feel in their wakeful subjective life? Better?","offset":9293,"duration":4},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Yes.","offset":9297,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: And how do I become a participant in the study? I mean, I get plenty of slow wave sleep, my sleep is great lately and has been for a while, but what—are you recruiting subjects?","offset":9298,"duration":10},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: This is a—yeah, it's a big complicated protocol.","offset":9308,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: I don't care, are you recruiting subjects? I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. I do care. I'm just teasing. People are probably thinking, \"How do I get that?\" Well, maybe this pre-sleep meditation protocol should be looked at, because that's something anyone can do. I'll provide a link to that paper.","offset":9311,"duration":12},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: So, that's exactly what we're doing in this study now. We're using a—this is a little technical, but we're using a micro-randomized design where, so in a single participant on some nights they get pre-sleep meditation, just before sleep, just a five-minute practice. And in other nights, they do not receive that.","offset":9323,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: And we are looking at the impact of that on slow wave sleep and also looking at the synergistic effects of pre-sleep meditation with the Testi stimulation to increase slow wave activity. And we're getting experience sampling measures during the next day to see if the pre-sleep meditation has a demonstrable impact on their mood the next day and how that interacts with our boosting of slow wave activity.","offset":9347,"duration":27},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Very, very cool. I should just say this is work that's being done collaboratively with Giulio Tononi and his group at in Wisconsin. He's a very well-known sleep and consciousness scientist, neuroscientist.","offset":9374,"duration":15},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Great lab.","offset":9389,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Yeah, great lab.","offset":9390,"duration":1},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Are you able to share any preliminary findings about what the pre-sleep five-minute meditation does to deep sleep?","offset":9391,"duration":7},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: We don't know yet. And honestly, it's not me being, you know, super cautious. We just this is a new study that we're just in the middle of. We have roughly 20-something participants who've completed the protocol, but it's it's ongoing right now.","offset":9398,"duration":15},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Well, given what you just described, and given that this other paper described that some pre-sleep meditation can have a really impressive impact on growth hormone release, I'm encouraged to do the five minutes before sleep. So, I suppose that if you want to double up on the benefits, you could just do the five minute per day meditation, folks, right in the hour before sleep.","offset":9413,"duration":21},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Why not? I think it would be great.","offset":9434,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: What are your thoughts on open monitoring meditation for increasing creativity?","offset":9436,"duration":5},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Honestly, the data on open monitoring meditation or for that matter any meditation and creativity, I would say are very limited. In part, it's because the measures of creativity that are used by psychologists typically are honestly, I think pretty crappy measures of creativity. So we're quite limited by the measurement tools that we have.","offset":9441,"duration":39},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Having said all that, I do think that open monitoring meditation can really boost creativity primarily by helping people become more aware of the associative thoughts that they have. And this relates to something we talked about earlier. I often tell students of mine to spend time inspecting their own mind, just watching their own mind and writing down thoughts that may occur that may be interesting.","offset":9480,"duration":32},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: And this is a kind of open monitoring meditation. It's having no specific object and just being open, aware, awake, and not distracted, not getting lost in a train of thought, but simply being aware. I believe that we probably have much more creative thought occurring than we give ourselves credit for, and it's simply because we forget. And I think this can really improve that. But the data are pretty meager.","offset":9512,"duration":35},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: But you still recommend it if people want to increase their creativity.","offset":9547,"duration":3},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Yes, I do, because this is one of those things where there's essentially no downside to it. We know there'll be other benefits that have been empirically documented.","offset":9550,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Awesome. Well, Richie, thank you so much for coming here today and educating us on meditation, but really much more than that. You've educated us on states of mind, how to access different states of mind, what they mean, how they impact the state of being and our traits that we will enter after we meditate. And now everyone should be inspired to do at least five minutes per day of meditation, maybe in the morning, maybe before sleep.","offset":9566,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Would love to get the update on this study that you described looking at slow wave sleep. And I'm really excited about your book. It's so great that you have a new book coming out because I, of course, read *Altered Traits*. I've talked about it on the podcast. I love, love, love the book. We'll put a link to that. But *Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving* by you and we should give credit to your co-author, Cortland Dahl.","offset":9592,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: And he is a neuroscientist as well?","offset":9617,"duration":2},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Yes, he's a neuroscientist, contemplative scientist, and chief contemplative officer of our non-profit human.org.","offset":9619,"duration":10},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Awesome. Well, you're a real pioneer in this space. The field, as it were, of meditation really needed a serious scientist to break in and study and share so that everyone could learn about and adopt meditation and you've just done so much to educate so many people and coming here today you've just done more of that, so I have immense gratitude for you and I know millions of other people do as well. So, thank you so much.","offset":9629,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Davidson: Thank you. And I want to express my immense gratitude to you for bringing science that can make our lives better to so many people, and that is such a gift and such a wonderful service that you are providing, so thank you.","offset":9654,"duration":16},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson. To learn more about his work and to find a link to his new book, *Born to Flourish*, please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple.","offset":9670,"duration":25},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.","offset":9695,"duration":26},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled *Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body*. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's been based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included.","offset":9721,"duration":24},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called *Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body*. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast.","offset":9745,"duration":331},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one-to-three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure.","offset":10076,"duration":23},{"text":"Dr. Huberman: We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero-cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. 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