at the end of this talk I'm going to ask you a very important question but before I do that I'm going to give you some good news and some bad news I'm going to start with the bad news and the bad news is that [ __ ] happens now you might have had an intuitive understanding of this what is slightly less known is the good news which is uh each and every one of you has the power to control and change your experience of this [ __ ] when it happens that you can learn and train yourself to have a better attitude about it and today I'm not only going to tell you how but I'm also going to show you uh some neuroscientific evidence from my laboratory at Yale University and also from other labs that suggests that this kind of training can help you feel less stress less pain and uh change the way your brain works so let's start what did I mean when I said sh happens what I meant is that whether we like it or not at some point in life you will experience some kind of pain for example physical pain and this can be anything from getting a paper cut or walking into something with a sharp corner which if you're me you do quite frequently um but also major things sometimes we get into accidents we break bones we need surgery but it's not only that there's also emotional pain and this again can start from minor annoyances like when you're stuck in traffic when you're late for um an important meeting or a flight or um maybe when you spill coffee on yourself right before uh you have to walk on stage that didn't actually happen to me luckily um but of course there's also more serious forms like when someone we love uh leaves us or passes away either way the Insight here is that even if we're incredibly lucky individuals even if most things are going our way sometimes life deviates from from our plan and things break and our expectations are violated and it's just like that famous Rolling Stone songs you can't always get what you want and so the idea that I want to suggest to all of you today is that whether or not you can get what you want your overall experience of life in general is influenced not only by the events that happen to you but also in perhaps more profoundly by how we perceive and how we react to them so our response here is really key now William Shakespeare uh said this really well in his play Hamlet he said for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so Victor Frankle is a holocaust Survivor who wrote A Memoir about his experiences and he called this the last of human freedoms to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances now what does that really mean let's imagine for a second that you just cut yourself pretty severely no attitude that you will adopt will change the fact that you were cut and it probably won't change the fact that you need to go to the hospital but the question is does it ever really help you to get annoyed about it does it ever really help you to spend the entire way to the hospital being really really upset choosing to have a good attitude can profoundly alter your experience and make it better or at least not make it worse so how do we do this there are many ways to do this the first thing to realize is that you have the power to choose and the second is to start practicing the kind of responses that you actually want to have and there are many kinds of responses and then there are many many kinds of strategies but one that I'm going to talk about today is called mindfulness now what is mindfulness you can think about it as a technique or skill you can think about it as a kind of attitude that some people actually have naturally more than others but um the way we think about it in Psychology or the operationalization of it is having two components a component of attitude and a component of attention now the component of attention is the first one and it's an attention that is directed to your momentto moment experience so in the present moment any Sensations that you have any emotions that you have and any thoughts that you have you're just paying attention to them but you're paying attention to them with a particular kind of attitude and that is an attitude that is open that is curious and that has an element of acceptance without judging your experiences good or bad maybe you can ask yourself can I be okay with this exactly like it is now mindfulness as a concept comes from a a a long history in Buddhist philosophy where it's part of a much larger set of practices uh that all have a similar aim of reducing suffering and increasing enduring happiness and where mindfulness is cultivated the state of mindfulness is cultivated through the practice of mind fness meditation now as some of you might know uh mindfulness meditation can be practiced in different ways and I don't have time to give you a full demonstration but I do want to give you a little taste and for that I'm going to ask you to trust me for a moment and close your eyes and as you close your eyes I want you to direct your attention to the physical sensation of your breath as it comes in and out of your nostrils and just notice how it moves spontaneously and don't try to change it in any way just pay attention to it now you can open your eyes and I know we only did this for a few seconds but if you did this for longer what you'd probably notice is that as you try to meditate and as you try to notice your breath whether you like it or not your mind will wander now your mind will wander uncontrollably because it's it's what Minds do they wander and what you'll notice is that it will wander to some familiar places sometimes memories will come up of things that you did earlier or maybe things that you wish you had done um many of us start planning I know that I always have a running to-do list in my head um people often find themselves judging the fact that their mind has wandered and judging their own experience maybe you even get distracted to the emails that you want to send later either way it's those moments when you wake up and find yourself mind wandering that are the perfect opportunity to practice mindfulness noticing and accepting the fact that you're mind wandered and it's exactly the place where you can practice and develop the skill of mindfulness so that you can later transfer it and apply it to Everyday events which are uncontrollable and sometimes unpleasant and before I move on I want to make a little disclaimer um I'm not a Buddhist evangelist uh first and foremost because this practice of mindfulness has been imported into psychological and Medical Treatments in the west over 30 years ago where it's been investigated systematically but I want to say also that the important disclaimer is that I myself meditate I've been meditating for quite some time this is actually uh me on the beach in Costa Rica a few years ago um but I've actually been I started meditating about 10 years ago and I started meditating because uh my heart was broken I i' Liv with someone for some time and we had to part ways and uh I definitely judged it as bad and I felt like I didn't have that freedom that Victor Franco was talking about to choose my response and so I started practicing and what I found after a while is that it did to my mind what going to the gym does to my body it makes it both stronger and more flexible and with time I learned to have better responses not only about the breakup itself but about other things including for example my fear of public speaking which you can see is much better now um it also helped me deal with other things like uh physical injuries even cancer and surgery and so I stand here today uh feeling like a much better person for this practice not perfectly calm by any means but much calmer than I would be otherwise um but of course as a scientist I have to tell you that I may not be representative uh I what we call an N of one just one of me many of you your experience might be different but luckily science is on my side they're now close to 100 studies that have investigated the effects of meditation and they're uh likely much more representative of what might happen to you if you start meditating and these Studies have consistently shown that meditation is associated with improvements in a variety of psychological and biological functions including stress anxiety cognitive function including attention depression addiction or drug use and even chronic pain more recently there is also evidence for biological markers that improve like blood pressure stress markers like cortisol which is a hormone that's associated with stress and even markers of cellular Health but importantly individuals who learn how to meditate often report an increase in overall well-being they're happier now you might ask at this point how is it that what seems like a fairly simple practice have such a profound effect on people's lives well the answer to that is that it changes our brain now we've known for some time that with every moment our brain makes new connections uh the neurons in our brains cells in our brain make some connections and break other ones strengthens some connections and weakens other ones and we call this experience-based neuroplasticity and the idea here is that the brain is not uh made of plastic like a bucket but rather that like plastic it can be molded into different shapes and so the question of course here is how does mindfulness meditation change your brain so we wanted to specifically test whether uh it changes the brain's experience of stress and along with my colleagues at Yale University we recruited a group of cigarette smokers and we randomized them to either receive uh mindfulness training during eight sessions over a month or uh the leading treatment for smoking cessation and then we measured their smoking first we discovered that everybody smoked less at the end so Not only was the leading treatment good but also mindful training was good for smoking sensation but more importantly we measured their brain activity during stress and how did we do that we use functional magnetic resonance imaging which is one of the leading ways to look at brain activity um and we also stress people out while they were in the scanner by asking them to recollect the most intensely negative memories in their lives and to imagine them vividly and people told us stories like uh the day that their son was in a an accident the day that their brother was shot so really emotionally invocative stuff and of course what we expected or what we were wondering is whether training meditation reduces the brain's response to stress and what did we find we found that there were indeed differences I'm just showing you one brain region here called the amydala and you're looking at a coronal slice of the brain which is uh imagine an Axe Murder uh chop my face off and my face fell forward and you looking straight at me like this so This brain region the amydala is really important we know that it's uh involved in the experience of negative emotion we know that it's important for stress in animal studies when you chronically stress them not only is amigdala more active but it often grows over time as a result of stress so here we what we saw is that those individuals who learned mindfulness meditation show decrease activity in the amydala during stress now this is brain function what about the structure uh BR holzel and Sarah Lazar and their colleagues at Harvard studied exactly that they recruited individuals who were stressed but otherwise healthy and they measured their stress and their brain structure before training them how to meditate again eight sessions this time over 8 weeks and when they looked at both brain structure and these individuals stress after uh learning to meditate they looked for the relationship between those two things and what they found is again a relationship that was centered in the amydala and specifically what they saw is that reduction in stress was Associated or correlated with reduction in the density of the amydala so those individuals who reported the greatest reduction in stress were also those individuals who showed the greatest increase in the density in the migdala so what did these two studies tell us together that learning how to meditate can significantly alter your experience of stress and can change not only the way that your brain functions during stress but also the way that it's structured over time now at this point even though this is quite striking you might be asking yourself what about physical pain right that's a slightly more objective thing than stress well we ask the exact same question and there is already some evidence that learning how to meditate uh helps with chronic pain and even helps with the experience of pain but what we wanted to know is what happens if we just tell people a little bit about my mind what mindfulness is and then cause them some pain will that change their experience of pain is that possible well to test that we recruited healthy adults people just like you and then we introduce them to this device we call it a thermode uh it's really just a square it's attached to a machine we put it on people's forearms right here and then we apply different kinds of temperatures we can apply warm temperatures which which feel fine we can also apply hot temperatures which people rate as quite painful and then we told them to respond either naturally as they normally would or we asked them to be mindfully accepting of the pain so we told them about mindfulness in the same way that I just told you um and then we told them how to orient with it around pain specifically so we told them to attend to and accept any Sensations they experience and response to the heat without making any judgments of the goodness or Badness of that sensation and so it's kind of like asking yourself yeah I'm feeling pain right now but can I be okay with this feeling and what did we find First in terms of people's experience of pain what we found is that when we just applied warm temperatures to their arm they didn't really report High pain intensity when we applied hot temperatures to their arm and asked them to respond naturally they reported a lot of pain what happened when we applied the same exact hot temperatures but asked them to be mindful and accepting of this pain what we saw is a significant de increase in pain ratings this is specifically a 27% drop in pain rating which is a lot now this is just people's pain rating what about their brain activity what we wanted to know there are regions in the brain that we know are responsive to physical pain we call them the pain Matrix they include regions like the insula the thalamus the dorsal singulate and we wanted to know whether activity in these regions that process pain differed um during mindfulness versus natural reaction so what I'm plotting here is brain activity from the moment that we applied pain pain and for the uh next 20 seconds and what we saw uh and this is extracted from one of those regions but really the patterns were the same across the brain is that when we applied warm temperatures there really wasn't a significant increase in activity when we applied hot temperatures and as these individuals to react naturally we saw a significant increase in their uh brain response to pain but when we applied the same exact temperatures and asked them to mindfully accept the experience of pain even their brain respond less so we saw a significant decrease in their brain response to pain what I'm showing you here is around 45% drop but across the entire brain we saw between 40 and 68% drop in the neural response to pain and that is a lot now remember this is with just half an hour of training and what that suggests and this is quite profound is that a little bit of mindfulness applied in the right moment can go a very long way of course that doesn't mean that practice doesn't make it better it does um there's a really nice study by Joshua Grant and pier rainville and what they did is they did the exact same thing that we did with this thermode um this time on people's ankles with individuals who've been meditating for many many years and what they found similar to our results is that when these individuals applied mindfulness in moments of pain they reported much less pain but when they looked at how many hours these individuals have practiced throughout their lives and looked at the relationship between that and the drops in pain they found a positive relationship or a positive correlation so what that suggests is that the more people practiced over time the greatest a drop in their pain rating so what does all of this mean so life will present you with many challenges and I hope that you will carry from this talk today that you have the power to choose your response or at least to practice getting better at it over time mindfulness is only one kind of orientation but it's one that uh as I've shown you will uh have a good chance of reducing your stress and reducing your pain and even changing your brain response and of course I'm not trying to suggest that mindfulness will cure everything it won't uh and it's not for everybody and I can also tell you from experience that the practice of mindfulness meditation um is quite difficult but I wanted to tell you about this today because I wanted you to have a chance to try it out for yourself because even if this practice will help you just a little bit right and here's my question that I promised you at the end of this talk the next time that something challenging challenges challenging happens to you why not try it thank you very [Applause] much