[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] and it's a very simple but a very radical conclusion and I'd like to now dig more deeply uh into this and provide the evidence for this framework that we've developed this framework is predicated on The View that the same mechanisms that encode suffering and encode trauma and these are mechanisms of neuroplasticity which simply refers to the fact that our brains change in response to experience and training and epigenetics which is the genomic equivalent of neuroplasticity uh and it simply means that the expression of our genes the extent to which they uh are turned on or turned off is influenced by our environment and also influenced by training so these mechanis Ms can be harnessed for the good and so I'd like now to consider what the key pillars of well-being are that exhibit plasticity and can be enhanced through training and these were articulated in a scientific paper that we published in 2020 uh called the plasticity of well-being a training based framework for the cultivation of human flourishing so what are these key pillars the first pillar is awareness it's it's where mindfulness would be it's about being present and it includes skills of attention of self-awareness and it also includes the capacity for meta awareness meta awareness is the capacity to know what our minds are doing and if I were in person I would ask all of you to please raise your hand if you think you know what your mind is doing I'd also ask for people to raise their hand if you think you don't know what your mind is doing I and then I'd ask how many of you think this is a ridiculous question well how many of you 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 absolutely no idea what you've just read your mind is lost well the moment you recog ize that your mind is lost that's a moment of meta awareness and it turns out that that can be trained and that is a really important attribute of all other forms of human transformation we cannot transform our minds unless we know what is occurring in our minds the second pillar of well-being we call connection connection is about feeling connected to others and to our sense of place to our land to our context it includes skills of appreciation kindness and compassion and this is the pillar that the Surgeon General focused on in his health advisory about loneliness loneliness is uh the lack of connection and it turns out that these skills can be easily cultivated the third pillar of well-being we call Insight and insight is about getting curious about how our minds work and particularly getting uh curious about the narrative that we all carry around in our heads about who we are we all have a narrative this is what human Minds do they create a narrative uh we have beliefs and expectations of ourselves and we know there are some people that have very negative beliefs about themselves and low expectations of themselves and of course that's a prescription for depression and what's really important for well-being is initially not so much changing the narrative but it's changing our relationship to this narrative so that we can see the narrative for what it is and what is it it's simply a bunch of thoughts and if we can see it in that way it can loosen the grip that this narrative has it can loosen the extent to which the narrative hijacks us uh and we can be a lot more free in how we see things and in how we act and finally the last pillar of well-being is purpose and purpose is about staying motivated it's about clarifying our values uh and finding meaning and it's not so much much about finding something more purposeful to do with our lives but how can we find meaning and purpose even in The Pedestrian activities of our daily life and taking out the garbage be deeply connected to your sense of purpose and of course it could be it just requires a little bit of reframing and we can easily learn to do that so I'm going to Now take us on a deeper dive and talk about each of these pillars in a little bit more detail and give a little bit of scientific evidence for each so the first is awareness and uh here I'm showing you a picture of one of my heroes uh William James uh he published a very famous two volume tome in 1890 called the principles of psychology and in this two volume T he has a whole chapter on attention and he said the following in this chapter The Faculty of voluntarily bringing back a Wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment character and will no one is compos sui if he have it not and education which should improve this faculty would be the education par Excellence but it is easier to Define this ideal than to give practical iCal directions for bringing it about I think if William James had more connection to contemplative Traditions he would have instantaneously seen that if nothing else they provide a method for educating attention this is something really important and the fact that we don't systematically bring the education of attention into our school curricula K through 12 to help our youth is nothing short of uh really a moral failing and it's something that we and many others are now trying to encourage so one of the ways we've studied this is by looking at the brain activity of people who spent years training their minds to better focus their attention and to do other things with their mind this is a picture of a young Tibetan monk uh happens to be someone quite well known uh by the name of minger rache uh uh and um who by the way wrote one of the uh what I consider really one of the very best books on meditation for anyone who is interested in learning uh the book is called the joy of living um and here we are testing his brain electrical activity uh while he's meditating and at the time that we first tested Ming Impe which is in 2002 uh he spent on average about 62,000 hours of his life formally meditating now you can do the arithmetic at home but I promise you 62,000 hours is a crazy big number uh and um uh so we decided we'd start there to see if the brains of these folks are different because if we didn't anything different in minger impe's brain then it's very unlikely we'd see differences in the brains of ranked beginners or just starting to meditate so we did that and sure enough we see these dramatic differences that you can see with the naked eye which is almost unheard of in this kind of research so if you look on the right of this figure you see uh recordings of brain activity from the scalp surface and these dense squiggly lines are depicting gamma oscillations these are very fast frequency oscillations they're on the order of about 40 cycles per second and they're indicative of states of attention uh and also they're a marker of plasticity of the brain itself and we see the prominence of these uh oscillations in these long-term meditators and we see it not just when they're medita but we also see these oscillations significantly more than in age and gender match controls in the resting state when they're not formally meditating so this is a marker of brain function that seems to have something to do with the uh qualities that they're cultivating when they're meditating now let me move on to connection and here introduce a very different strategy for doing research and I'll sort of go back and forth among these strategies but the work with very long-term practitioners is super exciting and really suggests that the brains of these long-term practitioners are different but a skeptic can say well maybe these people were different to begin with after all most people don't elect to live a life like a monastic most people will not medit um for hours every day day in and day out uh and so what about uh a more typical person uh and what about much shorter periods of practice does that make a difference so in this study that I'd like to highlight here we recruited volunteers who never meditated before but were interested in learning something to cultivate their own well-being that's how we advertised it and one group group was randomly assigned to a condition where they were instructed to meditate on compassion and the basic instruction for this group had them bring a person into their mind and their heart and we started with a loved one uh where you have a uncomplicated loving relationship bring them into your mind and your heart and think of a time in their lives when they may have had some diff difficulty and then cultivate the strong aspiration that they be relieved of that difficulty that they be relieved of suffering and we taught them a simple phrase to use to silently repeat in their mind like may you be happy uh and enjoy the conditions of Happiness may you be free of suffering and the uh causes of suffering so we just had them repeat a phrase like that or any other phrase that they came up with themselves that was similar in content and they did this for a loved one they did this for themselves and eventually they did this for a difficult person someone who really pushes your buttons maybe not the most difficult person but someone who pushes your buttons and uh had them go through this in a very genuine way wishing that they'd be happy and enoy enjoy the causes of happiness and be free of suffering and the causes of suffering and we did this for two weeks uh so practitioners the beginners were using this training uh every day for two weeks for 30 minutes each day and they were compared to a group that was randomly assigned to use a strategy that's derived from cognitive therapy cognitive therapy is an empirically well validated treatment for anxiety and depression and also to cultivate well-being and in this cognitive therapy they were taught to cognitively reappraise negative events so that they reappraise them to be more positive they don't attribute them to themselves uh and uh uh they went through a systematic training to reappraise these events so that's what we did in this experiment and then after two weeks we gave them a task to assess their pro-social behavior now why did we measure pro-social Behavior we wanted to measure this because we believed that the compassion training would specifically um cultivate more altruistic Behavior among the people uh and so we gave them what what in the scientific uh Community is regarded as a very hard-nosed measure of altruism which is costly altruism where they actually had to give up real money that they were earning to render another um interaction to be more fair and we tested them at the end of two weeks and the participants randomly assigned to compassion training in green behaved significantly more altruistically compared to their counterparts who were trained in this cognitive reappraisal training so they they showed a real difference in their pro-social behavior and their brains changed after just two weeks of training this is 7 hours of training seven hours was sufficient to produce a measurable change in the brain that we can measure with MRI the details of this are not important what important to know is that it doesn't take much to get these circuits in the brain going now I want to in the next few minutes cover insight and purpose uh and insight as you may recall is a curiosity driven self know knowledge particularly uh knowledge of the narrative about the self that we all have and one way we can actually evaluate this is similar in style to how a cardiologist might evaluate your heart if you went to a Cardiologist uh to measure your cardiac function the cardiologists may have you uh uh exercise on an exercise bike or treadmill to stress your heart and in response to that stress the function of the heart can be observed in the same way we want to stress the mind and the Brain we want to stress it but we want to stress it in a way that's ethical uh and also obviously um uh with fully informed consent and one of the most ecologically valid ways of stressing the mind and the brain is with physical pain we've all been exposed to physical pain we all know what pain feels like and pain is uh a very realistic stressor and we can deliver pain to a person very safely by using heat and it creates a burning sensation and the way we do it is we strap a device to the wrist area this is called the owner area of the wrist it's really sensitive um and uh uh we have a little device that we strap on and through this device we can circulate water very rapidly and we can regulate the temperature of that water and doing this allows us to control the uh extent to which this plate that they have strapped onto their wrist is hot uh and so we can deliver the painful stimulus in a way that is very well controlled and very safe so let me share with you this experiment that we did this is an experiment that involved bringing very long-term meditation practitioners who specifically were practicing a kind of meditation that involved insight and we compare them to a group of novice meditators who just were learning this practice for one week and they were age and gender matched and we brought them to the lab and we gave all of them this experience of heat they all had a taste of what this was and then we brought them into the MRI scanner and what we did in the MRI scanner is we strapped on this device and we told them in very simple experiment that when you hear a tone beep 10 seconds later you're going to get zapped with this heat that was the experiment so watch what happens when the non-meditators come into the lab and they are given this tone now I should say that we are searching in the brain in areas that are called the pain Network this is a set of regions in the brain that we know to be pain responsive to this kind of physical pain so the non-meditators come in they hear the tone and as soon as they hear the tone their brain is on fire that's all that's happen they haven't gotten the heat but the brain is responding as if it's already been Zapped and this is due to this anticipation that these participants have then when the painful heat comes on they continue to respond and then when the heat goes off they show a very slow recovery now let's contrast this with the long-term meditators they come in they hear the tone nothing there's literally no significant activation at all in any regions of the pain Network completely inactive but then when the heat comes on they show a massive response and the response in certain areas of the brain is actually significantly larger than in controls and then when the heat goes off they immediately and rapidly return back to Baseline folks this is the neural signature of resilience and this can be learned so finally I want to turn uh our attention to purpose and uh and just illustrate with one little data point uh that per Pur turns out to be the single most important psychological predictor of longevity of any characteristic that's been studied among older people so let me give you an illustration of this uh this is a study where people who are 70 years and and older were followed over the course of five years and what we show here is people separated into the 10th percentile the lowest percentile on having a low sense of purpose that's the solid line and participants in the dotted line are very high and having a strong sense of purpose they're in the 90th percentile and on the Y AIS is the likelihood that they die over the course of this five years and these participants all are matched on pre-existing medical conditions at the to started this study and Then followed over time for five years and you can see that the folks who were in the 10th percentile with the lowest sense of purpose end up dying sooner having a strong sense of purpose really matters okay now I want to end by sharing a little bit with you about the scaling of well-being and our healthy Minds program we've put a curriculum together to train each of these four pillars of well being in the healthy Minds program it's available as an app it's totally free uh there's absolutely no pay wall and it's the only app that is available that is truly evidence-based there are two randomized control trials that have been published illustrating its Effectiveness uh there are three more in the works uh and um uh the data are very robust if you want to learn more about it you can go to try healthy minds.org and um I want to now uh uh I'm gonna end now and not share any of the data from the healthy Minds program and end with a little uh meditation practice uh that uh we can all do together uh and I'll just share with you this final slide with uh links to our websites you can uh check out the center for healthy minds and healthy Minds Innovations to learn more about what we do and uh now we can do a little practice together that combines all four of these pillars of well-being so for those of you I guess all of you are in front of a screen um perhaps you'd like to close your eyes uh if you'd like to keep them open that's fine too you can solve gaze and let's find a posture that is upright not too tight not too loose and whenever we begin a practice like this we like to remind ourselves why we're here why we're taking the time to do something like this and let's consider the possibility that training our mind and opening our heart is beneficial not only for ourselves but for all the others that we touch directly or indirectly and with that intention as a backdrop let's simply Begin by bringing awareness into our bodies and noticing whatever might be arising and the invitation here is not to change anything not to fix anything it's simply to use the body as support for our awareness and now I invite you you to bring into your mind and into your heart a loved one and reflect on how this being it could be a pet or a person how this being has been helpful and beneficial to you and allow a natural sense of appreciation to emerge and now for insight I'd like to invite you to bring into your mind a challenge that you're currently facing not necessarily the most significant challenge but some challenge that you're facing or that you've faced recently and reflect on your beliefs and on your expectations surrounding this Challenge and now imagine what it might be like for you to face this challenge with a very different set of beliefs and expectations and finally we're all here together because of some recognition that cultivating our minds and our hearts may be beneficial and see if you can tune in to some larger sense of purpose that these practices might be serving envisioning how these practices can really be of benefit to all of those people and beings that you touch directly or indirectly so for those with eyes closed please open them and we can re-engage and thank you all thank you so much Richie you covered uh so much so efficiently and practically and we've received a lot of good questions and I'm going to see you ready for this how many we can squeak in here to our last 10 minutes or so together one question about purpose because you mentioned how even taking the trash out can be a purposeful moment and in this final part of the meditation you were directing us towards this notion of how we are with ourselves impacts other people it seems like you're pointing to how we can have work with ourselves in in a moment by moment way even doing as you say pedestrian activities purposefully but I'm wondering if you can clarify this some for people who are confused about the purposeful taking out of the trash for example yeah I mean I can give you an example from my own life uh that really started during covid you know at the very beginning of covid I think most of us were not traveling and you know I had been traveling so much before then and then all of a sudden I'm not traveling and and finding myself at home and um uh and therefore being available for doing daily chores that uh I might not otherwise have done daily and we have a cat at home and um the lit box needs to be scooped every day and I did a little ritual around um scooping the litter uh and you know it really became a purposeful act for me I loved and I still do love doing it uh thinking reflecting on how it's kind to the cat it's kind to um people who come into the house uh so they don't have to smell this uh and it's it is just something so simple uh and you know really can transform what I might have you know a number of years ago sort of groaned in response to having to do on a daily basis uh to totally embracing it and looking forward to it um so it it's it doesn't really take much it's so simple that it just yeah it's yeah it's interesting because I think when you first hear something like purpose you think it's something like you know I'm gonna have to volunteer someplace or something Grand I mean you're bringing contemplative discoveries to people all over the world but you're pointing to it in a different way of sort of how I can purposefully bring benefit to my immediate environment and to the people who I touch right here right now it's different exactly exactly now another question the pillars are they related to specific networks in the brain how did you ident identify these are the four categories yeah great question and it's a it's not a simple answer some of them are associated with very well defined identifiable networks um the one that's really not is purpose um purpose affects a lot of different networks but it itself is really complex and involves many different um brain regions uh and the way we came into these four pillars is by simply asking what is the ven diagram overlap of core pillars of well-being that have received scientific attention that we know in one way or another um are rooted in neural circuits even with purpose being more complex and that have been addressed in the contemplative Traditions as something that's trainable uh and these are the four that fit that overlap and one of the things that you would find is if you looked at other psychological theories of well-being two of our pillars are commonly found in almost every other framework of well-being and those two are connection and purpose and the two that are totally unique are awareness and insight I wonder if you can say more about connection someone wrote in I'm wondering if you have any thought thoughts on how I can start to engage in Social connection when I don't immediately have anyone to connect with and you know in the practice you had us do an appreciation practice where we weren't actually you know making a date with a friend and so I want to get really practical here on how we build that out does it have to be personto person is this more oh I'm doing a loving kindness practice inside myself by myself at home for people who are far away both yeah it's a great question and you know the the sort of really hard-nosed granular answer uh is we don't know um uh uh what I would say is that based on what we do know now that the mental exercise that is the contemplative practice is important in helping to facilitate actual real behavior and so just to give an example you know one of the simple practices that I do and this is another tip for uh viewers um one of the things I do on a daily basis is after I meditate in the morning I go through my calendar for the day uh it takes about 90 seconds and I just look at all the people I'm going to be seeing that day and just reflect on either some positive qualities about the person or how I can be most beneficial in that meeting um and it really doesn't take much it's a simple appreciation practice and you know I find that it helps me when I actually encounter those people in uh in my day uh and so even if you know a person doesn't have a lot of people around all it takes is one or two encounters and it might be having a warm-hearted smile with the cashier at the local grocery store um you know the these are the elements that are part of our the fabric of our social lives Tina writes in you mentioned that training the mind is more effective than Pharmaceuticals for mental health conditions but I imagine you feel there's a time in place for psychiatric medications what is that in which cases are they most effective and I realize this is a complex uh question to be throwing at you but maybe you can give us a framework for thinking about it sure I'm happy to and the teenis coming it's not quite accurate in terms of what I said I what I said is that mental exercises like meditation can produce more specific changes in brain circuits than any known pharmaceutical that's what I said um and so uh I am uh certainly someone who's not anti medication I believe that the judicious use of medications is important in certain conditions and basically very serious psychiatric disorders that are not responsive to other less um side effect producing strategies May warrant the use of medication uh and so I think you know someone with a serious psychiatric disorder who wants to meditate my advice to them always is um please do this with a trained mental health professional who's also a meditator unfortunately there are now you know quite a few of those kind of folks around so Richie someone who has listened to this presentation and says Okay I want to do a personal inventory of these four pillars see where I'm at and I want to work on my situation to increase my well-being yes I can sign up I can get the healthy Minds app that's gonna help me what other suggestions do you have for how somebody takes these four pillars and says I'm going to make this real in my life I'm gonna practice this yeah so that's a great question thank you for asking um part of what we offer in the healthy Minds program is actually a an assessment tool takes about three minutes and you can assess uh how you're doing with awareness connection insight and purpose and actually if you're doing the app every 28 days we give you the assessment tool again uh so that you can see how you change over time uh and that's really helpful feedback uh that can provide some suggestions for what would be most important to work on uh and I would say that the single most important thing is to do this on a regular basis and you don't have to fit in any special posture you don't have to do this uh as formal meditation you can do this while you're commuting you can do it while you're doing your laundry um uh and you can there's a whole uh um uh method in our app you can do it as what we call Active practices while you're doing these other activities of daily living and the research shows that if you spend five minutes a day doing this on a regular basis change will occur one of the things I'd like to remind viewers of is that when we first evolved as a species on this planet none of us were brushing our teeth uh and I'll bet every person who's watching this brushes their teeth every day uh and spends a few minutes doing it and what's kind of remarkable is that brushing our teeth is not in our genome it's something that we've learned to do and the evidence the scientific evidence shows that if we spend even as short a time each day as we spend brushing our teeth nourishing our mind this world would be a different place so the invitation is to please join us on this journey and the best form of meditation you can do is whatever form of meditation you actually do a few minutes every day Richie I have a sort of strange question to end on and that is you you know you you shared with us how real the well-being crisis is in our world and how it's accelerating and you know I have um a lot of empathy for people who are really suffering from a lack of well-being and I want to address that person who's listening to this who says you know the fact is my motor's not turned on exactly like I want to make this move Richie is saying five minutes a day I have five minutes a day but my motor is not on I don't know how else to put it I don't have and I'm wondering if the from all the research you've done the most effective single thing someone can do to kind of get that fire in them to then take the five minutes and take the next steps what you found yeah it's a great question and you know honestly Tammy it's hard answering it kind of in the abstract without knowing more but let me say a few things one is that simply becoming aware that your motor is so-called not turned on is itself beneficial that's awareness that is meditation you can become aware that your motor is not on uh and that actually if you do that on a regular basis it's helpful so that's the first thing the second thing is that there are times when what's best to do may not be a form of meditation it may be to take a walk to do some kind of physical exercise uh to get the motor going in a more direct way uh and you know uh that's really could be really beneficial as well uh we know that the most effective strategy non-pharmacological strategy to increase neuroplasticity in the human brain is actually through aerobic exercise uh and so doing some kind of physical exercise to get that motor going can be helpful and can contribute to a long-term benefit Dr Richie Davidson thank you so much for bringing the framework of the four pillars the work of the healthy Minds app introducing us here giving us a taste on soundr one I hope very many of us will follow up and thank you so much for everything you're doing what a great bodh zfa you are in the world thank you thank you Tammy and the same goes to you thank you for all you're doing and I really appreciate uh your work and your commitment your tenacious commitment to bring this to so many people so thank you thanks sounds true Warners [Music] [Music] the n [Music] [Music] [Music] w [Music] [Music]