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Change Your Brain Every Day
Dave Asprey: Meditation Power, Dopamine Reset & the Truth About Triggers
00:47:01
In this mind-expanding episode, Dr. Daniel Amen sits down with biohacker and Heavily Meditated author Dave Asprey to explore how meditation—and a few unexpected brain hacks—can rewire your nervous system in real time. You’ll learn Dave’s go-to...
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- [00:00]
Dave Asprey
The problem is, most people, forgiveness is a mental and a cognitive concept. I decide I forgive them. I've said I forgive them, therefore I forgive them. But if you check in with your heart and your nervous system, you did not forgive them. So this is a way of really turning on so that the feelings in the body match the thoughts in the head and the sense of relaxation and power and removal of friction in your life. It's profound.
- [00:26]
Daniel Amen
Every day you are making your brain better or you are making it worse. Stay with us to learn how you can change your brain for the better every day. Are you excited to optimize your brain and help the brains of those you love? Do you want to prevent or treat memory problems, anxiety or depression? Do you want to be happier? That's why I created Amen University to take what I've learned over the last 45 years and help you have a better brain, a better mind and a better body. You can take courses like our 30 day happiness challenge which was shown in research to increase happiness by 32% in just 30 days, or memory Rescue or Overcoming Anxiety, depression, trauma and grief, or Healing Add at home in 30 days and much more. We also have professional courses and courses for kids, including brain thrive by 25, which was found in independent research to decrease depression and improve self esteem. And as a special offer just for our listeners, you can save 20% on your next course. Visit amenuniversity.com and use the code PODCAST20. Welcome everybody. I am so excited about this podcast. I know you will be too. I am with my really good friend Dave Asprey and Dave has been on the show before. He has a new book, love the title, Heavily Meditated the fast path to remove your triggers, dissolve stress and activate inner peace. So for those of you who don't know, Dave's the author of four New York Times best selling books. He's the founder of Bulletproof Bulletproof Coffee. He is considered by many to be the father of the biohacking movement. It was about 16 years ago he got scanned. He saw a friend of mine in the Silicon Valley. He was not doing well and ended up getting scanned. His scan looked terrible. Turned out it was mold exposure and his scan 13 years later, dramatically better. And so he and I have loved each other for a long time. And so I saw his new book coming out. I'm like, everybody needs to meditate. But when people hear that word, they're afraid. I can't sit still. I'm not going to India. And sitting on the floor for three weeks Help me.
- [03:44]
Dave Asprey
That's why I wrote the book. I can say there wouldn't be a biohacking movement without your work. That I had read your very first book. I was failing out of Wharton Business School, and my brain just wouldn't work. And I worked so hard on losing some of the hundred pounds that I've lost. But the brain fog was just profound. And I thought it was. Maybe I was dumb, maybe there's a moral failing. I'm just not trying as hard as everyone else. And when I got the results of my brain scan back, I'm like, number one, now people believe me. Number two, I just have a hardware problem. I can fix a hardware problem, but if it's a problem with who I am, that's a much bigger issue. And I wouldn't have graduated from Wharton without having my brain scans. And that shift from it's about me to it's about my body and my hardware and how are my organs functioning? That was a big shift. I was already into the longevity movement, but I needed to understand that so that I could put the picture together that became biohacking. When I wrote that first post, started the conference, just introduced the word on Twitter, saying, guys, here's a definition for this thing that I do because I need a name where I'm about consciousness, longevity, and anything else that I want my body to do, including losing weight or not having pain in my knees and all that kind of stuff, but meditation.
- [05:10]
Daniel Amen
So I fell in love with imaging because almost immediately in my very first patient, it decreased stigma because she looked at her scan and she said, you mean it's not my fault?
- [05:24]
Dave Asprey
Exactly. It gives you immense control. And look at the definition of biohacking. You change the environment around you and inside of you, including your brain, so you have full control of your biology. So now it's not my fault, and I can do something about it. And this means that whether you're 60 and you're saying, I'm noticing some aging things in my brain I don't like, or you're 20 and saying, I can't pay attention. The through line for all of that is, can I make my brain work the way it's supposed to? And now that it's working, how do I teach myself to have inner peace and to be calm and to be able to choose my state no matter what happens in the world around me? And it's very hard, as you know, to do that without a healthy brain. But even if you have a healthy brain, it can still be a misbehaved. Healthy brain, because you didn't learn how to train it. And for me, I said, well, all right, I'm going to go to South America and study with shamans, and I'm going to go to remote parts of Nepal and Tibet and China, and I'm going to study with masters there, and I'm going to do art of living exercises from India for five years. And I'm going to study with these different gurus to understand what's going on in there. And then, like you, how do I get the data? Because my sacred promise to myself was that I'm only going to do things that work. Because for so long I just said, well, I'll push harder, which doesn't work. And for so long. So do I want to lose weight? I'll go to the gym. 90 minutes a day, six days a week. I didn't lose any weight. After 18 months, you think I would notice it wasn't working. But I'm like, it's me. I'm not trying hard enough. So for meditation, it's the same thing. Some meditation takes a huge amount of time and it's very hard to do. Or maybe there's a way to enter these healing states or these high performance states that are documented throughout history. Almost everywhere on the planet where we have history. What if there's a faster way to get there? Or maybe you don't want to go all the way there. You only have 20 minutes today, or five minutes.
- [07:20]
Daniel Amen
So you make a cow hacking meditation.
- [07:22]
Dave Asprey
Absolutely. And I've been doing this consistently for 20 years.
- [07:25]
Daniel Amen
Well, and you also have a course that you teach called 40 Years of Zen, that people come to you from all over the world and now you're giving it to them in a book.
- [07:37]
Dave Asprey
Exactly.
- [07:38]
Daniel Amen
And which is a huge gift.
- [07:41]
Dave Asprey
This is a proprietary thing. One of the realizations that came to me from studying these different disciplines, there's going to be reactivity in the body and in the mind. And I remember sitting at Copan monastery outside of Kathmandu, and I'm sitting there, legs crossed, and they're saying, imagine the Buddha. And you're sitting there for an hour. And they're describing every little detail on the Buddha's necklace. There's three. I'm like, this is a lot of work. I've been here for nine days every day, imagining the Buddha and doing all these things. Like, no sane person is going to do this. Right. Except it had value. The problem is we don't have words for a lot of our inner states. And if I would say just Calm down. That actually pisses most people off if they're not calm. But what does calm actually mean?
- [08:37]
Daniel Amen
Especially if I said that to Tan, I wasn't having a fight. It's like, just calm down.
- [08:43]
Dave Asprey
Exactly. But what if you could, when you told yourself, I want to calm down, if you knew where the switch was, and you could go, dink, and then you would feel, like, a relaxation in your chest, and then you feel it, you're like, wow. I not only believe I calmed down, if you measure me with a computer, I did calm down. So when I'm in the monastery, if I do it right, and the woman who's teaching the class, if she notices because she's monitoring everyone in the class and one eye is open, she nods at me. I got my feedback. Yay. Or a thousand times a second, I could have a computer saying, warmer, colder, warmer, colder. And then suddenly I feel this new state and go, that's what I was trying to do. What's the word for this? And we've struggled with language to describe these beautiful states. And you go online, you look at some of the meditation influencers from Bali or something, and they're all translated. I felt the golden nectar of whatever. There aren't words because these are feelings, Right? And so what I found was there are things you can do during meditation that, with science, improve the movement of your brain and your nervous system per minute. And so if you only have five minutes to meditate, you should probably do what works. And we have this mindset, well, working hard has merit. So if I want to go to New York, I'm just going to walk. That would be the hardest work. It's just terribly inefficient because it's going to take you a month or two, if you even make it, or you could get on a plane. So with meditation, the world has a lot going on, and we have families and we have jobs. So if you're going to spend five minutes, what do you do? And step one that most of us learn if we have healthy brains is, I really want to punch that guy who just said that mean thing in my meeting, but I'm not going to. So you catch the feeling, and then you behave, and then you smile. But it's the fake smile and people who are in tune, oh, there's a lack of coherence in that person, because their outer behavior says one thing, their inner state's another, and we can feel that. So what people get as they start doing these practices from heavily meditated is you get congruence where the person said the mean thing, but it didn't push any buttons, therefore you're smiling, you're aware that they're out of integrity, but you didn't get triggered. You're not reactive. And the less triggered you are, the less energy you have to spend using your conscious brain to tell yourself, don't punch him, don't yell, don't swear, don't do all the don't do things that healthy humans do. What that does is it frees up huge amounts of energy for longevity, for improving yourself, for doing things that matter in the world. And for me, going from the pretty broken brain that you've seen back in my 20s and 30s, lots of anger, lots of anxiety, I didn't even recognize those because they were constant in me to being able to be present, to being able to say, oh, something triggered me. That's weird. I'm going to go in and I'm going to turn off that trigger. Imagine if you were to take your phone and every app that wants to send you an alert is allowed to. You can't use your phone because TikTok and blah, blah, blah, blah. So we go through and we turn off the alerts. When have we ever had the opportunity to turn off the alerts in our nervous system? So instead of managing alerts, we just don't have them. So we can be present, we can be calm, we can be focused, we can create a sense of safety in ourselves. And it's so powerful that it creates a sense of safety in those around us.
- [12:22]
Daniel Amen
So we have to know how to do that. But first, meditation has been studied in Tibetan monks, in Franciscan nuns. I'm actually friends with Andrew Newberg. He wrote the first book on this, why Won't God Go Away? And he and I published a study on a Kundalini yoga form of meditation. Kirtan Korea. It's a 12 minute chanting meditation.
- [12:50]
Dave Asprey
I've done that.
- [12:50]
Daniel Amen
Earth, life, death, reborn. And what we found and what other people have found is meditation activates the prefrontal cortex. So things like judgment, what you were talking about, focus, impulse control, but it calms down. Actually, the same part of the brain that psilocybin calms down, which is called the default mode network, the posterior cingulate gy. It's the little chatterbox box in your head, the critic that tells you you're not as good, you're gonna die, negative stuff is gonna happen. So it calms that down and you actually lose your sense of time and space. And meditation's been shown to Lower your blood pressure, decrease headaches, decrease cortisol, improve your sort of mental well being. But then people go, I should meditate. And I don't want to be triggered, but I am constantly by my wife or my dog or my boss or. Yeah, whatever. So step one is what?
- [14:08]
Dave Asprey
The centerpiece of heavily meditated revolves around something called the reset process. This is a structured meditation you do. It's the same one we do for $16,000 for executives in five days with electrodes glued to your head. It's easier with feedback, but you can do it at home. And it's an F word. Forgiveness. And we've all learned when we're kids, your mom says, tell your sister you're sorry. And we think forgiveness is words, or we think it's telling someone that you're sorry. But it's not that. What it is when you really study things like Nelson Mandela and you study forgiveness practices around the world, it's a felt sense, an internal shift you make. And when you walk through the reset process, and it's got eight steps in it, I don't know if we can teach the whole thing on the show here today. What you do is you figure out, okay, something triggered me. And then instead of thinking about that thing right now, you go, what did it feel like inside my body? Like, was it my gut? Was the hairs on the back of my neck? Like, am I sweaty? Like, what's the ick feeling? And then you ask yourself a question, what's the first time I felt that way? And some random thing will pop into your brain that makes no sense whatsoever. And that's your subconscious telling you that's where you got this trigger. That's what turned the alert on.
- [15:29]
Daniel Amen
So the first step is feel.
- [15:32]
Dave Asprey
Yes.
- [15:32]
Daniel Amen
What you feel, where is it in your body? And then, bridge to the first time you.
- [15:39]
Dave Asprey
The first time. And it's okay if you don't remember the first time. Just go back as far as you can.
- [15:43]
Daniel Amen
No, no. This is so powerful. I do this with patients all the time.
- [15:47]
Dave Asprey
Yes.
- [15:48]
Daniel Amen
And they quickly. I used to do it in hypnosis.
- [15:52]
Dave Asprey
You don't have to.
- [15:53]
Daniel Amen
So there's a whole form of hypnosis called hypnoanalysis. Put them in a trance, go back to the symptom, when did the symptoms start? And they go back to it.
- [16:03]
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
- [16:04]
Daniel Amen
And then I realize you don't have to put them in a trance.
- [16:07]
Dave Asprey
You just have to have a little thread of curiosity.
- [16:10]
Daniel Amen
Curiosity.
- [16:11]
Dave Asprey
And you can't do it wrong. If you go back to seventh grade and you realize it actually was when you were three. It doesn't matter. Do the seventh grade one and then the three year old one will appear. And so many of these, as you know, they come from between 0 and 7. And there was a time when you were young that you didn't feel safe. And it doesn't matter if your parents are doing their best. You had great parents. Like there was a time and they might not have even known it. So something just set a little alert, like I wasn't safe. If anything like that ever happens again, don't feel safe. And then we, there's anxiety and then we look around and go, I'm not feeling that. I'm feeling triggered. So I'm going to find a reason with my rational brain. And it's, you know, my wife or my dog or whatever. But that's not real. It's just a rapid protection system. So the first step of the reset process, go back as far as you can and then say, all right, what happened? And then you set up a structured thing where you sit the person across from you and a little meditation state. You don't have to do breath work. It's easier in the dark. It's easier with your eyes closed. And 40 years is in. We have special glasses that keep people in a certain brain state. According now we have actually a published study in a journal about the color of lenses. And we have electrodes on them and they're in the dark. But you go back, all right, I'm going to sit the person across from me. And then we make a very specific charge. You did X and it made me feel Y. And a lot of people say, well, I want to forgive. They'll say something like, oh, me, my dad was mean to me when I was young. Dad, you were mean to me. And it made me feel sad. It doesn't work. It has to be a specific behavior. So you might have to do 20 or 30 of these on someone who's a major figure in your life. Right? So there's that one time where say someone was really critical when you were young and you just felt crushed. Say, okay, you were really critical this one time and it made me feel helpless and hopeless. Okay, so once that happens, now you've said you did this. It made me feel this way. And here's where the reset process gets itchy. You have to feel that feeling one more time and you really go in. And we have the ability, like on Spotify, you can pick any song and play it as many times. Any feeling we've ever Felt, you have the ability to play it in your body. So you play back that feeling just for a minute. And it's okay if there's tears. It's okay if you sweat and feel nauseous or angry or your muscles get tense. Great. The more you feel it in your body, not think about it, but feel it, the better it works. And then you shift into an altered state where you start looking at your heart, feeling your heart, and you see it from the other person's point of view. And you ask a question, what had to happen to that person to make them do that? And you start realizing, oh, my gosh, my parent learned that from their parents, and their parents learned it from their parents who were chased out of their country in World War II and grew up with trauma and poverty. And you realize that this person sitting across from you who you're very upset by, you see him as a. As a child. You see all the things that make them a human, a flawed human, just like you and what you feel. And there's more descriptions in. In the book. You sort of feel your heart open a little bit, and you start really just feeling compassion. And there's three steps that we work towards. The first one is empathy. Can you at least sort of feel the pain that this person was feeling? Like, how miserable did they have to be to do that to me? Like, oh, kind of feeling a little bit sad for them. And then you step out of empathy, which is feeling their pain, into compassion, which I wish them well. Like, the fact that they did this wasn't about me, it was about them. And as you do this, you're looking to create this sense of expansive relaxation that comes out of your heart, and it floods your whole body. And the ultimate state above that is even equanimity, where you're like, I can love this person. I forgive this person. And you can do this with the most mean, narcissist, abusive people in your life. You have to call them. You have to tell them you forgave them. You're turning off the alert. And the trick behind the reset process is when you feel the pain just one time, and then you feel this state of compassion that happens. It cancels it out. But here's the biggest trick in the reset process that's missing from most of the work on forgiveness. To go into that state of compassion, you cannot do this neurologically without gratitude first. So you feel the pain, and then you think, what's one good thing that came out of this? So say you're dealing with a Bully. I was bullied really hard in seventh grade and I was well, okay, what's one good thing I learned how to be tough. Okay. It turns out the ego, the body, we love getting gifts. We love things like that. So you just have to say, I was in this state of, ah, I'm unsafe. Oh, my gosh, something good happened. It can be tiny and then you can step into compassion. And most practices will teach you feel the pain and then go into compassion. But if you don't have the bridge of gratitude, it doesn't work. And we can show this with all the EEG neuroscience. And what typically happens when someone does this process is we'll see this amazing drop in their aggressive focus beta brain waves. And usually we'll see a crossover of their theta and their alpha brainwaves, See a huge spike in alpha brain waves and a drop in their theta. So it's when these brain waves cross over, people report, I was just doing forgiveness on something that really bothered me as a kid. And I saw an angel. I saw an angel. I experienced a feeling, a sacred feeling, a divine feeling that came just from setting down a grudge. So forgiveness has nothing to do with the other person. It's turning off your own alerts and seeing everyone as a flawed human. And when you go through anytime I'm triggered at all in my life, I run this process because any trigger I'm experiencing is room for improvement and evolution of my own spirit. I had a really big one. I went through. You want me to share it? Going back to the beginning of the biohacking movement, sometime 2014, 2015, I went on the Joe Rogan show and he was really complimentary. He said a lot of really good things. It helped him with some of his brain stuff and with his nutrition. But then a company he's an investor in decided to copy some of my work. And I went back on the show and it just had a really strange vibe. And the next day he just went online and just said, dave's a bad man. And nothing he said is real. Like, there was a really focused attempt on to say after my reputation now, I should have just been like, whatever that would have been if I was emotionally where I am now. But it triggered something. And in the book, I talk about these the two things that are most painful for adults, especially entrepreneurs, and high performance people. It's injustice and betrayal. And in this case, I had gone in and done my best to serve Joe and his audience and the injustice of him just saying, screw you, buddy. I sat down to do the reset process. It took me six months to decide I was going to do it because I was a little stubborn and I was still working on how all this stuff works. And what flowed into my head made no sense whatsoever. When I was in first grade, a kid did something he shouldn't have done. And like a tattletale, I told the teacher. And the teacher comes in and asks little Johnny, did you do this? He goes, I didn't do it. Dave did it. So I got sent to the principal's office. And as a kid, I was so outraged that I did the right thing and I got punished for it. I didn't remember, this was 30 years ago. I had no. But it just popped into my head. And as soon as I ran the reset process on that, all this story of, oh, my gosh, my reputation, what are people gonna say? It's not fair. All of that just dissolved. The reality was, every time Joe Rogan says, I'm a bad man, I sell more coffee. I couldn't see it. My team's like, dave, why are you so reactive? It was because of stupid first grade trauma. I'd forgotten. But when I did that, I made peace with injustice. The world is not always just. I do not have to be triggered when I don't get what I think I'm going to get. And it's created so much peace. And when I work with entrepreneurs, it's betrayal and it's injustice and man.
- [24:43]
Daniel Amen
Well, you know, I've had. I've been attacked, like, viciously for 35 years.
- [24:48]
Dave Asprey
And you've held the line and. Yeah. How do you do it?
- [24:53]
Daniel Amen
It's so funny. I was. I was thinking, like, if I go back too early on and because part of it becomes panic, it's not anymore. But when you have the Washington Post using words like charlatan, snake oil salesman, and things like that, even though snake oil is 23% omega 3 fatty acids. Just saying. When I was four, I was in swimming lessons and the teacher was not having it with me and hit me during the oh, wow. Swimming lesson. My mom watched it and she, like, took me out of swimming classes, took me home, told my father. My father took me and threw me in the pool.
- [25:38]
Dave Asprey
A little trauma there.
- [25:40]
Daniel Amen
Swim or die.
- [25:42]
Dave Asprey
Wow.
- [25:43]
Daniel Amen
And I'm like, so that's a moment I would go back to, right? And feel it. And then it's hard to have empathy for and compassion. Here's the Swim or die.
- [26:04]
Dave Asprey
What's the one good thing that came out of that? What's your gratitude for that?
- [26:08]
Daniel Amen
Well, the gratitude is I can handle people who abuse me.
- [26:17]
Dave Asprey
Maybe toughness.
- [26:18]
Daniel Amen
And my dad wasn't abusive, but that is a situation that I wouldn't repeat.
- [26:26]
Dave Asprey
Yeah, for sure. You felt really unsafe.
- [26:29]
Daniel Amen
Yeah. And later in life we made up. And I was his best friend the last five years of his life. But when people attacked me, I would get this panicky.
- [26:43]
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
- [26:43]
Daniel Amen
Feeling, which I think can go back to that. Right. And also all the videos of me when we're young. I'm one of seven. My older brother's beating me up.
- [26:57]
Dave Asprey
Oh, geez. Lots of forgiveness there.
- [26:59]
Daniel Amen
And my dad videoed it and so he gave us home videos when I was 50. And I'm like, why didn't you stop him? And he's like, somebody had to take the movies. Which is just complete bullshit. Right. Wow. What that did, like, the gratitude for my brother is I can tolerate people going after me and still be okay.
- [27:27]
Dave Asprey
Look at the resilience you have now.
- [27:30]
Daniel Amen
And that has served me. This process is so powerful.
- [27:36]
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
- [27:37]
Daniel Amen
So when you get triggered, what do I feel? And feel it. And go back as early as you had that feel.
- [27:49]
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
- [27:50]
Daniel Amen
And I often do. What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Go back to the first time and then re Experience it.
- [28:00]
Dave Asprey
And then re experience it. Find one good thing.
- [28:04]
Daniel Amen
So it's empathy. And what's gratitude?
- [28:08]
Dave Asprey
Gratitude first, then empathy.
- [28:11]
Daniel Amen
Gratitude for what's one good thing about it? And then empathy.
- [28:15]
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
- [28:15]
Daniel Amen
For the other person.
- [28:17]
Dave Asprey
And then what after the empathy, you step into compassion. So you just realize, wow, like, look at what. Where did they learn that? And you just realize, humans, we learn most of what we do from our parents who learned it from their parents who, going back to Cave.
- [28:31]
Daniel Amen
And my grandfather was tough.
- [28:33]
Dave Asprey
Yeah.
- [28:34]
Daniel Amen
So most of them were. I'm sure he learned it from his father.
- [28:36]
Dave Asprey
Yeah. And World War I. And you know, all the stuff that people have been through, like the world's been a pretty harsh place. So they survived. Doesn't mean they were happy. They weren't experts in that. So you just realize, okay, I got a flawed human here. And you step through into that compassion, and then you start paying attention to your heart, and you actually can open the front of your heart almost like a Venus fly trap or like a flower. And what's going on here is gratitude followed by empathy and compassion. You will feel it in your heart. Forgiveness is a heart centric emotion and it'll usually flow into your whole body and you start connecting with the other person as a human being. And sometimes it helps to make them younger. So Say you're working on a parent. See your parent as a five year old and you go, oh my gosh. Right? And so all of a sudden something shifts inside of you and then you want to go into this juicy, soft feeling of wow. Like I'm feeling joy, I'm feeling gratitude, I'm feeling love. Imagine the way you feel when you have a puppy for the first time and you want to amplify that feeling the same way you amplified feeling the ick. Since you can play any feeling you wanted, you play ew. And then you play wow. This is such a profound sense of awe, gratitude, compassion. I see this person isn't the monster I thought they were. And at the same time, you don't ever have to talk to them again. It's dangerous to interact with narcissists that really talk to them, so you'll never talk to them again. But now they have no power to.
- [30:11]
Daniel Amen
Trigger you anymore, so you don't have.
- [30:13]
Dave Asprey
To share the experience.
- [30:15]
Daniel Amen
You can do it all internally.
- [30:17]
Dave Asprey
Yeah. The problem is, most people, forgiveness is a mental and a cognitive concept. I decide I forgive them. I've said I forgive them, therefore I forgive them. But if you check in with your heart and your nervous system, you did not forget them. So this is a way of really turning on so that the feelings in the body match the thoughts in the head and the sense of relaxation and power and removal of friction in your life. It's profound.
- [30:42]
Daniel Amen
Do you hunt for triggers?
- [30:45]
Dave Asprey
I do now. I don't really have a lot of triggers. I have spent six months of my life with electrodes on my head and taught thousands of people how to do this. They're mostly CEOs and celebrities and stuff. And I measure results. So two weeks after going through five days, this is an intense five days. Two weeks after that, roughly half of people report improvements in their relationships. But if you wait six months for the brain to really finish myelinating and crystallizing and creating the new patterns, 91.7% of people report improvements in relationships. So we all have things in our primary relationship that are triggering. And if you go through and you remove those, you realize most of your relationship triggers came from your parents, not from your partner. And you reset each of those. And all of a sudden your partner does something that would have just pissed you off. And normally you're like, okay, I know that she does that. I know it makes you mad. I'm just going to, like, I'm going to smile. I'm just going to say, okay. But it's still, like, you're going to sleep at night, you're thinking about it, it's all gone. Like, they do it. You're like, oh, they're doing what they do. And I love them. And there's no cost. And because there's no cost, that is free energy for you to do something that really matters.
- [31:59]
Daniel Amen
So actually, having couples go through the process can be really helpful. Yes. Especially if they're in trouble. Yes. It's so interesting. Okay, so this is when you get triggered. How about meditation on a daily basis? Is this something you recommend for people?
- [32:19]
Dave Asprey
I recommend meditation for most people, but just meditating probably isn't very effective on a permanent basis. And wouldn't it be funny and amazing if you had two hours a day to meditate and two hours a day to exercise and an hour a day to go spend time in the forest and another two hours a day to cook really nutritious food and to go to bed on time and sleep eight hours. You wouldn't do anything else in your life. Also, you need two hours a day for lab tests if you want to live. Like, like, so we have to compress the time to get the results. So there's a few practices in heavily meditated that work. So the goal of meditation is to take the brain where it is now and to put it into a different state. And you can do just meditation or meditation with breath work. Breath work makes meditation work faster for most states, and that's. That's a gift. So I talk about different types of breath work in the book, and it's so easy. It's. You don't have to be an expert. It's even just learning the thing I.
- [33:29]
Daniel Amen
Teach my patients, anybody who has a panic attack. So the first thing, don't leave. That's the first thing. Don't leave.
- [33:36]
Dave Asprey
Yeah, don't check out.
- [33:37]
Daniel Amen
Yeah, like, if you're having a panic attack in a grocery store, don't leave the grocery store. Because if you leave, the anxiety controls reinforces. Second thing, breathe.
- [33:47]
Dave Asprey
You said it. And you can learn from Navy SEALs and Special Forces guys. The box breath is a very common one. I mean, I'm sure you teach that. I talk about the Uji breath, which is profound. And this is a yogic breath where it sounds like a seashell, almost like you're going to snore. So you breathe in through your nose, your mouth is closed, and you're pulling your pallet up so you're almost at the, like a snoring sound, like. And you do that three or four times it'll drop you out of a stressful situation and if you can't go to sleep at night, do 10 Ujjayi breaths. You won't make it to 10. It knocks you out very quickly. So. Oh, now I have access to change my state both with meditation and with breathing. There's a chapter on psychedelics and default mode network which you talked about earlier. I'm not a proponent or I'll say I'm not for or against psychedelics. Different psychedelics can have meaningfully beneficial effects on states or they can show you a state, but if you rely on them for the state, well, you know what it's going to do to your brain.
- [34:50]
Daniel Amen
I'm very worried, I am too about the mushroom parties that 18 year olds are having. It's, everybody thinks it's good medicine. So just like marijuana, it's been unleashed on our society. And there's a thing, 300% increase in psychosis, psilocybin, psychosis, going to emergency room. So not everybody has it, obviously, but we should be careful.
- [35:19]
Dave Asprey
It's funny, in the monasteries where I was learning meditation, there's a locked part of the library and I asked the llama, I said, why can't I go look at those books? I said, because they'll make you crazy. Those are only for advanced people. And they warn you. Meditation, in fact there are studies on this. Meditation causes some people to go crazy. Wow. And it's, it's, I don't think I've.
- [35:41]
Daniel Amen
Ever seen it in my 45 years of doing this. The breathing I like is four seconds in eight seconds because when you breathe twice as long out as you breathe in, it activates the vagal nerve. And I've seen it almost immediately increase heart rate variability.
- [36:06]
Dave Asprey
I've taught that to my kids even. It is so amazing. And you can do that in the grocery store if you're having a panic attack. Right. You can do it on the phone when you know an attorney's yelling at you. You can do it in a board meeting. No one knows that you're doing it.
- [36:17]
Daniel Amen
Right.
- [36:18]
Dave Asprey
And what are some other things that could change your state more quickly? There are light sound goggles, been around since the 70s where we use sounds and lights flashing to move the brain.
- [36:29]
Daniel Amen
Into a state based on the concept of entrainment. Brain picks up the rhythm correct in the environment.
- [36:36]
Dave Asprey
And this goes way back in time. Tibetan bulls. They play one bowl in this ear and one bowl in another ear that are slightly different sounds. And the brain tries to make sense of it and it, the way it makes sense of the two, puts you in a certain state. So you could put headphones in and listen to one of an infinite number of tracks that will shift your state. What I believe is best for human evolution is use sound, use light, use drumming, use a psychedelic. If you must, use some breath work to learn what the state feels like so you can turn it on yourself. So I don't want people to get addicted to entrainment. I wanted to use entrainment or any technology necessary to say that's the exalted sense of samadhi. This is what it feels like to really, truly melt into myself. Now that I know that feeling, how do I play it back? Using just my mind and my body and to develop the neurological state control so that you can shift at will. And in the east they talk about enlightenment, and in the west, equanimity is more of a word or resilience. And that's the picture of a monk meditating in the middle of a storm. Like no force on earth can take you out of your chosen state. When you learn how to control your nervous system and your brain. And it's not to control it because it's trying to buck and it's trying to fight. It's not that kind of control. It's the kind of control of you're driving a car and it's a nice sports car and you turn the wheel and you just know where it's going to go. And it's effortless and it's connected. Oh, I get to choose my state. Not because I'm fighting into that state, because I'm guiding it, because I'm piloting myself. And this is what advanced meditators learn how to do. You become aware of your state at all times and where your consciousness is. And it's not a fight, it's.
- [38:28]
Daniel Amen
And with heavily meditated, they can learn how to do that in a couple of minutes a day, as opposed to a couple of hours. Yes, a day. And I love that so much.
- [38:41]
Dave Asprey
It's the biggest gift I know how to do. And this is millions and millions of dollars to develop this technique and the technology that shows that it works and guides people when they come into the clinic. The rest of the time, you can do this at home. And there's another thing that makes meditation so much easier that is missing from a lot of modern world. It's a new concept in heavily meditated. And it's called bicep. And it's not this bicep. It's brief, intentional Conscious exposure to pain. And at first. What? That sounds kind of dark. Well, if you look back through history, monks used to whip themselves in the morning on their back. It's called self flagellation. I read about this in 14. I was like, that's horrible. They thought they were such bad sinners that they would whip themselves. It's not about causing harm. It's about stimulating the nervous system to show it who's boss.
- [39:34]
Daniel Amen
To show it.
- [39:35]
Dave Asprey
To show your nervous system that you are boss. So one minute of something that hurts but is not harming you can profoundly change how much dopamine it takes to activate your dopamine receptors.
- [39:48]
Daniel Amen
Is this like a cold plunge?
- [39:49]
Dave Asprey
There you go. Biohackers do cold plunging specifically because it's uncomfortable. Yes. We get metabolic benefits and endorphins, but it resets your dopamine means sensitivity. And if you're a former addict, how many addicts have you worked with who have a lot of tattoos? They get the tattoos because the pain of getting the tattoo resets their nervous system so that they require less dopamine, so they have less cravings.
- [40:13]
Daniel Amen
I thought they were addicted to opiates. And it's sort of like, why do people cut? And what I discovered with cutters is if I give them naltrexone to block opiates, they stop. Stop cutting because they don't get the reward from the pain. And you can.
- [40:33]
Dave Asprey
You can be addicted to pain like that. We're talking one minute. And what it's doing is it's making it so that it takes less dopamine to motivate you and to make you happy.
- [40:42]
Daniel Amen
So what kind of pain are we talking? So we talked about cold plungers.
- [40:45]
Dave Asprey
I'm not recommending tattoos, but that's why people get them.
- [40:48]
Daniel Amen
Oh, no. Do you see the new study on.
- [40:50]
Dave Asprey
They'Re bad for you?
- [40:51]
Daniel Amen
That 21% increase in lymphoma for people who get tattoos.
- [40:56]
Dave Asprey
Tattoos are not good for you, by the way. I have one tattoo. I got it when I was 49. It is. You're going to love this. Not. It's the caffeine molecule. And I got carbon black. I looked at what was in the ink to the best I could. I used a small amount of ink. It's the only one I'm ever going to get because I know they're bad for you. I'm like, I. When I'm 180, I want to say, I had one tattoo and I want it to still look good. That's my goal. So so many things Wrong with.
- [41:20]
Daniel Amen
I know. Tana got her first tattoo, and it freaked me out. It was our daughter's birthday on her neck. And I'm like, I'm married to a tatted woman.
- [41:30]
Dave Asprey
They're not like you said, lymphoma. It's. There's a scar there, and I treated the scar, and then there are some toxins, so I'm not recommending that. But the reason you see so much ink on people who've been addicted and you see so many people who are in recovery doing cold plunges, it's because they're making it so their body needs less dopamine to thrive. And as you know, dopamine rewards you for effort, but not for getting what you want. So if it takes less motivation to reward you for effort, everything in your day feels easier because you spent one minute in cold water or, you know, maybe you ate some really spicy peppers that made you cry, and you're like. Or, you know, I'm not recommending the tattoo thing. The. The title of it. Of that part of the book. That chapter is actually go spank yourself. And whatever it is that's going to give you one minute of pain, you do you.
- [42:23]
Daniel Amen
Okay, that's so funny. In my book, the Brennan Love, there's a section called can you say moo? And it was about people who have weird sex fiends and fetishes. The story of someone who.
- [42:43]
Dave Asprey
Like a furry kind of a sex thing with cows. Oh, my gosh. I didn't write about that. And heavily meditated. One chapter is a little spicy. Because the other thing, Daniel, that. That is in the book. And I. My. My publisher pushed back on this a little bit. But 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm at least once in their life. So one of the easiest ways to access altered states, like extremely powerful states of healing, is conscious, loving intimacy with someone you trust. So there's a chapter on that, because ignoring that massive pathway into altered states. And how can you talk about psychedelics and breath work and meditation if you ignore tantra and the practices of really going into the body and feeling everything?
- [43:30]
Daniel Amen
Says I don't tell very many people. I'm a certified tantra teacher, of course. But in. In the Brain in Love, I. I talk about, you know, why does she cry? Oh, God. When you make her happy? It's because orgasms are actually activating the right temporal lobe, an area of the brain that's been associated with religious experience. And you call it your closest to God.
- [44:00]
Dave Asprey
So I interview us now.
- [44:02]
Daniel Amen
Probably get all sorts of Interesting comments on that one.
- [44:05]
Dave Asprey
We will. But there's a somatic therapist I interview for the book and she spent a lot of time, you know, somatic therapy is like, where is it in your body? Where do you feel it? And she ended up becoming a tantra teacher and even a dominatrix. And it. Because it was cathartic for her clients. This is not under her licensing and all that, but because she's saying this is taking people to a point where they felt unsafe because they were tied up or whatever and then they were experiencing a release and then they were done with the trauma. So I don't judge anyone from any technology.
- [44:36]
Daniel Amen
Well, sexually, there's so much trauma.
- [44:39]
Dave Asprey
Yeah. Associated and healing. That's possible.
- [44:43]
Daniel Amen
And healing potential. All right, we have to stop heavily meditated. I highly recommend it. Dave Asprey, thank you so much for just being in my life and being a mentor to me and this new book. I'm so excited for the people who are going to pick it up.
- [45:08]
Dave Asprey
Well, Daniel, the feeling is mutual. And thank you for your work in the world. You've had a profound impact on me and on biohacking, just on the world. So, so much love and respect and admiration. Thank you.
- [45:23]
Daniel Amen
Every thought, every decision, every success is created by your brain. And the one thing I've learned from looking at over 250,000 brain scans over the last 30 years is that you are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. And I can prove it. This is why I created brain fit life 5.0. To help you assess your brain and then help you optimize it by knowing your brain type and giving you access to the tools you need to have a better brain and a better life. It includes includes a 30 day happiness challenge, brain and mental health trackers, hypnosis, audios, brain enhancing music, and tools to conquer stress and anxiety. You can feel better, think sharper and live happier. Go to the App Store and download brain fit life 5.0 today. If you like this week's episode, please make sure to leave us a review on itunes or Spotify and follow me on Instagram or TikTok at Doc. Amen and Tanay.