Podcast Narrator/Host (2:40)

if I didn't sleep quite as well

Andrew Huberman (2:42)

as I would have liked.

Podcast Narrator/Host (2:43)

So today you're going to hear about the incredible science of meditation, the brain and bodily changes that occur, but also how you can rewire your brain using meditation. Dr. Richie Davidson is a true pioneer

Andrew Huberman (2:54)

in this field, being one of the

Podcast Narrator/Host (2:55)

first to bring brain imaging and studies of mindfulness and meditation to the West. He has, of course, authored some of the most impactful research papers on these topics, but also popular books, including a new book coming out later this month entitled Born to How to Thrive in a Challenging World, which I myself look forward to reading. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson.

Andrew Huberman (3:32)

Dr. Richie Davidson, welcome.

Dr. Richie Davidson (3:35)

Thank you, Andrew. I'm honored to be here.

Andrew Huberman (3:37)

Well, it's an honor to have you here. I am a longtime fan of your research, of what you've built at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the books you've written. We'll talk about your new book. I didn't even know you had a new book. This wasn't a book tour invite. I had seen you give a seminar at Stanford and I said, great, here's my opportunity to finally get you on the podcast. But you really transformed the way that I think about not just meditation, but all states of mind and how that relates to our individual traits and how those can change over time. Today we'll talk about concept and protocols, but I'm curious how you think about states of mind generally. I think it's really important that we frame the discussion with this because we all know what sleep is. Most people have heard that sleep has different components, REM sleep, et cetera. We know what it is to be awake, stressed versus calm. But how should we think about states of mind? And then once you tell us how you think about that, perhaps then we can better place this thing we call meditation into a particular bin.

Dr. Richie Davidson (4:46)

So thank you first for having me, Andrew. And I just want to say I've been a long term fan of yours, so I'm really happy to be here. In terms of states of mind, I think that at the outset it's really important that we also remind listeners that there is a thing called traits too. And so we can't talk about states without also talking about traits. And we'll get to traits in a moment. But I think with regard to states, we can think of them as organized patterns of activity in the brain that have corresponding organized mental correlates, if you will, or subjective correlates. And there are certain states that occur with regularity that are part of our biological rhythms. And so most human beings will have states of wakefulness, of deep sleep, and of REM sleep every day. And that is regulated by well known kinds of biological rhythms. And then there are other kinds of states that are sometimes described that are states during what we normally think of as waking. Although I think honestly the concept of state is often used loosely, without rigorous boundary criteria for what constitutes a state and how it might be distinguished from another state. There are certain states which, if they occur with regularity, will lead to a trait. They'll lead to a shift in the baseline for the next state. There was a paper I wrote many, many years ago with my dear friend and colleague Daniel Goleman, who I wrote the book Altered Traits with. And the origin of Altered Traits is really in a sentence that we wrote in a paper 20 years earlier where we said that the after is the before for the next during. The after is the before for the next during.

Andrew Huberman (7:02)

Let's drill into that for a second.

Dr. Richie Davidson (7:04)

Yeah, so what we mean by that is that how you are after a state, Say you do a little meditation practice and it leads to a state change. That state change may persist in some way and that becomes the next before for the next during. The during is the state is the, say the meditation state. And so it's a description of how a state can lead to a trait. In the domain of emotion, you might think that frequent bouts of anger, which you can think of as a state, can lead to the trait of irritability, which is sort of chronically having a low threshold. You can think of a trait in certain cases as altering the threshold for the elicitation of a state. So a trait of irritability would be a trait where you have a lowered threshold for the elicitation of anger, for example.

Andrew Huberman (8:09)

Yeah, I love that example because I know that many people will resonate with it, because so much of what we see online nowadays is designed to capture our attention by engaging a negative affect, mild anger, frustration, or even outrage. There's other content online too, of course, and this podcast is online, after all, and many other sources of what I consider benevolent educational information. But it is so true that what we experience in one portion of our day impacts how we are in the rest of our day. And perhaps the Simplest correlate for all of it, for me anyway, is sleep. If I sleep really well for three or four nights in a row, I wake up in a certain state that certainly makes my day go differently. And the inverse is also true if I don't sleep well. I feel like we have such great nomenclature and understanding of brain activity and how that impacts emotionality for sleep. We know that REM sleep based dreams are very vivid. Slow wave sleep based dreams are less vivid. Perhaps we know the electrical activities associated with those different states of sleep. I'm aware of a lot less information about brain activities and clear definitions of waking states of mind. Do you mind if we talk about

Dr. Richie Davidson (9:36)

this for a little bit? Sure.

Andrew Huberman (9:37)

It's been a few years since I've heard about and I don't think we've ever really talked on this podcast about alpha waves, beta waves, theta waves. Maybe you just educate us a bit on some of the waking brain states that we've all experienced perhaps are in right now, but we just don't hear about that much anymore.

Dr. Richie Davidson (9:54)

So, yeah, we can talk about those oscillations of brain electrical activity and there are broad suggestions for what kind of state they may reflect. And, you know, I'll go through that. But it's also important to recognize that you can be showing alpha activity in one part of the brain and beta activity in another part of the brain simultaneously. And so it's a bit coarse to talk about these as general characteristics, but there could be times when we see predominantly one oscillation or another. And so talking about generalized states in that context may be more reasonable. So with that, as a caveat, let me say that in humans we see a broad range of frequencies that go from approximately 1 Hz 1 cycle per second to approximately 40 Hz, and from roughly 1 to 4 Hz is delta activity that is typically not seen during waking. It's predominant during deep sleep. And there is data that suggests that the density of delta activity or slow wave activity during deep sleep is actually diagnostic of how restorative that sleep is, which is a whole separate set of issues and super cool. And there are actually some really interesting, highly novel strategies now using neurostimulation to actually boost slow wave activity during deep sleep, which may actually help to potentiate some of the skill acquisition that we do during the day, including meditation. And we're doing some of that work now, which is actually, you had asked earlier, before we started, about some novel new work that we're doing, and that's all also one of the really cool New things so we can dive into that.

Podcast Narrator/Host (11:55)

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Andrew Huberman (12:09)

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Andrew Huberman (13:57)

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Andrew Huberman (14:30)

I saw a paper recently that described a. And forgive me if this was one of your papers, I don't think it was. It described a pre sleep meditation that one could do to significantly increase the amount of growth hormone that's released once one gets to sleep. And I thought that was an Arizona.

Podcast Narrator/Host (14:49)

And I thought this can't.

Andrew Huberman (14:50)

And then I realized this makes total sense. Right. I mean, it has to do with. I forget the sentence you wrote, but that how we exit one state impacts how we encounter the next one and perhaps even our trait within that next event of life. So we'll definitely get back to this when we talk about protocols because I think that people vastly underestimate the extent to which different. Let's call them meditations for lack of a better word right now, how that can impact how we show up to work, how we show up to relating how we show up even to sleep.

Dr. Richie Davidson (15:26)

Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman (15:26)

And it's not just about being calm

Podcast Narrator/Host (15:28)

so you can fall asleep.

Andrew Huberman (15:29)

Turns out this meditation that was described boosts growth hormone in an incredible way without altering some of the other features of sleep.

Dr. Richie Davidson (15:41)

I saw that paper too. Okay. It wasn't ours. Yeah, but yeah, super interesting. I agree. Yeah. So just to continue with the brain oscillations, I talked about delta, the next faster brain rhythm is theta activity, which is roughly between 5 and 7 Hertz. Theta activity is often seen during transition from wakefulness to sleep. And it's associated with these, as you were saying earlier, these liminal states. It's also been associated with certain kinds of meditation. Alpha activity is roughly between 8 and 13 cycles per second or hertz, and it's often characterized as, quote, relaxed wakefulness. Beta activity is typically defined as roughly 13 to roughly 20 hertz. And it's associated with activation. If there is a cognitive task that a person is engaged in, you will typically see increases in beta activity, particularly in the cortical regions that are engaged in those cognitive tasks. And then finally, there's gamma activity. Gamma activity is especially interesting. We see that in meditators, long term meditators, gamma activity has as its peak frequency roughly 40 hertz. It is seen in a number of contexts. One of them is during what some have called insight. And insight is where I think most viewers have had the experience of working on a problem and all of a sudden they just have an aha moment and things sort of gel, they congeal, they come together. And there have been some clever experimental designs where investigators have created tasks that increase the likelihood of aha moments. They're sort of trivial in the experimental context. They're simple cognitive tasks where all of a sudden you just recognize the answer. It might be something like a crossword puzzle and you know, you're trying to get something, a word to fit, and suddenly you get the word. It's comes in a moment and it's kind of an instantaneous recognition. And you typically would see a burst of gamma oscillations that is very short. The average duration would be around 250 milliseconds. Really short. What we see in these long term meditators is the prevalence of high amplitude gamma activity that goes on for seconds and minutes. When we first saw that, by the way, and there's a lot of interesting history here, but we first reported this in 2004 with very long term meditators where the average lifetime practice of this group was 34,000 hours. Listeners can go to the arithmetic later, but 34,000 hours is a big number. And in these practitioners, we saw these really high amplitude gamma oscillations that actually were visible to the naked eye, which is unusual for this kind of measurement. And in the original paper, which was published In PNAS in 2004, we actually had a figure of the raw EEG from one practitioner just to illustrate how prominent it is that you can see it with the naked eye. And we've subsequently replicated that. It's been replicated by others. We've also seen that this gamma activity is found during slow wave sleep. It's actually superimposed on delta oscillations.

Andrew Huberman (19:26)

Is there any evidence that meditation can actually replace sleep or that it can offset some of the negative effects of mild sleep deprivation?

Dr. Richie Davidson (19:35)

This is a great question. I think about it a lot. I don't think that the evidence is clear on this at all. And I'll give several examples. First, the Dalai Lama, who probably meditates more than anybody I know, he has a practice of literally doing approximately four hours of meditation every day. And he's been doing that for more than 60 years.

Andrew Huberman (19:58)

I'm reassured by that, if you told me the Dalai Lama meditates for 40 minutes a week, I'd actually be concerned about the role of Dalai Lama. So the title, and he very proudly

Dr. Richie Davidson (20:10)

says, I sleep nine hours a night.

Podcast Narrator/Host (20:13)

Wow.

Dr. Richie Davidson (20:13)

Okay. Nine hours a night and he gets nine hours of sleep. That's his regular sleep and he gets it all the time. And you know, I don't know whether he would say he needs it, but he gets nine hours a night and he's very proud of that. Okay, that's one counter example. You know, myself, I have done a bunch of sleep science with collaborating with some sleep researchers. And many years ago, one of these people said to me, richie, you really should give up an alarm clock. Just don't use an alarm clock anymore. And I was getting at that time between five and a half and six hours a night of sleep, and I gave up the alarm clock and my average length of sleep increased by about 30 to 45 minutes. And I feel much better.

Andrew Huberman (21:00)

Oh, sure. Especially since the extra sleep tends to be toward morning. You're getting more REM sleep.

Dr. Richie Davidson (21:06)

Exactly.

Andrew Huberman (21:06)

But the difference for me between five and a half and six or six and a half is in terms of just subjective well being and focus, et cetera is tremendous.

Podcast Narrator/Host (21:16)

Slightly related question.

Andrew Huberman (21:18)

If one were going to choose to meditate and had the option to do it at a sort of liminal state between, let's say, being awake and going to sleep at night, or between sleep and shortly after one wakes up and starting the day versus in the middle of the day or in the middle of the morning, is there any advantage to placing meditation in one of these, what I'm calling liminal states or, or transition states between sleeping and awake in either direction?

Dr. Richie Davidson (21:46)

I would say probably for most people, yes is the answer. But I think there's a lot of individual variability. In general, I would say it's useful to meditate when you're feeling most awake and less sleepy. Sleepiness is an important obstacle in meditation, and there's a lot to say about that.

Andrew Huberman (22:10)

Yeah, I'm surprised to hear that. I expected you to say that. One should meditate at a time when the brain is closest to sleep because you want to be in a state of mind that's less about controlling your thoughts. But then again, I could also see an argument for how meditation involves a redirect of attention. So let's actually drill into this a bit. What is the meditative state that one is seeking for, quote, unquote, effective meditation?

Dr. Richie Davidson (22:40)

Yeah. So first let me say that just like there are hundreds of different kinds of sports. There are hundreds of different kinds of meditation. They don't all do the same thing. They have different effects on the brain and the body. And so I think it's really important that we not lump all of meditation together. So that's one really important thing.

Andrew Huberman (23:03)

Can we divide it up? So, for instance, if we were going to draw the parallel with exercise, maybe we'll do that several times today. We can broadly lump exercise into cardiovascular and resistance training. There's also mobility work. And then. And then there's a bunch of other stuff with meditation. Can we create some broad bins?

Dr. Richie Davidson (23:22)

Yes.

Andrew Huberman (23:22)

And what are those broad bins? And then we can go into specific practices.

Dr. Richie Davidson (23:26)

Yeah, so, yes, we can create some broad bins. So. And we've done that. We've published some papers that offer typologies for classifying different meditation states. So one kind of meditation we call focused attention meditation. And focused attention meditation is where you are narrowing your aperture of awareness to a specific object. It could be an external object, it could also be an internal. It could be, for example, your respiration, it could be a sound, and there is a narrowing of the aperture. And this is all broadly within the category of practices that we would say are cultivating aspects of awareness. So another awareness practice is what we call open monitoring meditation. And open monitoring is where there is no specific focus, but rather the aperture is broadened, and there is no specific intention to focus on any one thing or another. The invitation is to simply be aware of whatever is arising as it arises. One of the aspirations there, or the invitations is not to try to get rid of thoughts, because our minds and our brains are built to generate thoughts. So there's no goal, if you will, to get rid of thoughts, but rather to if thoughts arise, that's another object that you can be aware of. You know, we talked about sleep and sleepiness and that earlier. You can even, you know, you can do. You can be aware of being sleepy, you can be aware of being distracted. The goal, if you will, is not to change or to fix anything, if you will. The invitation is to shift from a mode of doing to a mode of simply being.

Andrew Huberman (25:24)

I want to talk about this thing about doing to being, because the language can sound a bit mystical and vague to people. But as a longtime practitioner of Yoga Nidra, I've talked a lot about on this podcast. There's this instruction inside of Yoga Nidra to shift from thinking and doing to being and feeling.

Dr. Richie Davidson (25:47)

Exactly.

Andrew Huberman (25:47)

Which is beautiful language, poetic, et cetera, but also as neuroscientists and for the general public, I think it might be useful for us to just, maybe just double click on that for one second. As a neuroscientist, I think of thinking and doing as okay. Doing is action. So the opposite of that would be stop moving the body thinking. Well, there's a whole discussion to be had about what is thinking in neuroscience, but certainly you wouldn't want to plan, you wouldn't want to be ruminating on the past. Presumably you would want to be more in a state of sensation and perceiving what's happening right now. So is that an appropriate breakdown or is it wrong? Is it insufficient? I'm not trying to score an A with the professor here.

Podcast Narrator/Host (26:40)

I'm just trying to. I'm trying to figure out when we

Andrew Huberman (26:41)

hear, move from thinking and doing to being and feeling, what does that mean in terms of actionable steps that people can take?

Dr. Richie Davidson (26:50)

Yeah, so I think that the way you describe it is basically accurate with a little bit of perhaps tweak. So if, if, when, if one is invited to do this and one finds oneself ruminating or planning, for example, which is supposedly an activity you're, quote, not supposed to be doing, rather than trying to stop it, it's simply to be aware of it. Wow, I'm now planning or I'm now ruminating about something that happened in the past. What really is most important is the invitation not to change it, not to actively try to shift it, but to simply be aware. And one of the, I think, conjectures in all of this is that there's so much going on under the hood that we're typically not aware of. You know, our lives are moving at such a pace that the information that is transpiring is, is occurring at such a rapid rate that we are typically aware of only a small fraction of that. And this is a practice that's inviting you to simply be aware of that. And not doing is a helpful kind of thing, because if we're acting in the world, we obviously need to navigate, and there are things we obviously need to do to be safe and to protect ourselves and so forth. And so that will engage other mechanisms.

Andrew Huberman (28:31)

I'm interested in the possibility, or maybe you've seen this in the data, that there are at least two different types of people, people who, for instance, go through life feeling, doing, being, thinking, and projecting things out into the world. Or maybe they're quiet people and they don't project much out into the world, but they're just doing their thing and they're not thinking about their thinking, they're not thinking about their doing, they're just doing. We know people like this. Then there are people who are always multi tracking like, you know, they're self conscious, they're very self aware. And I'm wondering whether or not a form of meditation where somebody arrives at the meditation very self aware, like, oh, there's my thought about that again. There's my thought about that again. And working perhaps on not judging it could be beneficial, but perhaps what that person quote unquote needs or would benefit from was just being in a state of freedom, of freedom from their self monitoring. Whereas the other person perhaps could

Podcast Narrator/Host (29:34)

clinician

Andrew Huberman (29:35)

here could afford to be a little more self aware and realize, oh, you know, I'm in this mode where and see their thinking a little bit.

Dr. Richie Davidson (29:42)

Totally. And you're naming something super important. And you know, I think that the way you characterize the second person who is more self aware, it's. There's more than just self awareness in your description. There's a kind of holding back there. It's not just monitoring, but there's a kind of suppression almost.

Andrew Huberman (30:07)

It's a lot of work.

Dr. Richie Davidson (30:08)

It's a lot of work.

Andrew Huberman (30:09)

And it could be stifling for their creativity.

Dr. Richie Davidson (30:11)

Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman (30:12)

We had my friend David Cho on the podcast, now we're friends. That was actually the first time we had met, but we've become good friends and he's a brilliant artist. Brilliant artist. And he talks about how the best art comes from just forgetting what anyone thinks or wants. You know, Rick Rubin talks about this just getting the audience out of your mind and just letting it flow through you. And I think great artists do that. And it's what we pay money to see. We want to see that form of expression. We don't want to see the self monitoring artist.

Dr. Richie Davidson (30:44)

Yeah, that's great. And I, I totally resonate with that. And there is a, a phrase in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that is called undistracted non meditation. Undistracted non meditation. And that's said to be the highest form of meditation where you just drop all the crap, you know, all the techniques, all the control, all the tightness.

Andrew Huberman (31:16)

This is my goal in life. Watch out, folks, if this ever happens.

Dr. Richie Davidson (31:20)

But you're totally awake, you're fully aware. Yeah, but there's no artifice, there's no, it's just complete freedom. And, and there are, you know, I think there, I, I've had the, the honor of just hanging out with some people who I think are really in that as a trait that that's who they are.

Andrew Huberman (31:47)

Rick Rubin's like that. He's a close friend. And I can tell you I've spent a lot of time with Rick and how he appears to people and his kind of mythical status. I think a lot of people. His magneticism is. Because that's real.

Dr. Richie Davidson (32:01)

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman (32:02)

He can be in very, very close proximity to things online, in person, he can see all of it. He's in real touch with it, but he's still him. Somehow it doesn't invade him in a way that changes the way he shows up. If we were to paint little beams of energy, now we're really sounding woo coming out. There's stuff coming out, there's stuff going in, and they're interacting, but they're not contaminating one another. Where they interact. It just makes both things better. And that's a very, very rare trait.

Dr. Richie Davidson (32:33)

Yeah, I agree. There's a term that I often use, which I can talk about how we can define this more technically, but for lack of a better word, I call stickiness. And it's kind of an affective hysteresis, if you will. It's. It's kind of where, you know, you're hanging on to emotions that. That may not be useful. You're carrying stuff from a previous experience into a current experience, and it muddles things. And, you know, the. The. Our emotional lives are so infused with this kind of stickiness, but with, like, with Rick Rubin or with other people who are showing this, there's no stickiness, there's no stickiness, and that's a kind of freedom that I think is very much what we're talking about as the trait manifestation of these kinds of practices.

Andrew Huberman (33:37)

Yeah, it's interesting. I think a lot of people mistakenly use drugs to try and access that state. And I also think that we have a real. As a species, as a culture, but also as a species, we have a real affinity to people who can embody this freedom that you're talking about. Great comedians. Like when Richard Pryor was on, you're just like. I mean, maybe he had a subscript in there. Maybe he was devoting like 2% of his prefrontal cortex to monitoring. But it just seemed like. We call it flow, but we're in their flow, they're in ours. Whatever it is, there's a powerful interaction there that there seems to be very little self monitoring. Then there are a few other. I mean, we see it in athletics.

Dr. Richie Davidson (34:25)

Yeah, totally.

Andrew Huberman (34:26)

We just see it. We can feel it. And it's super powerful. And that's from the perspective of performing arts or comedic arts. But for people who want to approach meditation, do you think it's useful at all to ask themselves before they go into the meditation, you know, are they in a mode of self monitoring or are they in a kind of. Or are they more feeling more free, more present to just whatever it is they're experiencing, not questioning it and asking them for do you think it's useful in order to get the most out of a meditation practice? I guess what I'm getting at indirectly here is most meditation practices involve shifting from doing one thing to maybe you're walking, maybe you're open eyes. But typically I think people either sit or lie down, close eyes and start focusing on their breathing and trying to quote, unquote, get present. Is there anything?

Dr. Richie Davidson (35:23)

Well, the kind of practice that I most often do is actually with eyes open.

Andrew Huberman (35:27)

Really?

Dr. Richie Davidson (35:27)

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman (35:28)

Oh, then just tell us about that. What would be a good. Let's use the parallel to cardio again. I would say if somebody is really out of shape and wants to get in shape, I would say the first thing is take two 20 minute walks a day and then we could talk about getting on a exercise bike and then maybe doing some resistance, you start layering things in. Right. But what would be the equivalent of the two 20 minute walks a day for meditation?

Dr. Richie Davidson (35:54)

So this is the protocol question, I guess. You know, I would say it's really important to start modestly. And we often will ask a person, what's the minimum amount of meditation that you think you can commit to every single day and do it for 30 days consistently?

Andrew Huberman (36:12)

Five minutes, perfect.

Dr. Richie Davidson (36:14)

Whatever that number is, perfect. Start with that. And then the next question is, are you comfortable doing it formally as a seated practice, or would you prefer to do it while you're walking or while you're doing another non cognitively demanding activity? It could be commuting, it could be washing the dishes. There are lots of those kind of activities that we often do on a daily basis that you can actually intentionally use your mind in this way while you're also doing those activities. And by the way, we've shown, we actually have really good data on this, that at least for beginning meditators, it doesn't matter if you're doing it as a formal meditation practice or as an active practice, the benefits are absolutely comparable.

Andrew Huberman (37:10)

And what are those benefits?

Dr. Richie Davidson (37:12)

So if you do it for 30 days and you do it just five minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety and symptoms of stress. We've shown that repeatedly in randomized controlled trials, you'll see an increase on measures of well being or flourishing. And we can talk about what those actually mean. You can even see, just with this amount of practice, a reduction in IL6. IL6 is a pro inflammatory cytokine that is important in systemic inflammation. And with just this minimal amount of practice, you see a significant reduction in IL6 over the course of 28 days. Five minutes a day. We've actually seen changes in the microbiome and we've seen changes in the brain with just this minimal amount of practice. But the important point is that you're doing it every day. When people ask me, what's the best form of meditation that they should do? If they're just beginning, I say the best form of meditation that you can possibly do is the form of meditation that you actually do. So figure out what that form of meditation is and then stick to it. Do it every single day.

Andrew Huberman (38:33)

I love this. I actually am going to challenge our podcast audience to five minutes a day for 30 days. I'll put something out on social media. Rob, please remind me to put something out on social media to do five minutes a day for 30 days. Because what you describe are significant health effects.

Dr. Richie Davidson (38:53)

Yeah, totally.

Andrew Huberman (38:54)

And as you describe them, it made me remember this set of experiments from neuroplasticity. Do you mind if I share these, please? Because I have a. This is a theoretical, practical question as we move into these protocols. But before we do that, what should we call this protocol? It's the Richie Davidson five minutes a day. Five minutes a day. Richie's five. It's the Richie's Five meditation. I'm going to start that later. I'll share what I've been doing, but it's not even that. I've been doing 10 breaths upon waking, 10 breaths before I get out of bed. I'm like, if I can just do

Podcast Narrator/Host (39:32)

10 breaths of focused meditation before I

Andrew Huberman (39:34)

get out of bed, the whole day will go better. And it tends to. There's this wild set of findings in the neuroplasticity research that most people don't talk about because it's very inconvenient for neuroscientists. We're all familiar with the enriched environment thing where you give rats a bunch of toys or mice a bunch of toys or monkeys a bunch of toys. And the idea would be, if you give kids a bunch of toys or listening to Mozart, that their brains will develop more, you see more physical connections, you see improved cognition, et cetera, et cetera. A really smart guy. Down at University of California, Irvine, Ron Frostig did an experiment where he said, maybe this is all backwards. Maybe the normal cages they live in without all these toys are just deprived environments. And it turns out that's probably the case. So all this enriched environment stuff, it's not that it's B.S. it's just that the experimental conditions were so deprived that what you had was most animals just deprived in a certain way. Then you give them what they needed naturally, and all of a sudden you saw more connections, et cetera. If we applied that to meditation, something that we think of as kind of

Podcast Narrator/Host (40:44)

an enriched mental environment, okay, I'm going

Andrew Huberman (40:46)

to now do this exercise. I'm going to do five minutes a day, or 10 or 20.

Podcast Narrator/Host (40:50)

We think of it as kind of

Andrew Huberman (40:52)

adding exercise, but riding a treadmill, doing resistance training. I mean, we used to just farm and go get water and do things. So in some sense, all of that is a replacement for a deprived environment.

Dr. Richie Davidson (41:04)

Exactly.

Andrew Huberman (41:05)

So is it possible that what you're describing is not something that people developed over time, but rather something that was core to our experience as humans and that the brain needed, but that with the advent of technologies and busyness or whatever we've gotten away from. And so when you talk about doing five or 10 or 20 minutes of meditation a day and seeing all these health effects, what we're doing is we're actually just putting back what needed to be there in the first place. This is like the equivalent of you getting your 30 minutes more sleep, because alarm clocks weren't really a thing 2,000 years ago. Does that make sense?

Dr. Richie Davidson (41:42)

It makes sense, but, you know, and I think that there's an element of truth to it, but I also think that there's some additional discussion that we should have about it and dialogue. So, first of all, these practices have been around for, you know, 2500 years or more. It's not like they've been invented in the modern era to deal with the. The separation that has occurred between humans in the natural world that is of distinctly modern kind of invention. So that's one thing. The second thing is that, yes, I agree with you that the characteristics that we're talking about as traits that are outcomes of these practices, there are many ways to get there, and there are probably natural ways to get there that don't require meditation. In fact, you know, when we, in our early days, we interviewed these practitioners around Dharamsala, India, who were practitioners that the Dalai Lama referred us to who were spending 30 years in retreat. They're called hermit monks. And, you know, you have to hike for three hours to find their cave. And we interviewed these people. You know, they told us, well, you know, I need to meditate. But many others are just born where they're just naturally have these qualities. They don't need to meditate as much as me. I'm just a simple, you know, poor monk who really needs to do this because I'm inferior to those people, if you will. And it's kind of modesty, but also, you know, there may be some truth to that. And so I think that that is. Is real. But I also think that the qualities like, for example, kindness, I believe, and this is the subject of this new book that I wrote with my colleague Cortland Dahl, Born to flourish. Qualities like kindness are innate. They are part of our innate repertoire, but in order for them to be expressed, they require nurturing. And it's very similar to the way scientists talk about language. Language is innate. I think most scientists would agree with that. But we know that there have been case studies, for example, of feral children who are raised in the wild, and they don't develop normal language. So in order for the language to develop normally, it requires nurturing of some kind. And kindness is the same thing. It requires nurturing in order for it to be expressed. And similarly for other qualities that we're cultivating when we meditate, I think those qualities are innate, but they require nurturing. And in certain cases, I think that in order for those qualities to really be expressed at high levels, if you will, intentional nurturing may be required for at least the vast majority of people. There may be statistically very rare people who emerge who are like this from the start, for whatever reason. But for most of us, I think this kind of nurturing is important.

Podcast Narrator/Host (45:07)

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Andrew Huberman (45:46)

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Podcast Narrator/Host (45:47)

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Andrew Huberman (46:30)

Why do you think it is that so many people find it challenging to maintain a meditation practice? I mean, five minutes a day is nothing. Ten minutes a day is barely anything even for the very busiest person. And the positive effects that you describe, and we could also layer it and reduce stress, anxiety, lower resting heart rate,

Podcast Narrator/Host (46:51)

increase

Andrew Huberman (46:55)

feelings of well being, and on and on. I mean, there are just so many great studies now, including like you said, double blind trials. I mean, it's incredible. So why do you think it's so hard for people to maintain this practice of just saying, okay, you know what, I'm going to just go into this atypical state. It's not being stimulated by anything in my environment. I have to do this internally. There aren't gyms to go to for this. I mean, there are breathwork classes and things like that, but people don't tend to stick to it.

Podcast Narrator/Host (47:28)

That's the challenge.

Dr. Richie Davidson (47:28)

So I do have a theory about it which I'll share. But before I do that, let me just say that I often use the analogy of brushing our teeth. When humans first evolved on this planet, none of us were brushing our teeth. And somehow a very large swath of humanity has learned to brush their teeth every day. It's not part of our genome.

Andrew Huberman (47:50)

I think most people brush their teeth so that their breath isn't bad. I think they like the idea that their teeth look cleaner and they get less gum disease, et cetera. But all the scary stuff is actually very ineffective public health messaging. I mean, that's my guess.

Dr. Richie Davidson (48:08)

Yeah, so actually that's quite interesting, that view. But getting back to your question, why do people find it so hard? So there was a study published in Science not too long ago by a group of social psychologists and it was A study of, quote, boredom. And what they did essentially in this study, the core of it was they took people into the lab and they said, we had a little problem, and you guys are going to have to wait for like 15 or 20 minutes before the experiment starts while we fix some piece of equipment. And they were in a waiting room. There were magazines and books around. And they also said that social psychologists are really good at creating these scenarios. And so another experimenter came in and said, you know, they're from another research group and they understand that they have to wait a little while. And we have another experiment that you can do in the meantime. It involves receiving electric shocks. And of course, it's completely voluntary. You are free to participate or not. And the bottom line is that this is particularly. Male undergraduates in the United States prefer to shock themselves than to sit alone and not do anything. It's a robust finding. People could not sit without doing something is the bottom line. And the reason, I think, is that once we actually begin to inspect our own minds, most people are frightened at the chaos that they see. One of the things we found when we look at a very. In a very granular way is that when people start to meditate, we see a statistically reliable increase, increase in anxiety in the first week.

Andrew Huberman (50:07)

Interesting.

Dr. Richie Davidson (50:08)

And that's often when people say, I can't do this. It's making me crazy. And, you know, what we tell them is, that's exactly. You're doing exactly the right thing. You're noticing the chaos in your own mind.

Andrew Huberman (50:23)

This is the soreness that comes from a new exercise program.

Dr. Richie Davidson (50:27)

Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Huberman (50:28)

But people know to associate the soreness with, okay, the exercise was effective. It's going to lead to an adaptation.

Dr. Richie Davidson (50:35)

And we haven't changed the narrative yet about this. But what we're trying to. Where we say, this is great, that you're feeling anxious, it's exactly what you should be feeling.

Andrew Huberman (50:46)

Forgive me, I'm doing all this in real time. So if I'm slow. There's a reason the analogy to exercise feels ever more important now, because thankfully, the narrative has been embedded in people's minds that you lift objects or you cycle or run or row or swim, et cetera, to stimulate an adaptation. I think the exercise scientists, the fields of health and wellness, whatever it is, has been very effective in getting the message out that the burn in your muscles is the thing that's going to lead to an easier run the next time, to more fitness, more longevity, more well being, et cetera. But it's discomfort in the Moment. For a long while now, I've been trying to convince people because it's true that the agitation that one feels trying to solve a problem or read a hard page or passage in a book, the one that you have to return to three times, that you can't wrap your head around that that agitation is the stimulus for neuroplasticity. If you could just breeze right through it. The brain has no reason to change. It's not stimulated to change. It can, after all, just do the thing you're trying to do. So it becomes sort of a duh when you compare, when you look at exercise or you look at cognitive development. But somehow when it comes to meditation, maybe we can accomplish this today. I think you're doing this for us. Just knowing. For me, just knowing that in the first week anxiety is going to go up. But that's the equivalent of lactate accumulating in the muscles.

Dr. Richie Davidson (52:17)

Exactly. It's the lactate of the mind.

Andrew Huberman (52:20)

It's the lactate of the mind. Thank you. Yes, thank you.

Podcast Narrator/Host (52:26)

Perfect.

Andrew Huberman (52:28)

I believe that languaging and messaging is so critical to get people to adopt practices that require this discomfort adaptation loop that needs to be repeated over time. I love that. I knew we'd get someplace in that. In that one. Thanks to you. So glad you're here. So, week one, Five minutes a day. Expect and embrace the anxiety.

Dr. Richie Davidson (52:53)

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman (52:54)

Is it the thing that's going to produce the adaptation?

Dr. Richie Davidson (52:57)

I think it's contributing to it, yes. And it's also being aware of the anxiety without being hijacked by the anxiety, without being lost in the anxiety. So being able to see the anxiety as it's arising. And that's, you know, this is training in meta awareness. Meta awareness is super important. I actually think meta awareness is a necessary prerequisite for any kind of human transformation, mental transformation.

Andrew Huberman (53:33)

Could you define it for us, tell us a bit more about it? I'm very curious.

Dr. Richie Davidson (53:37)

Yeah. So I would say meta awareness is the faculty of knowing what our minds are doing. And to some listeners, that may sound a little strange, but how many of you have had the experience of reading a book where you might be reading each word on a page and you read one page, a second page, and after a few minutes, you have no idea what you've just read. Your mind is lost, it's somewhere else. But then you wake up. The moment you wake up is a moment of meta awareness. And it turns out that that's a trainable skill and that is one of the really important prerequisites for all Other forms of training, of mental training.

Andrew Huberman (54:24)

Do we know where this meta awareness resides in the brain? Is it prefrontal cortex?

Dr. Richie Davidson (54:30)

You know, it's a network of prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, insula. I think those are all structures that are participating in meta awareness.

Andrew Huberman (54:43)

It's interesting because I feel like as we were discussing earlier, people crave forgetting about themselves and just being inexperience. It's just such a powerfully and I think positive seductive thing. I often think about, you know, like at a party, dancing, like people who can just dance and enjoy themselves versus people who are self conscious about how they're dancing, even people who are good at dancing.

Dr. Richie Davidson (55:09)

You can be meta aware without being awkwardly self conscious, if you will. So, you know, you talked earlier about flow. I didn't jump in then. But flow can occur with or without meta awareness.

Andrew Huberman (55:24)

Really?

Dr. Richie Davidson (55:24)

Yes, a lot of flow, I think, occurs without meta awareness. So you know, Csikszentmihalyi, who first studied flow, he studied rock climbers. And like a rock climber who is, I mean, think about this. Why do people do stuff like rock climbing? I think that the reason why people do stuff like that is to produce this state of flow where most of those kinds of states of flow I think are states of flow without meta awareness, where you're completely absorbed in the activity. And for a rock climber, if there's even a momentary lapse in attention, it could be potentially lethal. And so by arranging one's physical environment in that way, you are basically forcing the default mode to be suppressed. And the default mode is a mode that we know is associated with a lot of self referential thought. And self referential thought often is anxiety provoking. And so this is a way to transiently suppress the default mode. But flow can also occur with meta awareness. And so, and it doesn't diminish the quality of the flow. And one analogy that we can use is in a movie theater. I mean, viewers have had the experience of being in a movie theater and I'm sure people have had the experience of being in a movie theater where you're so engrossed in the movie that you may actually, you're not aware that you're in a theater and you may not be even aware that you're watching a movie. You're so you are totally absorbed in the plot. And we've actually come up with a term to define that, and we call it experiential fusion, where you're fused with the experience. And that is a kind of the analogous to flow. Without meta awareness. But imagine being in the movie theater where your attention is riveted and there's absolutely no lapse in attention, but in the kind of penumbra of awareness, you are aware you're in a movie theater, you're aware that you're watching a movie, but that doesn't diminish the quality of your attention.

Andrew Huberman (57:51)

I want to ask about this thing about chaos. Noticing the chaos of one's mind, because you said that sits at the seat of the anxiety that people will feel when they first start to meditate. Now, everyone knows in the Ritchie meditation, to push through the first week, expect the lactate of the mind push through it. I love that so much. Thank you. The idea that the mind is chaotic and getting comfortable with that and not reacting to it, not feeling like we have to get away from it. We've heard this before, but I think it's somewhat of a novel concept to me to think that a goal of meditation is to be able to see that and sit with it, not necessarily eradicate it. You know, I think you said, you know, the Dalai Lama. I think for most of us, we see the Dalai Lama and other monks in robes, and you say he sleeps nine hours per night and he's meditating four hours per day. And we think, oh, he looks very blissed out and that's great for them. Do you think he has chaos in his mind? Is the idea that extreme meditators or even, you know, well, practitioned meditators are free of the chaos or that they're just comfortable with the chaos?

Dr. Richie Davidson (59:02)

I would say that it's a developmental process that changes longitudinally. So initially there's a lot of chaos and I think it gradually subsides. I don't think it. It's like a step function. I think it really occurs gradually over time and the chaos just sort of naturally diminishes. But that's a long term process. And I think for most of us there's always going to be some chaos. But part of the chaos also is, I think, a source of creativity. And when we talk about meta awareness and awareness of all that's going on in our mind, I often give my students the. The permission to, even if they're not meditators, to just spend a couple hours a week inspecting your mind. Just inspect your mind. Pay attention to what's going on in your mind. Don't do stuff outside. And if you come up with some interesting thought, write a little note to yourself as you're doing this. Not a lot of Words. But just a note to remind you when you're finish with this session. And I have the conviction that there's a lot of creative work that humans do on a regular basis that's kind of like dreams. Most people don't remember their dreams, but they occur reliably. And I think that there's a lot of creative thought that occurs on a regular basis, but we just don't pay attention to it and we forget it, just like we forget our dreams. But if we have the invitation to really inspect our mind in that way, I think this chaos actually often contains the seat of real creative insight that potentially could be valuable.

Andrew Huberman (61:00)

I do too. I mean, I wake up every morning with at least one idea from the transition from sleep to waking. Sometimes it's from a dream. I often will record my dreams as voice memos after I die. If somebody ever finds these voice memos, they're so crazy. Every once in a while I'll try and listen to one. I'm like, this is crazy. But I don't want to forget things. And sometimes I don't want to wake up and turn the lights on and I'll go back to sleep. And so I'll just record something in the voice memo sometimes write it down. I think there's so much learning to be had from what's coming up from the unconscious mind in dreams, but also just having a mode of capture during the day. Some way to just capture the things that spring to mind. The great Joe Strummer from the Clash, he said this. He said, if you are walking along and an idea comes to mind, you have to write it down because you think you'll remember it later, but you will remember it in a form that is not nearly as potent. He said something like that. That this is the mind throwing you ideas and you have to capture that.

Dr. Richie Davidson (62:00)

I love that. I think it's wise advice.

Andrew Huberman (62:03)

Friends of mine who are songwriters, poets, they do this all the time. They're constantly writing things down that they may or not develop something from. But they understand that there's information being thrown up to the surface for them. If you don't write it down or capture it in some other way, it's. It goes. It's evanescent.

Dr. Richie Davidson (62:21)

I actually have. I mean, this may seem contrary to views of how meditation is done, but when I meditate every morning, I actually have a little notepad by my cushion. And occasionally I don't do this every session, but maybe twice a week, I'll actually write down something during the meditation. One or two Words just to remind me, because something comes up in my practice, maybe an idea, and I want to remember. And I know also that I won't remember it after in the same richness. And so I'll just jot it down and then go back to my practice.

Andrew Huberman (63:02)

Is meditation something that kids can do and benefit from? Has that been studied in a formal way?

Dr. Richie Davidson (63:08)

Yes, it's been studied. We actually developed a what we've called a mindfulness based kindness curriculum for preschool kids.

Andrew Huberman (63:20)

Preschool.

Dr. Richie Davidson (63:20)

Preschool. And we've actually published a randomized controlled trial in a public school system of this curriculum. And the curriculum is available freely on our website in both English and Spanish. So if any teachers are out there or you know, teachers and want to use it, please, please feel free to, to download it and, and see how it is. But yeah, so it looks very different. So for example, what we do with a three year old, one of the exercises that they love is we ring a bell in a classroom and we have them listen, tell them, listen to the sound and as soon as you no longer hear sound, raise your hand. And it's amazing to see this because you can get 25, 3 and 4 year olds sitting perfectly still for around 10 seconds, but they could taste it. There's a palpable sense of quiet in that 10 seconds. And then they all raise their hand excitedly, but they can really taste it. And so I do think it's possible. The other thing is, and this is something really important, there's something we've discovered empirically recently which is that flourishing is infectious. It's contagious. Flourishing is contagious.

Andrew Huberman (64:52)

Can you explain what that means and how you study that?

Dr. Richie Davidson (64:54)

Yeah. So in the example of you asked about meditating in kids, and the reason I'm bringing up in this context is one of the best things I can think a parent can do for a kid is, is not to have the kid meditate, but meditate yourself and just be with the child and be fully present, be connected and really show up in that way. And you will osmotically transmit through your demeanor and your, your interaction, you will transmit these qualities to the child in a completely implicit way. And that's what we mean when we say flourishing is contagious, but how we studied it. So let me actually share one of the. This is a finding that we're super excited about and it's not yet published, but the paper is just under review. So one of the things we're deeply interested in these days is how can we scale human flourishing? So we're Doing this kind of sector by sector. And one sector that we're doing a lot of work with is educators and educators around the world, and particularly in the U.S. but we've done this in Mexico too. So it's not just us based, but they're super stressed, they're not well paid and all of that. So we did a study with public school educators in Louisville, Kentucky and there are many reasons why we went to Louisville. But Louisville is a complicated school system. It's diverse. There are a lot of problems in it. And it's a big urban school district, the Jefferson County Public School District in Louisville. And we did a randomized control trial with 832 educators in Louisville. And we had them use our Healthy Minds program, which is a digital offering which is freely available as the Healthy Minds program, where we had them cultivate four key pillars of well being, awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. We can take a deeper dive into each of those after. But they practiced for around five minutes a day. The average was a little less than five minutes a day over the course of 28 days. And we measured standard outcomes like depression and anxiety and stress and measures of flourishing. And we find what we found in other studies, which is that depression and anxiety and stress went down and measures of well being and flourishing went up. But the real kicker is that we by prior agreement had access to the student level data in the school system. We were able to look at the performance of the students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well being training. And we compared them to students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to a control group. The students had no idea that there was any research going on. What we found is that on standardized tests, this is in middle school children, and the sample size for the students was around 13,000. And what we found is that the standardized math scores of the students who were taught by teachers randomly assigned to the well being training was significantly greater than the scores of the students who are taught by teachers randomly assigned to the control group.

Podcast Narrator/Host (68:44)

Same curriculum, identical.

Andrew Huberman (68:47)

So what do you think is being transmitted there? Is it that the teachers are calmer, therefore the students are calmer? Is it that the teachers are calmer, therefore they're clearer. So the students, I mean, there are a lot of variables and we don't need to isolate them. I mean, this isn't, we're not trying to do, you know, pharmacology here, but what do you think could be going on?

Dr. Richie Davidson (69:07)

Yeah, I think everything you said is likely to be going on. I think the students, the teachers are are likely calmer, they're more connected. And what we know is that it was interesting because we looked at reading scores and the data for the standardized reading measure was in the same direction, but it wasn't as robust. The biggest signal was in math scores. And we know that math performance is degraded by stress more than reading performance in this age group. And so it could be something as simple as the kids who were taught by teachers that went through the well being training are simply calmer and less stressed when they take the exam. And so their true competence is more likely to be reflected in the test and not have it degraded by this kind of added stress and anxiety. So, so this is, you know, an illustration that flourishing is contagious in this way.

Andrew Huberman (70:12)

I would like to take a quick

Podcast Narrator/Host (70:13)

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Andrew Huberman (70:29)

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Podcast Narrator/Host (70:31)

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Andrew Huberman (71:33)

it's so interesting and again, I can think of so many different variables that could be at play. We did an episode, one of our most popular episodes ever, with a guy named James Hollis. Are you familiar with James Hollis?

Dr. Richie Davidson (71:47)

No.

Andrew Huberman (71:48)

He's a Probably by now 85 year old Jungian analyst. Brilliant guy. He's written a number of books. The Eden Project, which is about relationships and relating under Saturn shadow about trauma and healing. Just an incredible soul, an incredible human, and just an incredible educator. And I'm not alone in believing that. Just spectacular. And I said, he's a Jungian analyst. So I said, you know, what's the key to a really good life? But can we talk protocols? And he said something really interesting that I think will resonate with what you're saying and perhaps shed some light on what happened with these students and flourishing in general. He said, it's so important that we wake up each day and we suit up and we show up and we work in school, in relationships, in life. He said, but it's also just as important that we take a short amount of time every day and get out of stimulus and response. Because by getting out of stimulus and response, and I'm not being nearly as eloquent as Hollis, we come to know ourselves in a certain way that lets ourselves show up so much more effectively for everything else. And so maybe, just maybe, what these teachers achieve is by sitting in this anxiety. Because now I'm thinking about the lactate of the mind. They're doing a practice which lets them experience the anxiety, not respond to it. They're getting out of stimulus and response.

Dr. Richie Davidson (73:23)

Exactly.

Andrew Huberman (73:24)

And perhaps in the classroom they're able to teach more, teach more effectively, because they're not paying attention to the things that don't matter. Or maybe it's because they're also paying attention to the things that do matter, their signal, the noise is higher, so to speak. Anyway, I couldn't help but reference the Hollis thing, because to not do that would be remiss. But also, here's a guy who's saying, you gotta go to work each day. This is essential to building a good life. And you have to do all these things. And he's also saying, but getting out of stimulus response is what makes you effective in everything and of course improves your self understanding. And I think what you're saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I think you're saying when you talk about meditation is that it's a way of getting out of stimulus and response.

Dr. Richie Davidson (74:14)

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great analogy. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman (74:18)

Well, he deserves all the credit for all of that. You deserve all the credit for running all these experiments. Because I feel like what's been so frustrating over the years has been to hear how powerful meditation is, but that for people in the west, the word meditation brings up ideas of mysticism and ancient things. And people think, well, that's not for me. That's not going to benefit me now in this world. But I would argue we need it even more so now.

Dr. Richie Davidson (74:56)

I agree. I think that, and I think that the divisiveness and polarization that is just eating away at our society underscores the critical importance of this. I think it's needed now more than ever before in human history. And I think that it will, you know, with just modest amounts of practice. And one of the other, you know, kind of slogans that we think is really important is that it's easier than you think. It really is. Five minutes a day has a measurable impact. And so I think that if we really take this to heart, you know, if everyone practiced for five minutes a day, I have the strong conviction that this world would really be a different place.

Andrew Huberman (75:48)

Oh, absolutely. I think the challenge is convincing people. And that's, you know, you're doing it, we're trying to do that little by little. I mean, for a zero cost tool, it's just outsized positive effects. I think most people come to the table because it will lower their blood pressure. They hear that it will reduce their stress, maybe make them more effective, make them smarter, sleep better. But there are also the higher order effects that people talk about. Gaining some understanding of consciousness and what it may or may not be. When do those effects tend to arrive, if they ever do? Is it true that by meditating, by getting out of the stimulus and response and just watching one's thoughts and not responding to them and just non judgment, that we can actually gain some fundamental insight into how our minds work?

Dr. Richie Davidson (76:42)

I do think that that's possible and I think that it does occur. And you know, I think that if we're really good scientists, there is an important element of humility as we approach this that underscores really how little we know. And I think that these kinds of practices help us tap into something that I think is part of what it means to be a human being. And part of it is honestly, you know, we can use the words spiritual in some way and you know, or transcendent. And by that I mean something connected to something larger than oneself. And I know that this is getting into a little bit of woo woo territory and but people do have a taste of this and it helps to give their life more meaning and to infuse it with a kind of purpose that I think is really beneficial.

Andrew Huberman (78:00)

I wonder, and I'd love your thoughts on this, whether by doing meditation and seeing that the mind is chaotic and that it's difficult to Control. And that perhaps the best thing we can do is just observe and not respond to it, but not try and control it. That inevitably in one's meditation practice that the reality surfaces that we're all going to die. And I think for a lot of people, the fear of death is terrifying. It's inevitable and it's terrifying. And I do sometimes feel that a lot of the stuff in the world that we're offered, whether or not it's drugs or alcohol or excessive work or whatever, that just all the stuff is that a deeper layer of that offering is that it distracts us from that reality because it's terrifying. Any healthy person doesn't want to die,

Dr. Richie Davidson (79:02)

although I don't think it's terrifying for all people. And I think that this is actually one of the dimensions that is shifted by long term meditation practice. Unquestionably.

Andrew Huberman (79:14)

Is it shifted because people come to some understanding of energy and the fact that they will likely become part of something else, or do you think it's that they can just accept the reality that we're here, then we're not here?

Dr. Richie Davidson (79:28)

I think it's more the latter. And also imagine that this is the last day we're living right now, Friday

Andrew Huberman (79:36)

the 13th, of all days.

Dr. Richie Davidson (79:37)

Of all days.

Andrew Huberman (79:38)

It happens to be Friday the 13th.

Dr. Richie Davidson (79:39)

And are we showing up in a way that feels right for us and making the most of our lives and not squandering the opportunity that we have? And if we can live every day in that way, it really will change, I think, how we approach our mortality. And I know for me personally, I mean, well, I feel very differently about dying today than I did like 15 years ago. That's one dimension where there's been a dramatic shift.

Andrew Huberman (80:24)

Would you mind elaborating on that? How so? How did you feel about it 15, 20 years ago?

Dr. Richie Davidson (80:28)

Yeah, I was terrified. You know, in the same way I, you know, had a family, I have two kids, that I have all these, you know, responsibilities. And I reflect on this, I really do. And, you know, if I died today, I would feel like I've lived a very fulfilling life and. And I'm fine with that.

Andrew Huberman (80:56)

That's a great thing to be able to say. That's a great thing to be able to say. I don't think most people would probably be able to say the same wholeheartedly. And you attribute some of that sense to meditation?

Dr. Richie Davidson (81:12)

Definitely, but it's been gradual. I've been at this. My very first meditation retreat was in 1974, and I've been practicing daily Ever

Andrew Huberman (81:23)

since, Every single day?

Dr. Richie Davidson (81:26)

Well, I may have missed one or two days a year when I had a 6am flight, but other than that? Yes.

Andrew Huberman (81:32)

And what is your practice, your most consistent practice been?

Dr. Richie Davidson (81:39)

You know, my practice has changed many times over these, the course of these years and very different traditions in which I've practiced.

Andrew Huberman (81:48)

So what about time of day? Is it typically morning?

Dr. Richie Davidson (81:52)

It's always been morning for me.

Andrew Huberman (81:53)

You get up, use the bathroom, have a drink of water and start. Or you go right into it?

Dr. Richie Davidson (81:57)

No, I get up and I make myself these days a cup of strong black tea. And I drink the tea, which takes maybe 15 minutes, and then I meditate.

Andrew Huberman (82:11)

Got it. Do you set a timer or a chime?

Dr. Richie Davidson (82:13)

Yeah, I do set a timer and you know, I meditate at various lengths, but I. My modal time sitting is about 45 minutes a day. Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, but usually around 45 minutes a day and maybe three or four days a week. I do a really short practice at night, maybe five minutes before I go to sleep.

Andrew Huberman (82:41)

Since everyone that takes on the 5 minute a day 30 day meditation challenge will do it once they reach 30 days, does it make sense to update that to a longer meditation or would you just suggest that people stay with that as long as possible?

Dr. Richie Davidson (82:55)

What I would suggest is check in with yourself and see how you're feeling about it and how it's resonating with you. And, and if you feel like you can't really do much more, just stick with five minutes a day and keep doing that. The important thing is to stick with the daily practice. And one of the things that we talk about in this new book, Born to Flourish, is a lot of people have a really difficult time coming up with really being able to do this daily. And, and one of the things that we talk about based on our finding that it doesn't matter, at least in the early stages, whether you're meditating as a formal practice or doing it while doing other activities of daily living that are not demanding, like walking or commuting. You tie this to regular activities that you do every day, whatever those activities are. And we talk about this idea of social zeitgebers. A zeitgeber, as you know, is an environmental event, a signal that is that marks in the classical literature a biological rhythm like light is a zeitgeber to set our biological rhythms. But in the modern world, we have social zeitgebers that are human created zeitgebers. So eating, for example, is a zeitgeber. We eat typically at roughly similar times every day, at least most people. And that's an opportunity. You do that every day. You compare a little practice with that. And one of the practices that you can do, which I do every time I eat, virtually unless I'm meeting with someone, and it's awkward, but I do it at home, is do a little appreciation practice. Spend just 30 to 90 seconds reflecting on all the people it took to have food on your plate. And it also gives you a sense of interdependence. And when I sit down and have my breakfast, it's a cue for me. It's a social zeitgeber. I do my appreciation practice every single time. And then there's crazy things you can do. Like, I have a cat at home. I'm the one who scoops the litter every night. I actually do that as a practice. And it. It literally takes no extra time. I do it while I'm doing the scooping of the litter. But I honestly do this in a very authentic, genuine way. I reflect on, you know, the cat really appreciates this. My wife appreciates this. And people who go into the room with the cat litter appreciate that it's clean and scooped on a regular basis. And, you know, I just reflect on that intentionally. It doesn't take much. It's easier than you think. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman (86:06)

It's so interesting. I mean, I. I don't want to contort the message you're. You're offering, because it's a powerful one about bringing awareness to the things that we have to do anyway and allowing that to make us more effective and happier and more present. But there's also this idea around disciplines, and the word discipline is kind of heavy. Nobody really likes it because we got disciplined or something. But I used to pride myself on working longer hours than everyone. And as the years have gone on, I pride myself in just. I can. Consistency is my superpower. I may not show up with the most intensity every time, although sometimes. But intensity kind of waxes and wanes. But there's something about just showing up anyway and just doing it anyway that is so powerful. And I sometimes wonder whether or not the mind is just. It's our foe. Until we embrace that piece. It's kind of a little bit of what you're saying.

Dr. Richie Davidson (87:11)

Yeah. And I love the consistency theme and also the discipline. And, yes, I think you're naming something real and important. And there's a delicate calculus that ranges between kind of letting go and discipline. And each person, I think, falls at a different point in this Continuum. And what works for one person may not work for another. You know, with regard to meditation, I always say that what's best for one person isn't necessarily what's best for others. And we have to discover what works for us. You know, what we do know is that in terms of meditation, that consistency is really important. Important.

Andrew Huberman (88:00)

You know, I was never a particularly good athlete or bad athlete, but I've just been really consistent at exercise. And I mean, I play fewer sports these days than. Than I did. But just that just continuing to show up allows you to be the person among your peers. Not that it's competitive where you go. Everyone else seems to have quit, and they're talking about how much this hurts and that hurts, and you're like. And all that you really had to do is just kind of keep. Keep going. And I sometimes think that the people that are max intensity and they, you know, it's like, gold medal or bust. They're always the ones, are often the ones that we don't hear from anymore. They're like, gone.

Dr. Richie Davidson (88:35)

Burnout.

Andrew Huberman (88:36)

Yeah. So I love the examples of the Dalai Lama and, you know, the Michael Jordans of every domain. But I don't know. I mean, I'm more interested in being the person that at 50, 60, I mean, you're in your mid-70s, you look incredible. You. You're super vital, cognitively sharp, you're in shape, you're excited about life, you're not afraid of death. Clearly you're onto something, you know, so. And I doubt it's just the black tea. I'm guessing it's to some extent. I mean, there you have all the other aspects of your life, but this consistency of meditation practice.

Dr. Richie Davidson (89:09)

Yeah, no, I think it's been super important. I do think that the discipline that you're talking about is really important, and it is part of it. But again, I think we need to find the right balance for each person. And initially, it's really important to have people invite them to taste this with the lowest possible friction so that they can really experience the benefit. And then it can gradually progress and they can, you know, harness some discipline, which eventually will be important.

Andrew Huberman (89:52)

I'd like to talk about online culture and social media just briefly, because I don't want to demonize it. I teach on social media. This will be aired on various online platforms and clips of it will appear on social media. But I have this sneaking suspicion that by going online, the mind starts to believe this thing that's not true. That if we're not online either posting or looking at what people post, or both, that somehow will disappear. And it gets to this idea of the anxiety that one feels when you just go into your own mind and it's chaos in there for so many people, it's like it's chaos in here. And then just learning to sit with that. I think a lot of people go into the world because the chaos of the world can occupy their attention. And then it's not about the chaos that's in them.

Dr. Richie Davidson (90:49)

Exactly.

Andrew Huberman (90:50)

Again, I don't want to demonize online platforms because I use them, I educate on them, I learn from them, and I gain entertainment from them too. But I wonder whether or not the net effect of social media at the Internet over the last, let's say, 10 to 15 years has been to trick the mind at an unconscious level into thinking that if we're not on there, we're going to miss out. But it's not FOMO of not like we're not going to be included, but that. I actually think it may run much deeper than that, that it's. That we don't exist, that life is there and if we're not aware of it, we don't exist. Because I see parents looking at their phones while their kids are running around them. So you can't say, oh, well, this is only, you know, well, we have kids and you're tending to your kids and some parents are great parents, but I see a lot of kids that are clearly being, you know, babysat by devices. And the parents will say, listen, it's the only thing that quiets them down and gets them to settle down while I can tend to things. So I can relate. But what do you think about the idea that the Internet, while powerful and can be used for great good, may have convinced billions of human minds that they don't exist if they're not observing or engaging on there.

Dr. Richie Davidson (92:11)

I mean, I think that that's something super important. And I think with regard to attention, we talk about two big buckets. One is stimulus, captured attention. And the, the folks who design products online have been really good at capturing our attention. And, and our attention gets hijacked by that. And, and it leads to the kind of inference that you're talking about, which is that. And people feel that they may not exist unless they're, they're online. And you know, I read some survey study that was done within the last year that reported that the average American opens their phone 152 times a day. I think most people would agree they don't need to open their phone 152 times a day. But we do it for, for those kinds of reasons. And, you know, I often say we, we are all part of a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent. And I think it's serious and I think that we don't know what the long term consequences are going to be. But we do know that, you know, the short term consequences, at least in certain cases, are not very good. And I'm someone who is also, like you, Andrew, a great believer in the potential value of technology. And I believe that technology is basically neutral and we can use it for the good and it can be used for harm. But the previous Surgeon General of the United states, who I miss Vivek Murty, issued a health advisory in 2023 on social media. The title was Social Media and Youth Mental Health. And he has scary data that was reported in that report. Some of the data show that the psychiatric problems in adolescence scale linearly with the hours of social media consumption per day. And so it is really eroding the mental health of our youth, not to say of our adults, too.

Andrew Huberman (94:46)

Yeah, I think a lot of adults now are hitting those, hitting the black ice of Internet usage, even among peers of ours, professionals. I mean, it was wild to see how many people who were chairs of departments, brilliant creators, academics, people from all domains of life, demolished their careers by getting caught up in stuff online and not being thoughtful about what they were posting. You just go, I can't believe it.

Podcast Narrator/Host (95:19)

I mean, they threw away their professional

Andrew Huberman (95:21)

lives with their thumbs. It was wild, right? If you think about it, and this is happening less nowadays, but just people just nuking their careers that they had spent 20, 30 years building. These were very successful, very smart people, but somehow got caught up in it. We see that less. But I do see a lot of people getting into the whole polarization thing to the point where there really is no common ground online. It's impossible. You can't take a nuanced perspective on something. I try, you know, I said, oh, I thought the new food guidelines could afford to include a few more vegetable suggestions and some fermented foods. And like, immediately that the fact that I didn't completely attack it right, was I got attacked for that, but then I got attacked for the other side for not completely embracing it. So it's like, you can't win. You can't win. But getting offline is not an option. It's not an option. And the younger generation has been very clear with me about that. It is not an option to get to not be on social media platforms, to not be texting much of the day, is to not exist in the social milieu. And so how do we reconcile that?

Dr. Richie Davidson (96:38)

Yeah, so these are really complicated issues. I think that, you know, I certainly don't in any way pretend to have the answer, but I do think that we need to take digital hygiene seriously and we need to figure out ways of, as part of standard school curricula, of educating our youth in how to change their relationship or how to be, to say it a different way, how to be in healthy relationship with their digital devices and the products and features that are available on those devices. I have the conviction that it's a trainable skill, but we need, particularly in youth, to start early before they get their first phone.

Andrew Huberman (97:30)

Is there any evidence that meditation, because it allows somebody to sit with the lactate of the mind, can also afford someone less impulsivity and sort of being less prone to getting hooked by the chaos of the world around them?

Dr. Richie Davidson (97:47)

Yeah, I, you know, I don't think there's any hard data on that, but I think it's a great question. I think it's actually empirically tractable. I think it's really worth studying. My conviction is, yes, I think it's, it would be helpful, but the data don't exist.

Andrew Huberman (98:05)

What would an experiment look like that look like? I feel like we should run that experiment.

Dr. Richie Davidson (98:09)

That would be cool. I'd love to collaborate.

Andrew Huberman (98:11)

Yeah, I feel like there's gotta be established in lab measures of impulsivity.

Dr. Richie Davidson (98:16)

Yeah, there are good measures of impulsivity. And actually with impulsivity there are measures that go beyond self report measures. There are behavioral measures of impulsivity which may have more validity. And so it would be extremely interesting. And you know, with device use and with a person's consent, you can actually get back end data. So you don't rely on self report. So it can be really robust kind of evidence.

Andrew Huberman (98:45)

The word discipline comes to mind again. And I think so many people, when they hear discipline, they think about doing certain things. Waking up at 5, exercising, meditating, eating clean, et cetera. But to me, the most interesting aspect of discipline are the don't do. It's all the stuff you don't do. You know, we're in the Winter Olympics now and I haven't been watching, watching. I like the Summer Olympics. But inevitably when they do the Olympics, they interview the people who win gold medals or they'll do a day in the life of and they'll say, you know, they wake up at 5am and

Podcast Narrator/Host (99:19)

then they train and they always want

Andrew Huberman (99:20)

to say, what do they eat? They go, oh, you have four eggs in my oatmeal, or whatever it is.

Podcast Narrator/Host (99:25)

What they really need to show is

Andrew Huberman (99:26)

all the things they don't eat. Right. Because sure, what they eat is interesting, perhaps, but far more relevant to. To their performance is all the things they don't eat. It's all the things they're not doing. And of course that makes for much less entertaining shows. So they don't do that. But I feel like that the training that would be so valuable is to train up the no go response.

Dr. Richie Davidson (99:49)

Absolutely. One of the things in my own life that I'm very aware of is, and apropos not doing, is not taking out my phone. And I'm very intentionally aware of that. I actually do a little practice of feeling my phone in my pocket and I really will not take it out unless I actually need it. I remind people when I have meetings at our center, you know, often it's just the cultural habit, particularly with young people, you know, they put their phone on the table and there are data showing that even if you have all your notifications turned off, the simple presence of the device is enough to impair the interaction in some way, to have a discernible impact.

Andrew Huberman (100:36)

And cognitive ability. There's this really. I don't know if you've seen this study. It's pretty cool. They looked at cognitive performance in people that had the phone upside down, on the table, in their backpack, beneath their chair, or in a different room. And only by having it in a different room do you see the normal level of cognitive focus. Not even an improvement. It turns out that people can focus just as well. It's really interesting. They focus just as well if the phone is on the table or under their chair in their backpack, but that the brain is using additional resources to keep suppressing the thought about the phone. So their cognitive performance is diminished. So the phone is really a cognitive detractor under those conditions. I think about that a lot. It's also why I have a lockbox for my phone. I keep it in a separate room. It's one of the reasons I love this podcast more and more with every passing week. Because no phones in here. We can really drop into things. Yeah, I think that training, the no go response, having that level of discipline is the superpower.

Podcast Narrator/Host (101:42)

All the other stuff, the to dos.

Andrew Huberman (101:43)

I mean, yeah, it's. It's important. Can't just not do anything, obviously, but we focus so much on what to Take what to do. People always want to know what should I take, what should I do? What's the ideal workout routine? And here we have this five minute a day meditation, great. But it's also all the things you're not doing. When you can sit for five minutes, you're not responding to the impulse to get up, the discomfort of body that can come up during meditation. A pain in the back, your hip getting tight. Should we look at those as an opportunity to train up the mind and our ability to not go into stimulus response or should we get comfortable?

Dr. Richie Davidson (102:24)

It's a great question. And you know, my very first meditation retreat in 1974, I just went into this cold and it was like meditation boot camp. It was kind of retreat where we were practicing for 16 hours a day and my body was on fire. It was so painful physically, that was the most predominant experience. I had just intense, intense physical pain. And then in this style of practice, after the third day, you had to make a vow that you're not going to move during each hour long session. So the meditation sessions were hour long and you had to make a vow that you're not going to move. Man, the pain was so intense, the physical pain. And you know, eventually after the like the fourth day, there's a kind of breakthrough that most people have, which is this remarkable kind of experiential insight where you directly look at the pain and you see that it's not exactly what it's cracked up to be and it's actually much more differentiated and you begin to see all of its constituents and that's when there's a kind of release. The other thing to say is that we've done imaging work with physical pain and meditation. It's one of the most robust kind of probes that you can use to interrogate the quality of the practice and also the longer term trade effects, if you will. And I liken it, by the way. You know, when you go to a cardiologist, you often do a cardiac stress test. And so one of the best ways to probe the integrity of the system is by challenging it and not just looking at it at baseline, so to speak. And it's true of the mind and the brain. And one of the best challenges is physical pain. So we've done work where we've primarily used heat as a painful stimulus because it can be delivered very precisely and very safely. In imaging data there is a signature that is quite specifically tied to the physical pain itself and that there's another signature that is associated with the emotional Reaction to the pain.

Andrew Huberman (104:56)

The interpretation of it.

Dr. Richie Davidson (104:57)

The interpretation.

Andrew Huberman (104:58)

Got it.

Dr. Richie Davidson (104:59)

And when we subjectively experience distress in response to pain, it's actually mostly contributed by the secondary response, that is the emotional response to the initial noxious stimulus itself. And that is the set of neural changes that we most dramatically see transformed by meditation as a trade effect. And it's particularly in this, this is published data. This was done with long term meditation practitioners and we show that actually it's specifically retreat practice. So we can have two people who are matched on the total number of hours that they've practiced in a lifetime, where in one person it is much more during retreat compared to another person. And it's specifically retreat practice where you're doing more intensive practice that contributes to the transformation of this emotional pain signature.

Andrew Huberman (106:05)

What would a good retreat practice look like? It would be presumably a course, but I guess if somebody didn't have the resources, they could take a weekend. And what does that look like? They're meditating a couple hours a day.

Dr. Richie Davidson (106:17)

More than a couple of hours a day.

Andrew Huberman (106:19)

Okay. So it'd be kind of hard to self direct.

Dr. Richie Davidson (106:22)

Yeah. Although there are a lot of online resources for this and actually for a person who is unable for whatever reason to go physically to a retreat, there are online resources. But of course, you know, I think it's pretty probably more beneficial to do it in person because you're more likely to comply with the expectations of like not checking your phone and things of that sort and being silent.

Andrew Huberman (106:50)

I'm always impressed by people that can sort of self direct. So much discipline. It's pretty cool. I have rules in my house. Like I have a study area in my basement where I draw and prepare podcasts and I don't allow phones down there, mine or anyone else's.

Dr. Richie Davidson (107:06)

That's wonderful.

Andrew Huberman (107:07)

It's an electronic free zone. I also now I noticed I like working out. It's a pleasure for me. And I have a gym and I noticed that my workouts would take much longer if I brought my phone in. So now I allow myself to turn on an album or two and leave the phone outside. But there's no phones allowed there either. And now I'm thinking about also making that the rule for the loft for the bedroom, like no phone. So there's fewer and fewer areas where things are allowed. But I think unless you set real constraints that it just starts to permeate everywhere. And I don't think I'm alone in that. And I grew up in Silicon Valley, so I'm not anti technology. I just I want to have the richest experience of life possible. And so I just find that harder and harder to do when it's like inviting all these other things and people into the room when you, when you have a phone there.

Dr. Richie Davidson (108:04)

Well, I love those examples and I think, you know, you are setting an inspiring example for others. And I think that things have gotten so bad with the deleterious impact of technology that you know, we've been led to, to do those kinds of things which I think are so important. And I think the more examples of that the better.

Andrew Huberman (108:30)

Yeah, I feel like it took us a while to become the country with such excessively high rates of obesity that we finally went, oh my goodness and we need to do something about this. So better eating, exercise, of course critical. The GLP drugs have been, I believe have been very helpful for a lot of people. I don't, I would hope people first embrace lifestyle tools and then, and in any case embrace lifestyle tools, but I don't think we're going to have the so called ozempic for addiction to devices. There isn't going to be something to come along and knock us off that place. I think it just requires a lot of self control. But I can promise everyone that your workouts get way better.

Dr. Richie Davidson (109:13)

Way better.

Andrew Huberman (109:15)

Your work gets way better. I actually think that for the younger generation it's become easier than ever to excel simply by not doing a lot of the things that other people around you are doing.

Dr. Richie Davidson (109:25)

Totally, totally.

Andrew Huberman (109:26)

You know, it's, it's, it used to be, you know, how do I succeed? How do I succeed? And you know, the, I'm joking. These days the shortest you know, how to become the best at your craft book is going to be by turning off your phone 22 hours a day. You will become best in class. I, I know it. Yeah, I absolutely know it.

Podcast Narrator/Host (109:43)

And people say, well then you can't access certain things.

Andrew Huberman (109:45)

There are ways around it and because it's really the, the presence that you bring to things that allows you to be effective.

Dr. Richie Davidson (109:53)

Yeah, absolutely. And regarding self control, I think that self control is a trainable skill and it is a byproduct of flourishing and one of the central capacities. I mean I, we talked about meta awareness earlier and I think meta awareness is really a key ingredient for self control and self control will, or self regulation will improve as a consequence of that. And that's a superpower. You know, there was a study done by these two psychologists, Moffitt and Caspi, who are developmental sort of lifespan psychologists and they've been studying this cohort in Dunedin, New Zealand, it's a birth cohort. So these folks have been studied since birth. They're now I think in their 60s, but there's amazing longitudinal data on, on these people. And they had a paper in PNAS a number of years ago that looked at measure behavioral measures of self control in, in these, in this cohort when these people were four and five years of age. This particular paper was looking at outcomes when they were 32 years of age. And what they found is that the individuals who are in the upper quintile of self control at 4 and 5 years of age had significantly less drug abuse, were significantly less likely to be involved in in court proceedings. They earned on average US$6,000 more per year and they were matched on socioeconomic status of their families of birth.

Andrew Huberman (111:41)

So they were more successful.

Dr. Richie Davidson (111:42)

More successful. So all these amazing outcomes. And I remember this paper was published many years ago, but I remember there's a line in the paper that says strategies which will improve self control will lead to all these important outcomes and save taxpayers money.

Podcast Narrator/Host (112:06)

I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up. Waking up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, NIDRA sessions and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now there are thousands of quality peer reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice. Both from the perspective of novelty.

Andrew Huberman (113:03)

You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and

Podcast Narrator/Host (113:07)

to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have

Andrew Huberman (113:14)

two or three three minutes per day in which to meditate.

Podcast Narrator/Host (113:17)

If you'd like to try the Waking up app, please go to wakingup.comhuberman where you can access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.comhuberman to access a free 30 day trial.

Andrew Huberman (113:29)

Super impressive. And I do think that nowadays we hear so much about the do's exercise, you eat this and five minutes a day meditation. I think the self control component that's an outgrowth of, of meditation seems like a distinct benefit of meditation because when you're exercising, yeah, I suppose if you really hate it and you're constantly forcing yourself not to quit, that's a form of self control. I feel like most people, once they get going, they're kind of moving through it. But who knows? I do want to use this notion of self control as an opportunity to look at the other side of it. And I was planning on doing this at some point. I think now's the point. I'm fundamentally confused about something about life. Maybe you can help me. I'm still not sure how much of life, of a really good life should be forcing ourselves to do things versus kind of quote unquote, honoring what's right for us. Now obviously, with respect to morality, with respect to the big stuff in life, those are easy answers, okay. But when it comes to moving through the day, we're now talking here today about starting the day, doing something that you probably don't want to do or that you would reflexively not do as a means to gain some other larger benefit. We're talking about going against the reflex, against the impulse. In the Buddhist traditions in the field of meditation. How is this kind of thought about? And just personally, how do you think about this? Because I think a lot of people listening are probably thinking, okay, great, like I'll do this if it gives me some benefits. I'll lower my heart rate, I'll have less stress, I'll learn some additional self control. But I think people are also feeling overwhelmed with all the stuff they feel like they have to do and fight themselves. And I think people are tired of fighting. And I think part of the reason they're tired of fighting is that they're not picking up the phone and going, oh, this is cool, this is cool, this is great, this is great. I think that they feel slightly out of control, that they just can't resist it and it's just happening. And so we've lost the muscle, so to speak, the mental muscle of resistance. But I think that of overcoming resistance. And, but it's also kind of a philosophical question. I mean, how much of our lives should we be forcing things upon ourselves to be better? And how much of life should we just live and be free? Like a bulldog, which is the best breed of dog?

Dr. Richie Davidson (116:12)

When I first started meditating, I was fighting with my mind and I thought that that was great. This means I'm really doing the work that's necessary and sitting through the physical pain, you know, forcing myself to sit for an hour while my, you know, feeling like my knee was on fire and my back was killing me. And you know, I had a kind of sense of pride. I'm able to just tough this out. And I was miserable. You know, I did that kind of practice for quite some time and it may have had some benefit in shaping my skills of self control. But you know, at some point I discovered that maybe there's another strategy that can be effective. That is that that's not about fighting with your mind and not about fixing anything. But it's the invitation is really to make friends with your mind, to welcome this, to have a completely different stance toward it and to do it with ease rather than with, you know, this kind of attention ridden stance. I think that that is possible. And the approach that we are taking in the Healthy Minds program, for example, is we're trying to do that. So there is a bit of discipline involved, but it's kind of really at the most minimal. It's inviting people to be where they are and to really make friends with their mind and not to fight against it. It's not about pushing away thoughts, it's about, it's not about, you know, sitting down to meditate. If, if you, if you're restless and can't sit, that's fine. Do it while you're walking. So the discipline is the intentional use of the mind and there is discipline involved in that. But it's kind of what is the minimum level of discipline to begin to get these networks going? And that's kind of the question that we've asked. Yeah.

Andrew Huberman (118:37)

Because your lab has been focused heavily on the neuroimaging and understanding what brain networks are activated as well as the positive outcomes. So this five minute a day meditation could be done eyes open, could be

Dr. Richie Davidson (118:50)

done eyes closed, could be done while you're walking, while you're commuting.

Andrew Huberman (118:54)

And it shuts down the sort of default mode network and brings higher levels of activity in these awareness attentional networks. Is that, I mean, broadly speaking, I'm a neuroscientist, but I want to translate this for people.

Dr. Richie Davidson (119:08)

Yeah.

Andrew Huberman (119:09)

Because the names of the structures actually are somewhat meaningless.

Dr. Richie Davidson (119:12)

Right.

Andrew Huberman (119:13)

Unless we've got someone in a stereotax.

Dr. Richie Davidson (119:16)

Right.

Andrew Huberman (119:16)

Yeah.

Dr. Richie Davidson (119:17)

Just to be transparently honest, there's been very little imaging work on the five minutes per day We've done some, and what we've seen in the work we've done is the biggest. And in general, I think this is true. The biggest changes that you see, particularly in the early stages of, of practice, are in measures of connectivity. And it could be functional connectivity, which has to do with the functional integration across different networks, or it could be in measures of actual structural connectivity that we can image with diffusion weighted imaging. And looking at white matter connectivity. And what we've actually seen with the five minutes a day is, is changes in diffusion weighted imaging looking at. I mean, the biggest change we see is in the superior longitudinal fasciculus, which, as you know, Andrew, connects the prefrontal and the parietal regions. And it's basically a major pathway through which the central executive network is interacting with the default mode. And that's what we see with just five minutes a day of practice. We can see measurable changes in diffusion weighted parameters. With just five minutes a day for a month.

Andrew Huberman (120:36)

It's super impressive. More and more incentive to doing the five minutes a day meditation. I guess that's the protocol we're weaving through this entire episode. And of course, people could do seven, could do ten. I'd like to see people do six months every day. That would be impressive. That's what I'm going to shoot for

Dr. Richie Davidson (120:51)

six months every day.

Andrew Huberman (120:52)

Yeah, just do five minutes a day for, you know, hit 30 days and then six months later. I don't know, I. I feel like if it's just the repeated showing up, that's really it. I mean, I have a prayer practice I do every night before I go to sleep. If I fall asleep, I get out of bed. My girlfriend knows this. I get out of bed and I pray. Like, I've not missed a night since I started doing this.

Dr. Richie Davidson (121:15)

I love that. I think that's beautiful. And I'd love to see a study done with priestly prayer and see how it affects sleep.

Andrew Huberman (121:23)

My sleep is definitely better than ever, but there are probably a variety of reasons for that, I'm sure. But sometimes I find that I'm falling asleep while I'm praying and I just tell myself, okay, it's the consistency. I have this script in my head that I'm showing devotion by showing up. Yeah, it's just the repeated showing up. And it's one of the few areas of my life that I was able to really remove the need to do it perfectly. I mean, what would that even look like? I realize how ridiculous that is, right? But some perfectionist tendencies in me were Showing up. So for me, I won't even say that the pride in it, the joy in it is from the consistency.

Dr. Richie Davidson (122:08)

Yeah, I love that. And I feel exactly the same way in my consistent practice. I think that's so important. I wanted to mention one thing about sleepiness because you mentioned that sometimes when you're doing the nightly prayer, you're sleepy. And sleepiness is, is often something reported when people are meditating and particularly in the early stages of practice. And you know, I've dealt with sleepiness a lot and particularly before I changed my routine of. And when I gave up the alarm clock because I was getting too little sleep.

Andrew Huberman (122:46)

Sleep deprived.

Dr. Richie Davidson (122:47)

Yeah, exactly. And I felt it and I struggled with it. So I have this meditation teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, who one of the things he's taught is, is sleep, sleepiness, meditation and sleepiness meditation is simply to be aware of sleepiness. Just be aware of sleepiness and don't try to fight it. Just simply notice what is sleepiness, how is it feeling, and investigate it with curiosity. And that completely changed things for me.

Andrew Huberman (123:26)

There just seemed to be this thing where when we fight our state or our nature, it gains power, but when we, we don't want to give into it, but when you acknowledge it, but you don't completely give into it, somehow it changes. Martha Beck was the first person to really teach me this. First in her books and then on the podcast, this idea that like, if a feeling sucks or you don't want it to be there, that rather than trying to suppress it, you really look at it and let yourself feel it until it changes shape just a little bit, her language. And then you start to look at it through that different, slightly different lens and then it morphs and it goes away.

Dr. Richie Davidson (124:07)

Exactly.

Andrew Huberman (124:07)

And I think in her, I again didn't describe it as well as she did or would or could. But what we're talking about over and over again today is the mind, looking at the mind. And it does seem to have this ability to, you know, humans have this ability. Do you think other animals have this ability? I know you can't answer that question for sure, but do you think one of the reasons dogs are so wonderful is because they're not self conscious?

Dr. Richie Davidson (124:35)

My conjecture is that our ability to look at our minds is way more developed than in any other species. And there may be some rudimentary kinds of meta awareness in other species. And, you know, some scientists have suggested that it may be correlated with successful performance on the self test. You know, recognizing yourself in the mirror, you Know, there's a recent report of elephants passing the self test.

Andrew Huberman (125:10)

So they are smart after all.

Dr. Richie Davidson (125:11)

Yeah, yeah. And you know, that's an interesting story. They did this actually in the Bronx Zoo in New York and they had to construct a mirror that was the size of an elephant to.

Andrew Huberman (125:21)

How do they know if the elephant knows it's itself? Because they don't attack it if it's itself.

Dr. Richie Davidson (125:25)

So they put rouge on the trunk and they expose the elephant to the mirror. And if the elephant touches the point where the rouge is, it's recognizing itself in the mirror. And there are very few species that pass the self test in that way. Most species don't.

Andrew Huberman (125:49)

We were talking offline a little bit earlier about a course that you're teaching, about this very thing that you're calling flourishing. So what do the students get in that course? And what components could you possibly educate us on right here, right now so that we can benefit without having the opportunity to take the course?

Dr. Richie Davidson (126:06)

Yeah, absolutely. So the course is built on a framework that we've developed on the plasticity of flourishing. It holds that there are four key pillars of human flourishing. And each of these pillars exhibits plasticity. And these are the key trainable ingredients that constitute human flourishing. So what are these four pillars? The first pillar is, and we've talked about some in the course of our conversation already, but the first we call awareness. And awareness is where mindfulness would be. It's where voluntary attention, the capacity to focus resides. And it also includes our capacity for self awareness and for meta awareness which we've spoken about. The second pillar we call connection. And connection is about the qualities which are important for healthy social relationships. Qualities like appreciation and gratitude and kindness and compassion. You can think of the opposite of that being, at least in part, social isolation and loneliness. Again, these are elements that we know can be trained. They are importantly connected to our well being. The third pillar we call insight. And insight is about a curiosity driven understanding of the narrative that all human beings have about themselves. The narrative that we carry around in our minds. And we know that we all have a set of beliefs and expectations of ourselves. And we know that at one extreme of the continuum there are people that have very negative belief beliefs and expectations of themselves. And of course that's a prescription for depression. But what's really critical for well being is not so much changing the narrative, particularly at first, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative so that we can see the narrative for what it is, which is a set of beliefs and thoughts and expectations and Then finally, the last pillar is purpose. And purpose here is not necessarily about finding something grand to do with your life that's more meaningful and purposeful, but rather, how can we find meaning and purpose in even the most pedestrian activities of daily living? And we actually talked about some of this earlier. But can taking out the garbage be connected to our sense of purpose?

Andrew Huberman (128:45)

Cleaning the kitty litter.

Dr. Richie Davidson (128:47)

Cleaning the kitty litter. And of course it can be. It just requires a little bit of reframing and that's a learnable skill. There are really three things that we've discovered in this work that can be easily summarized. The first is that flourishing is a skill. The second is that it's easier than you think. And the third is that flourishing is contagious. So that when you're flourishing, it's going to have beneficial impact on the people around you. And our course, the Art and Science of Human Flourishing, is built on each of these pillars to give students not just an intellectual understanding, but an experiential practice, a taste of what these pillars actually are. One of the important insights that the course is built on is that there are two major forms of learning that we know from modern neuroscience. One we can think of as declarative learning, which is learning about stuff. It's conceptual learning. The other we call procedural learning. And procedural learning is learning that is skill based. It's acquired through practice. And we know that it's instantiated in different brain networks compared to declarative learning. And human flourishing requires both. And most of the academy privileges declarative learning over procedural learning. And so this course that we teach is an unusual course because it includes a lab every week, so to speak, a little section where students do the procedural learning for the stuff that they're learning declaratively in the lecture part of the class.

Andrew Huberman (130:40)

I love that. I've long wanted to do a course that had information and practices involved. Sounds like you've built that course. If people who are not able to take the course wanted to access these different bins with some practical tools. You already gave us a tool for awareness. So meditation five minutes would be a great place to start. Done daily and just to be aware of what's of the chaos and be able to observe it but not follow it. How does one incorporate connection?

Dr. Richie Davidson (131:15)

So I actually talked a little bit about connection earlier, but there's a lot more to say. But one kind of connection is doing a little appreciation practice when we eat. That's one I talked about earlier, where we connect to the people even if we don't Know them who have brought us food to the table. Some of. Some we may know, some we might not know. There are formal kinds of connection practices that we. There are meditation practices that we call loving kindness and compassion practices. And so we can. We've shown in a randomized control trial that just a few hours of this practice over two weeks is sufficient to produce a measurable change in the brain. And so here's a way you can do this. You can begin with a loved one. And bring the loved one into your mind and your heart. And envision a time in their life when they may have had some challenge or difficulty. And then cultivate this strong aspiration that they be relieved of that difficulty and that they have a life of ease. That's it. And you can use a simple phrase that you can repeat to yourself that embodies. That captures that theme. It could be something as simple as, may you be happy, may you be free of suffering. But the words don't matter. Whatever words are most well suited for each person. But then you move on to different categories of people. So you start with a loved one. You then move on to yourself. You then move on to a category of person that we call a stranger. And a stranger is someone you recognize whose face you recognize, but you don't know them well. It could be someone that works in the same building that you work in. It could be a classmate. It could be a bus driver. It could be the cashier at a local store that you go to, a barista. You don't know anything about them, but you recognize them. And you can envision a time in their life when they may have had some difficulty, even if you don't know anything about their life. So you do that with the stranger. And then finally you move on to what's probably the most important category, which is a difficult person, Someone who pushes your button. And you genuinely bring them into your mind and your heart. And you recognize a time. You imagine a time when they have been having some challenge. And you cultivate the aspiration that they be relieved of that suffering. And that practice, just done a few minutes a day can change your brain. And it changes your behavior, and it

Andrew Huberman (134:12)

changes the brain how? Makes it capable of more empathy.

Dr. Richie Davidson (134:17)

So one of the key regions of the brain that's been implicated in empathy is the temporal parietal junction. What we see is that in this kind of compassion practice, there's significantly enhanced activation of the temporoparietal junction, particularly in response to stimuli of people in distress, stress. There's also networks in the brain that are involved in positive affect that are activated by this kind of practice. And behaviorally, we've shown, using hard nosed tasks that are derived from behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, we actually have demonstrated, and other scientists have demonstrated this, that people behave more altruistically using these hard nosed behavioral measures. We've also shown that on a hard nosed behavioral measure of implicit bias, that there's significant reductions in implicit bias and those reductions are sustained for at least six months after the formal period of practice ends. So there's really hard nosed evidence to suggest that both the brain and behavior change. So the third pillar, insight, is really about, and I should say just backing up for a moment, that two of these pillars, connection and purpose, are found in virtually every other framework for understanding well being. Two of them are unique and the two that are unique are awareness and insight. And I should just go back to awareness for one moment to just point out one other thing. There was a very famous study that was published in Science many, many years ago by Killingsworth and Gilbert, two psychologists at Harvard. And they did a study with around 3,000 people. And they texted them at different points during the day with their consent over the course of several days. And they asked three questions. The first question they asked people is what are you doing right now? And they checked off from a list of activities. Second question is, where is your mind right now? When I queried. And the third question is right at this moment, how happy or unhappy are you? And the finding from this study, the two key findings are that the average adult on these measures reports that they're not paying attention to what they're doing 47% of the time. And when they're not paying attention to what they're doing, they're significantly less happy. Even if what they're doing is boring. Even if what they're doing is washing the dishes. If their minds are distracted, they're less happy. And the title of this paper is A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind.

Andrew Huberman (137:27)

Does that mean that a focused mind is a happy mind or a happier mind?

Dr. Richie Davidson (137:32)

I would say a happier mind, but not necessarily happy.

Andrew Huberman (137:37)

I love that study. Yeah, I'm sure it will with each year that we have more opportunities for distraction.

Dr. Richie Davidson (137:44)

Exactly.

Andrew Huberman (137:45)

Which also, to be fair to social media means that if you want to sit down with your phone and handle some texts or scroll social media for a bit, there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

Dr. Richie Davidson (137:55)

Exactly.

Andrew Huberman (137:58)

It's the intrusion of that stuff into other activities that's likely to be the issue.

Dr. Richie Davidson (138:03)

Exactly. Totally agree. Totally so just to finish this insight. So a practice that is easily accessible, that can really help with insight, is if you're in a difficult situation, whatever it is at work in a relationship, imagine what a person who is different from you, that you may know, or it could be some famous person who you know something about. Imagine how they would view the situation from their perspective and just allow yourself to get a taste of how their view of the situation is different from your view of the situation. That's it. And that is really helpful in giving us some distance from our own beliefs and expectations and helps us recognize that when we see the world, we're actually not seeing the world. We're seeing how we construct our own construction of the world through our filters of beliefs and expectations. And so it helps us become less fused, less identified, which is really an important ingredient for well being. And finally, with purpose, a simple practice is whatever you're doing, whether it's a pedestrian activity, like washing the dishes or doing your laundry, just simply reflect on how this is beneficial not just to yourself, but to others in your ecosystem. That's it. Simple.

Andrew Huberman (139:42)

So much of what you just said, which by the way was spectacular, awareness, connection, insight and purpose, who wouldn't want to cultivate more of those? Especially given that awareness is correlated with more happiness, lack of awareness, and presence with less happiness. So much of it seems to be about getting outside ourselves and at the same time not letting the things outside ourselves pull us away from ourselves. And I feel funny even with that language. I mean, the language becomes so loopty, looped. We don't have, unfortunately we don't have real language for this. I love lactate for the mind because it's simple, it's accurate and it's actionable. But so much of what I think you're describing in these four bins is I think of it as like trying to ride the crest of a very kind of, in some cases choppy terrain until you're there.

Dr. Richie Davidson (140:39)

Right.

Andrew Huberman (140:40)

We can get pulled into the news and it's important to be aware of what's going on in the world, but pretty soon you just be lost in it and then carry forward the angst, the feelings of despair. Having gotten one over on the other team, whatever it is on the other side of things were in our heads and our problem seems so monumental that we forget that we have agency, that there are things we can do right there and then to handle ourselves and show up better. So, you know, it can feel like a pretty narrow bridge to walk. And I'm wondering if Any of the data from meditators shows that that bridge gets wider with time and maybe even easier to access. In the same way that somebody who's fit, right? I mean, they can do a really hard workout for them, but somebody who's really fit, they know, okay, when I get there, I'm kind of achy, but I know after five minutes of warming up, I'm going to be fine. So there's less resistance to the warming up, and therefore there's more energy for the actual workout. And then it goes much better.

Dr. Richie Davidson (141:46)

Yeah. I think what you're saying is so important. One of the things you're saying in the exercise analogy is that you're becoming more familiar with what happens. And as you become more familiar, there's less resistance because you know that the initial. I mean, I do when I go out on a bike ride, you know, the first 10 minutes are agony for me, honestly, I think that's helpful for people to hear.

Andrew Huberman (142:12)

I think I. You know, Rob, who's my producer and close friend, he's done multiple Ironmans, he runs all the time. And I asked him, do you. Do you feel good when you run? He's like, no. Usually for the first 20 minutes, I feel like garbage. And then I feel great. I'm like, oh, that's good, because I thought I was the only one. Although for me, it's a little bit shorter. But I don't run the way that he runs. I don't cycle the way that you cycle. I'm out there just to, you know, do it, not to, you know, perform

Dr. Richie Davidson (142:37)

at an extreme level, because I'm familiar with it. I know that at a certain mile distance, it's going to change, and it does very reliably. And we also similarly can become more familiar with our own minds. The familiarity is the same kind of concept. We can become more familiar with our own minds. And when we become more familiar with our own minds, our capacities become more readily available, more spontaneously available. And one of the challenges when we first start this work of intentionally cultivating flourishing is that we forget. We know the things that we could do to be helpful, but we forget to use them in the moment, in the friction of the moment, or even if the moment is not so friction, like. But, you know, I've seen people, even meditators, you know, when they're. If they're coming to a meal and they sit down, they just immediately start, you know, very unconsciously, instead of just taking a moment, you know, for a little appreciation. But the more you do it, the more it becomes spontaneous. And literally the sitting down to the meal is a cue which elicits this response and it really becomes more spontaneously available. It takes some time, but I think that this is really a reliable outcome of doing this with regularity.

Andrew Huberman (144:08)

Fantastic. Yeah, I'm a big fan of ritualizing things. I have my pre podcast ritual. It doesn't matter what it is. And the consistency is what matters because I think it probably the neuroscientist in me wants to say that it probably allows a lot of networks that don't need to be active to be less active and probably allows the networks that do need to be active to get some of that energy. Literally. I mean, we had Martin Picard on here. He's an expert in mitochondria.

Dr. Richie Davidson (144:40)

He's a good friend of mine.

Andrew Huberman (144:41)

Oh yeah, he's terrific.

Dr. Richie Davidson (144:42)

I love Martin.

Andrew Huberman (144:43)

And you know, when. When we used to. When we used to talk about energy, it sounded kind of woo and, you know, but it's mitochondria. I mean, we're talking electrical and chemical signaling between neurons. And mitochondria are handling so much of that. And so we're no longer living in the space where the names don't have substantiation in the textbooks and in biophysics and in molecules. And while that might not be the most important aspect, I think people that would otherwise say, oh, well, you know, this meditation stuff sounds kind of, kind of out there. No, this is the stuff of biology.

Dr. Richie Davidson (145:16)

It's this. Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman (145:17)

It's the stuff of physics. It's the stuff of chemistry. So speaking of chemistry, I'm curious what your thoughts are on psychedelics. We've talked about them before on the podcast, and I always use the usual disclaimer that there's some very, very compelling clinical trials. Psilocybin for major depression, maybe for other things as well. Ibogaine, very dangerous unless done correctly with correct health monitoring. So has been shown to be helpful for trauma, for addictions, MDMA and empathogen. Not a psychedelic for trauma, but that we still don't have FDA approval on these things. Many of them are still Schedule 1. So no known medical application and still very illegal to possess or sell. So that's the warning. And certainly populations that shouldn't go near them, people with predisposition to psychosis or mania. That's very, very clear. With all of that said, the data are pretty exciting. People's ability to access an understanding of patterns in their unconscious mind, to rewire their default mode and resting networks to reduce anxiety, and on and on and Psychedelics and meditation have a somewhat overlapping past. I'm curious what your thoughts are, given all the disclaimers, what your thoughts are, and is there a place for combining them with meditation to achieve more accelerated results?

Dr. Richie Davidson (146:51)

Yeah, those are great questions, which I have thought a lot about, as I'm sure you suspect. So I have a few nuanced views of this. First, I'm excited about the new research in the way you are. And I also completely agree with you that there are really promising data from some of the clinical trials. So, you know, you mentioned in severe intractable depression, and there are, I think, really good data there. It's also good data for alcoholism. So. And I think that this resurgence of research is a great thing. And I'm convinced this is something that really could be helpful in a number of clinical situations. I'm less sanguine about the use of psychedelics in, quote, normal people or individuals who are doing it for kind of their own self development or flourishing or spiritual development. I'm less sanguine for the following reason. I think that psychedelics can produce a kind of glimpse of a different mode of being, which could be helpful. But I think a lot depends on what happens after that, so to speak, and how that experience is actually worked with and integrated. And one of the things that concerns me about the stuff happening with psychedelics today is the relative lack of training of the folks who guide psychedelic sessions. And you can look in the United States today and see that many major universities, including my university, not through my involvement, are offering these one year kind of certificate programs to become a psychedelic guide for people with very little prior training. And this is something that's occurring all over the place. It deeply concerns me because I wouldn't trust the kind of people who. I mean, it's not to disparage these people. I'm sure that they have good motivation, but I just don't think that taking a person with no prior training and putting them in a program for a year is sufficient to cover all of the issues and nuances that are going to arise. The other related issue is that when a person has a psychedelic experience, what happens after and what is kind of the residue of that? And what I sense is, is the residue is that they have a memory of the experience and so they remember aspects of what happened during the experience. And the recollection of an experience is very different than the embodied transformation that is required to produce real change. You know, for me, there's a simple question you can ask. Is this person kinder? Does their spouse report that they're more enjoyable to be around. Is their flourishing contagious? Those are the questions that I think can be asked and I haven't seen a lot of convincing evidence of that. I'm a big fan of the research going on and continuing to use the these substances for treating people who are in various states of significant distress. But I'm cautious about their use in a broader way to promote human flourishing at scale.

Andrew Huberman (150:56)

Thank you for that very, very thoughtful response. Yeah, I'm enthusiastic about these compounds. I just still have a lot of questions about what proper integration really looks like, how to standardize that. And then of course there are many people who perhaps are hearing this and will say, well, there's a long standing tradition of how to do this correctly. And now people in standardized medicine in the west are now trying to overtake this or change it and raises a lot of interesting questions. I think clearly it's growing in its use. I haven't heard of any standard ways of meshing it with meditation. Certainly there are people also at Stanford combining it with transcranial magnetic stimulation because these compounds opened up plasticity to some extent. And the idea that one could direct the plasticity towards specific networks in the brain is pretty exciting. I mean that, I mean what's cooler than that, right? Combining chemistry and brain machine interface to and people's self report and a really good practitioner and driving the neural circuit changes so that they can emerge from that better. But yeah, we're not quite there. We're not quite there.

Dr. Richie Davidson (152:14)

And I think in general the use of neurostimulation, neuromodulation methods in conjunction with other modalities of intervention, whether it be psychedelics or meditation, for example, is a very promising avenue for exploration. And we're doing some research right now combining neuromodulation with meditation to see if we can boost the impact of meditation with some targeted neuromodulation. And it's specifically neuromodulation to help facilitate sleep.

Andrew Huberman (152:55)

What device are you using to stimulate.

Dr. Richie Davidson (152:57)

So we are using this, I'm sure you know something about it, but it's actually there are very few groups in the world currently using this. It's called transcranial electric stimulation with temporal interference testi. And the basic idea of this, this is that if you have two electrodes that are stimulating at a very high carrier frequency, say 15 kilohertz, which is essentially from all we know, the brain is not responsive to a 15khz signal. So that's the carrier frequency. And the way it works is we're stimulating one electrode at 15,000 kilohertz and another electrode at 15,001 kilohertz. So there's just a 1 hertz offset. And the geometry of the targeting is such that we can target deep brain structures where the delta frequency is maximal. We are targeting structures that are specifically structures where we know slow waves are generated and are therefore an important ingredient in, in deep sleep. And we're, we're doing. And this stim. The other cool thing about this stimulation is you cannot feel it. It has no subjective sensations. So it's very different than tms which is, you know, you feel it big time, you don't feel a thing. So we are delivering this during sleep. People don't know when they're getting stimulated. They of course know they're being stimulated because they're giving informed consent, but it doesn't wake them up.

Andrew Huberman (154:39)

And it increases slow wave sleep.

Dr. Richie Davidson (154:40)

We've definitively demonstrated that it increases the density of slow wave activity during deep sleep.

Andrew Huberman (154:48)

How do they feel in their wakeful subjective life?

Podcast Narrator/Host (154:51)

Better.

Dr. Richie Davidson (154:51)

Yes.

Andrew Huberman (154:52)

And how do I become a participant in this study? I mean I get plenty of slow wave sleep. My sleep is great lately and has been for a while. But what are you recruiting subjects?

Dr. Richie Davidson (155:02)

This is a. Yeah, it's a big complicated protocol.

Podcast Narrator/Host (155:06)

I don't care.

Andrew Huberman (155:07)

Are you recruiting subjects?

Dr. Richie Davidson (155:08)

We are recruiting.

Podcast Narrator/Host (155:08)

I'm just kidding.

Andrew Huberman (155:09)

I'm just kidding. I do care. I'm just teasing. People are probably thinking, how do I get that? How do. Well, maybe this pre sleep meditation protocol should be looked at because that's something anyone can do. I'll provide a link to that paper.

Dr. Richie Davidson (155:23)

Yeah, and that's exactly what we're doing in this study. Now we're using a, this is a little technical, but we're using a micro randomized design where so in a single participant on some nights they get pre sleep meditation just before sleep, just a five minute practice. And in other nights they do not receive that. And we are looking at the impact of that on slow wave sleep and also looking at the synergistic effects of pre sleep meditation with the testy stimulation to increase slow wave activity. And we're getting experience sampling measures during the next day to see if the pre sleep meditation has a demonstrable impact on their mood the next day and how that interacts with our boosting of slow wave activity.

Andrew Huberman (156:16)

Very, very cool.

Dr. Richie Davidson (156:16)

I should just say this is work that's being done collaboratively with Giulio Tanoni and his group in Wisconsin. He's a very well known sleep and consciousness scientists.

Andrew Huberman (156:31)

Great lab. Great lab.

Dr. Richie Davidson (156:32)

Yeah, great lab.

Andrew Huberman (156:33)

Are you able to share any preliminary findings about what the pre sleep 5 minute meditation does to deep sleep?

Dr. Richie Davidson (156:42)

We don't know yet. And honestly, it's not me being super cautious. This is a new study that we're just in the middle of. We have roughly 20 something participants who've completed the protocol, but it's, it's ongoing right now.

Andrew Huberman (156:58)

Well, given what you just described, and given that this other paper described that some pre sleep meditation can have a really impressive impact on growth hormone release, I'm encouraged to do the five minutes before sleep. So I suppose that if you want to double up on the benefits, you could just do the five minute per day meditation, folks, in the hour before sleep.

Dr. Richie Davidson (157:23)

Why not? I think it would be great.

Andrew Huberman (157:25)

What are your thoughts on open monitoring meditation for increasing creativity?

Dr. Richie Davidson (157:30)

Honestly, the, the data on open monitoring meditation, or for that matter, any meditation and creativity, I would say are very limited. In part it's because, you know, the, the measures of creativity that are used by psychologists typically are, honestly, I think, pretty crappy measures of creativity. So we're quite limited by the measurement tools that we have. Having said all that, I do think that open monitoring meditation can really boost creativity primarily by helping people become more aware of the associative thoughts that they have. And this relates to something we talked about earlier. I often tell students of mine to spend time inspecting their own mind, just watching their own mind and, and writing down thoughts that may occur that may be interesting. And this is a kind of open monitoring meditation. It's having no specific object and just being open, aware, awake and not distracted, not getting lost in a train of thought, but simply being aware. I believe that we probably have much more creative thought occurring than we give ourselves credit for, and it's simply because we forget. And I think this can really improve that. But the data are pretty meager.

Andrew Huberman (159:09)

But you still recommend it if people want to increase their creativity?

Dr. Richie Davidson (159:12)

Yes, I do, because this is one of those things where there's essentially no downside to it. We know there'll be other benefits that have been empirically documented.

Andrew Huberman (159:24)

Awesome. Well, Richie, thank you so much for coming here today and educating us on meditation, but really much more than that. You've educated us on states of mind, how to access different states of mind, what they mean, how they impact the state of being and our traits that we will enter after we meditate. And now everyone should be inspired to do at least five minutes per day of meditation. Maybe in the morning, maybe before sleep. Would love to get the update on this study that you described looking at slow wave sleep. And I'm really excited about your book. It's so great that you have a new book coming out because I of course read Altered Traits I've talked about on the podcast. I love, love, love the book. We'll put a link to that. But Born to Flourish How New Science

Podcast Narrator/Host (160:07)

and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path

Andrew Huberman (160:10)

to Thriving by you. And we should give credit to your

Dr. Richie Davidson (160:14)

co author, Cortland Dahl.

Andrew Huberman (160:16)

And he is a neuroscientist as well.

Dr. Richie Davidson (160:18)

Yes, he's a neuroscientist, contemplative scientist and chief Contemplative officer of our nonprofithuman.org awesome.

Andrew Huberman (160:29)

Well, you're a real pioneer in this space. The field, as it were, of meditation really needed a serious scientist to break in and study and share so that everyone can learn about and adopt meditation. And you've just done so much to educate so many people and coming here today, you've just done more of that. So I have immense gratitude for you and I know millions of other people do as well. So thank you so much.

Dr. Richie Davidson (160:55)

Thank you. And I want to express my immense gratitude to you for bringing science that can make our lives better to so many people. And that is such a gift and such a wonderful service that you are providing. So thank you, thank you, thank you

Podcast Narrator/Host (161:11)

for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson. To learn more about his work and to find a link to his new book, Born to Flourish. Please see the links in the show. Note Captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the Follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from science sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre sale@protographsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols An Operating Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social

Andrew Huberman (162:57)

media platforms and if you haven't already

Podcast Narrator/Host (162:59)

subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Richie Davidson.

Andrew Huberman (163:35)

And last but certainly not least, thank

Podcast Narrator/Host (163:38)

you for your interest in science.