"Sustaining Happiness Through Mindful Living" | Barry Margerum | TEDxSantaClaraUniversity

good night, what I like to do is start by taking a couple of deep breaths together, done, inhale, hold the exhale, inhale, hold the exhale, it's a great way to prepare yourself for any important meeting activity or event, actually You should relax and concentrate more. and it's certainly going to help me in this presentation so how am I doing so far? You like what category would you put me in neutral frenemy or possible bad guy now before you as you ponder what I should say because I'm having trouble with Sometime I'm off the market okay it's not available so if you caught me ladies or gentlemen, a kind of demonstration, the reason I asked that question is because we make value judgments about people we don't even know in the first seconds we see them we all do it we do it unconsciously we are connected that way we are actually looking for threats to our ancestors many years ago we are just looking for saber-toothed tigers they were worried about who they would encounter and whether they would be Friends or Foes, that is how they survived and that we carry with us today Joseph LeDoux of New York University It says that we are not, there is no evidence that our brains are programmed by fear, what it does say is that we have the circuits that allow us to detect and respond in pre-programmed ways that are modifiable, so what I would like to talk about tonight It is about

mindful

ness and meditation so that you can better modify and regulate that you are pre-programmed to deal with this global digital world in Which we find the benefit is that when you receive a bad email you don't have the same reaction as if you saw a tiger with sabertooth and it's bigger than that, it's not just for events like that, it's devastating. events in your life, how do you approach them and make sure you can handle them appropriately?

I got divorced and what I discovered is that through

mindful

ness and meditation I was able to make better decisions, make better decisions and found a path to

happiness

. and peace faster than it would have otherwise and that's what we're going to talk about tonight. I have been a student of this for several years and I became very upset with my friends because once I found out about this I kept telling them that All the time I decided that was not the right forum so I am glad to have the opportunity to talk to you this night about this.

The best way to understand mindfulness is to understand the circuits of the brain. There are three parts. The first part is the The brain stem is the oldest part, it was known as the reptilian brain 400 million years ago. It does basic things, regulates the body and also allows or initiates the fight against flight and the fear of freezing. The response seen in torn reptiles. The next area is the limbic. The system found in mammals often refers to the emotional part of the brain. This is the part that records every behavioral memory that created good and bad experiences in your life.

Generates our emotions. These two together, the brain stem and the limbic system, are our causes. many of our automatic behaviors and impulses come from trained instincts, reactions and trained instincts from that area of ​​the brain, the prefrontal cortex is the most evolved in humans and it is the executive function of the brain and what it does is have the ability to make a pause before we take impulsive behavior in your actions has the ability to calm and regulate the limbic and brainstem areas of the brain, so you are driving your car and you are supposed to merge and the guy or girl gets in front of yourself and if you activate your prefrontal cortex you rationalize well he must be in such a hurry that he interrupted me you do nothing if you do not activate your prefrontal cortex you honk the horn you get nervous you turn it off and maybe even get road rage, to be determined, so Mindfulness practices according to Daniel Siegel are the ability to create a state of activation that allows you to harness the power of the prefrontal cortex at that moment and that is very important.

Being able to do that can help you better manage your thoughts and emotions through meditation practices. If you look at long-term meditators, you find that they have less emotional reactivity than the rest of us, they don't work. as we do with the brainstem and the limbic system - the prefrontal cortex is what we're going to talk about tonight and we're going to try to deal with what you'll find is that once you learn to use these things you're more able to be reflective that reflective you can take stock of the situation and do the right thing instead of just not being our best leaders around the world are people who have this ability some people call it emotional intelligence but it is the ability to manage these things allows you to lead people are allowed to deal with difficult situations difficult conversations I think today we find that we need to employ these things even more than before because of the world we live in, does anyone sound familiar?

Here at school we have just passed the midterms, whether you are a parent, whether you are a worker, whether you are a student, the days have become longer and more intense, we receive more emails, more notifications, alert messages, Facebook, Twitter, posts of Snapchat than ever before, if you want. You can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, unfortunately many people do this and worse are the people who expect you to pay that way. 60 Minutes had a series from Alliance saying that, in fact, smartphones and apps like Facebook have become addictive and you see people using them. all the time I'm sure you can relate to that, you can see people walking down the street and almost stopping at traffic signs because they are focused on their phone.

I almost did it this weekend forcing it and I'm supposed to be paying attention. Now worse is the fact that on top of those externalities, we have everything going on in our lives in general, we have the fact that you didn't get the fraternity or sorority you wanted to get into to get that job done. a girlfriend or a boyfriend, I mean, it is difficult to be human, it is very difficult to be human and I like to shout, I like to describe it as if our lives were continuous successions of ups and downs, twists and turns of pleasant and unpleasant situations that the School of US Army war a term they call bucha volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous they describe it for war situations because you don't know what's going to happen next that's how our lives are 2017 is a very good example of that and I'm not talking about that Cubs win the World Series then the problem is that we believe the world revolves around us we believe the road should be straight and flat we believe it should be simple simple true predictable that's, hey, I'm the star of the movie here, right , that's the problem because we want everything to go the way we want, when the world is a winding road, we get stressed, that's why we get stressed if things don't go the way we expected, so what happens when that happens are two things first if we look. at a macro level Harris International did a study and showed that we lose about $300 billion a year in lost productivity due to work-related stress at an individual level Matthew Killingsworth did a study with calm

happiness

when you track your happiness found that The 47% of the time you were distracted or your mind wandered due to problems happening in your life. 47% of the time they also found that when your mind wanders it is typically negative.

I think you're not very happy when your mind wanders because it's another topic. Now I take a section on that because when I was in business school, one of the professors noticed that one of the students I don't have happens to be the cutest one in the car class and wasn't at the lecture. at all and he for some reason decided to say so what are you thinking? You're clearly not listening to my lecture, she said, well, I'm having a sexual fantasy in the middle of class, that was the end of that class, we couldn't even go back to class because that was it, yeah, she had to ruin a class, so this is a problem.

Matthew Killingsworth would tell you that my wandering is a cause, not a consequence of unhappiness, and then I think that's what we're going to wear tonight, so we have to deal with this unhappiness because being unhappy is really detrimental to your success and welfare. There have been more than 200 studies of 200 to 75,000 people that show that being happy improves all areas of your life, marriage. your job your health your relationships you know that it is a case in which we all seek happiness and we and in reality we are happy people by default the problem is that all the anguish that we bring into our lives makes us unhappy and that is what we are trying try to deal with that and then there's the other point, you know, which is how many people like to work with unhappy people, does anyone know that, so we want there to be a desire to be happy and what I'm going to propose tonight is a way to do it this is my definition of mindfulness: paying attention in the moment, in an open way and accepting what you are experiencing, paying attention in the moment, in an open way and accepting what you are experiencing, let's analyze that a little, paying attention.

At the time Eckhart Tolle wrote the book called The Power of Now, it was a groundbreaking book at a time and what he talked about was the fact that you never experience, think, feel anything outside of the present moment and you never will. Our lives are based on the present. moment, so our focus should be on making the present moment the best we can. The problem we have is that we have this thing called monkey mind or chatter that comes to our brain from that limbic system. Remember everything that happened. It was bad for you. It's as if that part of memory is like Velcro for the bad things and Teflon for the good things.

You remember every bad thing that has ever happened to you and you are bringing this to light, so you are bringing up the guilt, the resentment, the bitterness, the sadness, all of these things that make you feel guilty. get out of the present moment that mental distraction what you have to realize is that you have to let it go you can't those events are over there is nothing you can learn about them but now they are over you should have done it you learned and now you have to be in the present, you can't take it out of the present, did you see this a lot with sports psychologists, they tell players, football players that they missed the catch, they say forget that they missed the catch next play, it's always the next play or the guy who He gets stuck in the mud and hits himself.

I'm an idiot. I got my car stuck in the mud again. I always do this instead of saying hey, my car is stuck. mud What am I going to do now to get my car stuck in the mud? Does

living

in the past help? It just takes you away from the present, so your attention must be on the present. The same applies to the future. Anxiety Tension Restlessness and I fear that they are all there if you want them to be and they will be. The thing is that they are the few, they are the future and they take you through the present.

We try to predict the future, but we never do a very good job. It's always worse than we think. I remember my son got a bad grade in one of his classes. I thought he would get a bad grade in the class. I thought his GPA was going to go down. I thought he would do it. Not getting into a good college I thought he would get depressed and then be homeless, right, that's what our mind does, that's where our mind does it, so we have a you know, basically, the future will come here and when arrive. here is our actions and our attitude at that moment that matters, that is where you need to focus, so now we know that we are not in the past, we don't want to be in the future when we are in the present. but now we are in the present so now we need what we need, the right mindset, we need a positive mindset and in my definition of mindfulness, we want to be open, accept and learn, we want to be curious, we want to grow, we want to make the present be the best it can be by having a good attitude instead of having a negative mindset, a negative mindset that could be judging, comparing, controlling all the negative things that come and the problem is you know we compare all the time.

What we do is part of our egoic mind is to always compare and I can tell you that if you compare yourself to people better than you you are going to be unhappy. I can tell you that if you compare yourself to less for forcing people, it will be you. However, I will be happy if you are going to compare, at least compare with inferior people, but I am not suggesting that you compare in the first place and I think the problem we have today in our society is that it is much easier to compare because of social media. , everyone posts this and that and you can see everything that everyone is doing everywhere, so Barbara Khan at the University of Pennsylvania has been studying this FOMO fear of missing out for parents what it is the foam and has done studies to show that basically this is making you unhappy she gives the example of a person who goes to this exotic wedding andHe has a great time at the wedding, it's a really unusual and different wedding, he comes back, gets on a computer and discovers that all his friends are on the beach that weekend and she's missing it, he's thinking it won't be part of that experience that that group creates and you're going to miss out, so what does that do?

She dwarfs her experience at the wedding now if you asked her. If she did it all over again, what would she do? I would still go to the wedding, but what you have done is leave the present and not enjoy something that is notable because of that comparison. That is what you have to be careful with, in the same way we judge all the time we think we know what It's what's best for us, the problem is we don't always know what's best for us, so take the neighborhood kid who gets it. a horse and everyone says what a lucky child the next day he falls off the horse and breaks his leg what an unlucky child the next day the war breaks out all the healthy children go to war he stays at home what a lucky child we don't know what Is it good or is it bad for us, we believe so, you connect the dots later in life, there can be a silver lining if you make it and no matter what happens to you, so if you get angry about something that is not what you you want, keep this in mind.

Here is my mental framework that I suggest you try to use. It's called getting into the zone, so that's kind of a summary of what I've been talking about. You want to be in the present, not in the past or the future. You want to have a positive mindset, not a negative one, and that's where you want to operate now, you say, well, Barry, you just told me that 47 percent of the time my mind wanders, how am I supposed to do this? How am I supposed to do this? I'm supposed to stay in the present? My mind keeps moving forward. the future in the past, ha, that's where the meditation comes.

Meditation is the concept of being able to train your brain to be able to stay in the present. There are many forms of presentation, but what we are going to talk about tonight is really about. with concentration and how to keep your mind in the present moment, so what we're going to do is and we're all going to do this, we're going to focus on our breathing, do some meditation and focus. in our breath and what's going to happen is your mind is going to wander, that's what happens, then our milah wanders and then we'll notice that it's wandering and then we'll bring our attention back to our breath and this circle, the cycle will continue. practicing this. daily you can develop the neural circuitry in your brain to help better concentration and I can tell you that I really wish I had known about this when I was younger because I would have been a much better student and a much better person in life because it is all of this. things that get into our heads and cause us the problems that we have, so this technique is one that you can do and we will do it now, okay, so if you put your feet on the floor, you can close your eyes. or you can lower your head looking at the floor and again we'll start with a couple of deep breaths if you inhale, hold, exhale, inhale, hold and exhale.

Now what I want you to do is just breathe normally, kill yourself, relax. your chair softens your knees your stomach your shoulders your jaw the muscles in your face and now just focus on your breathing notice when your inhalation begins when you hold it at one end and find that place in your body where it is easiest Notice that your breathing is that your nostrils, your chest, your stomach, okay, you get the idea, that's all you need, the more you do that, the more you bring your mind, you'll be able to get it back, your breathing, you'll develop the circuits that your brain needs to know.

Oh, my mind wanders to the present or the future. I need to bring her back to the present so let me finish with the following. This is life, it is a continuous succession of ups and downs, twists and turns of pleasant and unpleasant situations in your life, except that that is what it is, except that it is not a straight path, except that you are not the star of the movie , there are all these other people in the world who actually have other things they want to do so try to stay in the present moment when these things happen, take a few deep breaths when something happens to you, this strongly suggests that that is what should do, try to understand how to be present so that you can better decide what to do and how to behave if you do it, I believe you will find a path to peace of mind and happiness thank you very much for your time