The Science of Mindfulness | Dr. Ron Siegel | Talks at Google

Hello everyone and welcome to this Google talk sponsored by G Paul's and I am delighted and very grateful to have dr. Ronald Siegel is here to talk to us today about

mindfulness

and how the practice of

mindfulness

can help us deal with everyday problems, so before he gets here, let me give you a little background about him. He is an assistant professor of psychology. he-time at Harvard Medical School, where he has taught for more than 30 years. He is a long-time student of mindfulness meditation and is on the board and faculty of the Meditation and Psychotherapy Institute.

He teaches internationally on the application of mindfulness practice in psychotherapy and other fields and maintains a private clinical practice in Lincoln Massachusetts. He is co-editor of the critically acclaimed text Mindfulness and Psychotherapy Second Edition. Co-editor of Widness and Compassion in Psychotherapy Deepening Mindfulness in Clinical Practice, which contains a foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, he is the author of a book for a more general audience on everyday mindfulness solution practices for everyday problems that I believe will be selling here with a reduced price for Google employees. He recently created a new comprehensive course for the general public that is part of the large course series named The Science of Mindfulness as a Research-Based Path to Wellbeing, which gets my personal recommendation.

I recently completed it and it's fantastic and I'm also a regular contributor to other professional publications and co-chair of Harvard Medical School's annual conference and meditation on meditation and psychotherapy, so without further ado, please join me in welcoming the Dr. Siegel on stage, welcome everyone, thank you Matt for inviting me and everyone else at Google for inviting me, thank you for coming here in person and those of you who have come virtually, you know that we don't normally choose to attend the keynote like this when We just fell in love, won the lottery, and got a promotion.

Instead, we become interested in these topics either when we have had some kind of crisis in our lives or perhaps our lives are going well on the outside, but for some reason we are feeling some degree of emotional distress or difficulty and it turns out that In recent years, neurobiologists, clinical researchers and mental health professionals have discovered that a series of ancient mindfulness practices that have been refined over the last 2,500 years or so turn out to be extremely useful in helping us work with all types of emotional difficulties. everyday, from anxiety and depression to serious difficulties such as chronic pain or perhaps relational conflicts and in a few minutes I will teach you some of those practices and show you how.

You can use them in your own life, but to use them effectively it is very helpful to have an idea of ​​why life is so difficult for all of us in the first place. Well, it turns out that we didn't actually evolve to be happy, our brains developed primarily as survival organs in the same way that the other organs in the body developed, and to understand this, it's helpful to look back at our past and let's start by looking to Lucy. This is an artist's conception of our great great great. great great great great great great etc. grandmother and she was roaming the African savanna somewhere between three and a half to four and a half million years ago there may be a previous common ancestor, we are not sure and we know that she survived because we have her DNA, but how is it possible that survive competing with other wild animals?

Imagine she comes face to face with the lion. What could you do well? She could grit her teeth and show her claws, but that probably wouldn't be the case. too effective, she could try to rely on her skin to protect herself, but that's pretty limited, until now it was silly or you still know she wasn't very fast, one of the first things you learn if you ever go on a walking safari in Africa and there you are. I usually know a couple of guides who have heavy weapons and tell the tourists, please, please, no matter what, just don't run, because everything is scary out there and it's faster than you.

See that half-blind hippopotamus? half blind rhino behind those trees 38 miles per hour that big heavy hippopotamus in the mud puddle 42 miles per hour and also if you run all that is a predator is going to think about your prey and they will make things worse so that she can't escape he had reasonable eyesight, not as good as a urja raff eagle, but better than a rhino, reasonable hearing, a lousy sense of smell, just ask your dog how he can get it right. Basically, she had a few things going for her. She had a combat flight system. which was able to respond to emergencies and this was first inherited from reptiles and defined more and more refined by mammals and also had a prehensile thumb, an opposable thumb that could pick up objects, which was actually very good at using tools and if Have you ever seen your dog try to use a tool, you understand how useful it is to have one thumb and the other thing he had where he had the ability to think, think about the past, analyze what had happened and project it into the future. future and it is this third ability that helped his enormous Lee and also gets us into a lot of trouble because it turns out that this ability to analyze the past for pleasure and pain and try to maximize future pleasure and avoid future pain is not some kind of neutral computing apparatus, it's actually subject to something called negativity bias, that's what cognitive scientists call it.

If you think about Lucy's situation, she could have made one of two types of errors and we could think of these as a type one and a type two error, analogous to the same type of errors we use in scientific research, there could be looked at a bush with a base shape behind it, thinking, oh my gosh, it's a lion when it was actually just a beige rock, or I could look at the same shape and say beautiful beige rock when it was actually a lion. Now Lucy could have made thousands of type 1 errors and still lived to propagate her DNA, but she made only one type 2 error, which is the end of her DNA line.

We develop minds and brains that are really good at these type 1 errors. Our minds, says my friend Rick Hanson, are like Velcro for bad experiences and Teflon for good ones. Anything bad that happens in our lives sticks, the good ones slide out of the pan. If you meet with your boss for a review and you hear about nine things you're doing very well and your boss tells you about one area of ​​insufficiency, what? You're going to think at 3:00 in the morning, isn't it nine? things you are doing very well and there are countless examples of this, even other animals do it, if you put a rat through a maze and at the end of a certain path you give it some food, it has to go through that test several times to learn the way if in the end you give him an electric shock a test, he learns that is all he needs and remember this even in couples there are people, there are a couple of psychologists, but less the name Gottman in the Seattle area and they study couples and find that on average we need five warm and fuzzy interactions with a partner to undo the loss of trust that comes from a fight, so the mind has this very strong negativity bias, we can try a little experiment here just to test this, can we?

I'll see how this plays out given the current political climate, but I'm going to say two words and I want you to notice the first words that come to mind after you say those two words. Ready, here are the two words Bill Clinton. Do you understand what came to your mind? Don't be shy, what scandal did someone get into? Monica, for example, yeah, the blue dress scandal, something like that, that's what still comes to mind for a lot of us, even though you know, obviously, his wife is running for office right now. Whatever you think about her presidency or his politics, I mean she helped resolve the conflicts in Northern Ireland, it was a period of prosperity.

The fact that what we remember about this is Monica Lewinsky shows you how easy it is for negative bias to take over. scandal palo loss of confidence palo those experiences palo it gets worse it turns out that life is difficult for everyone partly because we have problems with change this starts very very early I don't want to leave my diapers and start using the toilet the current arrangement suits me very okay are you joking around at school with all those weird people and that weird person called the teacher? I'm not going there. I want to stay at home with mom and dad now maybe there is some enthusiasm about these things but this is often a lot of reluctance I remember I have twin daughters, they are actually my strongest meditation teachers and I remember when they were born we thought what we had to do something practical.

I better give up my Toyota Corolla and get a minivan. I did not do it. I think it was great. I didn't feel like accepting the change. 18 years later, they are ready to go to college and I was in mourning. I thought now, after eighteen years of trying to form a good relationship with them and be a loving and caring father. They're going to abandon me like other girls did when I was 18 and wrote this script. Fortunately, my wife has a little more wisdom about these matters than I do, and she points out that if they had been in such disrepair they wouldn't be able to go.

It would make me even angrier, but change is hard and as I project forward, I'm becoming an older guy and I imagine myself going into assisted living, even if they're hitting the rocks for my entire generation, I don't think so. I'm going to accept the change, and you? Has anyone noticed any changes in their body since you were 20? Have you welcomed him and hugged him? This is a difficult path. There is another problem. One of the other things we see when we go to an African game park and it actually gets a little repetitive because in species after species the story is the same: there's a dominant male hanging around with the reproductively promising females and then there's another group of males who are younger doing the species equivalent of playing basketball. their skills and tools are prepared so they can try to overthrow the dominant male and we see this in species after species after species in humans, this concern for position in the tribe or in the pack is expressed as a concern for self-sufficiency. esteem, if you examine your minds and we do this with mindfulness practices, we begin to see that our minds are constantly comparing themselves to others and we choose many different domains and dimensions for this, for one person it is who is richer, for another it is who is smarter to someone else who has the highest position to someone else is who has a better physique or is better athletically who is thinner who is more attractive who is more creative who has more friends who is more liked the list goes on and on and on. follows if they hang out With meditators, the way I do it becomes a lot of fun, who makes less comparisons, who is less focused on themselves, who sees the bigger picture better, but now it's the same kind of thing, assuming that you are like me and your minds make these types of comparisons.

I always win. I once asked that question to a group. A boy raised his hand. I thought I should avoid it at lunch. You know, it's a bad sign. The men are handsome and all the children are above average. We will always have ups and downs with this. We are constantly faced with disappointments and a sense of failure and inadequacy because it is absolutely impossible to stay at the top. At that point, even if you are a gold medalist at the Olympics four years later, you will probably be crowned and if not, eight years later, surely right now, to make things even worse, who here is going to die is approximately the 20% of the hands went up, it's a pretty conscious group, so we've got this really bad situation, we're very, very focused on who we are, what we look like, how we're doing, there's all this change happening and in the end we fall apart. and we die.

It's no wonder we have a lot of psychological distress, so what I'd like to do is focus on some of these particular psychological disorders, among the most common, and I wanted to do that by discussing a little bit of a battle that unfolded. in the American Psychiatric Association when they were formulating the DSM-5, the DSM is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, it's basically the code book for classifying different types of psychological and psychiatric problems and there was this battle when they were designing the most recent copy between what we could call the groupers and the splitters the splitter said that what was wrong with the old system was that we still did not have a sufficient number of diagnostic categories and without realizing it we were still combining apples and oranges the grouper said , you know, that's crazy.

It really doesn't fit my experience, in fact, as a doctor for example, I rarely see people with only one diagnosis, almost everyone has aa little of this, a little of that, something like a third diagnosis and, in fact, it changes from week to week. They said, you know, I think if you create more categories you'll miss the forest for the trees, the splitters at this point actually said which forest the grouper said, well, for example, you won't see any of the universals in humans. Psychological difficulties, you won't see the types of problems that these different categories go through, they said they are universal, these are separate diseases, they are like you know syphilis and a broken bone, what are the universals?

Well, the woods say, for example, a really powerful one. Universal is what we might call emotional or experiential avoidance and let me give you an idea of ​​how this works. If any of you have ever drank 20% alcohol again, thank you. It's a little more realistic now. I know I'm in California. Some of you are going to say this, but who does it solely for the taste? Nobody, a very honest bunch, okay, most of us, when we drink alcohol, we do it because we would like to change one state of mind to a slightly different state, you know, let's say.

We've had a hard day at work and we're feeling a little out of breath and muscularly we're like that and we think you know a beer or a glass of wine would help me feel a little calmer o We're going to go to a party and there will be some people there that we don't know or worse yet, there will be some people there that we do know and we think you know one drink would just make this a success. a little more gently, so generally we drink because we want to change one state to a different one, a tense, anxious or unpleasant state to a more pleasant one and of course if we do it from time to time, that's fine, but if we do it compulsively and a lot and in fact I can't deal with life situations without doing them well then we have a substance abuse problem let's take another common problem let's take anxiety if I get nervous before speaking on Google or I get nervous before flying on airplanes but I fly on airplanes and speak on Google.

I don't have an anxiety disorder. I'm the nervous type of person, but I avoid public speaking or I won't fly on a plane because I don't want to feel anxious. That is the way. to an anxiety disorder and that can extend to all kinds of things that we end up avoiding because we are trying not to feel the anxiety. There was an astronaut, one of the first people in space, who is being interviewed by an actor because the actor was going to play him in a movie and they want to do a faithful job with this and the actor said: I don't understand how you can have the courage to climb those untested rockets.

I would have been terrified and the actor said I think you're misunderstanding courage is not about not being terrified we were we were terrified we had no idea about the things we are going to hold together courage is about doing what makes sense to do even when you feel afraid So we see that your experiential avoidance, trying not to feel anxious, is actually at the core of anxiety disorders. Let's take one more. Let's look at depression a little now. All of us, even if we've never been to a therapist or anything like that. Sometimes we have been sad and sometimes we feel depressed.

What is the difference in your experience? How does it feel qualitatively different to be sad or depressed? Don't be sure about this. Nobody knows. We have all experienced these things. Someone wants to offer a difference between them. sadness and what does that feel like in depression depression has more hopelessness absolutely has this thought that it will never end absolutely yes unenthusiastic in depression there is a kind of being separated from the commitment to life of true interest, what else yes, often sadness is touching it is kind In a localized way we are sad about something and often depression is much broader than that and it is as if a whole life feels empty or dead, someone else, so a way of Think about this and one of the characteristics that, in my opinion, cuts, gets to the point, in depression we feel like dead and like closed, while in sadness it is about to give an object, we are like alive, we are still committed to life when Shakespeare wrote, the farewell is such. sweet sorrow that we understand if he had written the farewell is such a sweet depression that we believe that this guy doesn't know how to write, you know, that wouldn't speak to us, so we can see that even in something like depression there is a kind of closure of In the organism there is a kind of experience of closure and avoidance that is part of this, so there is a very nice little video that, in my opinion, is a wonderful visual metaphor for this.

I'd like to show you that it's very brief but it gives you an idea of ​​how this plays out and, frankly, how experiential avoidance ends up multiplying our misery. you you you you the way that mindfulness practices will help us with this wide variety of different types of psychological difficulties is pretty much the way that the samurai warrior learned to deal with the flies from him. Mindfulness practices were developed cross-culturally to deal with everyday psychological distress. They were probably most intensely refined in Buddhist cultures, where we have about 2,500 years of written records of monks and nuns who practice these practices intensively and we're talking about several variations of them, but they exist in one form or another in virtually every culture. cultures, so let's talk about what mindfulness is and then we'll talk about how we can use it for these different types of everyday psychological problems as we use it.

In Western psychotherapy these days, mindfulness is a translation of a Pali term and Pali was the vernacular in which the teachings were first written down through the historical Buddha and the word in poly is sati and connotes awareness, attention, remembering, awareness and attention is part of the way we use them in English to be aware of paying attention, but remembering is different: it's not about remembering what you had for breakfast or even remembering childhood trauma, it's about remembering to be aware and At every moment of our days there is a scholar of ancient texts named John Donne at Emory University and he put forward the following criticism: He said, "You know, if you could imagine a sniper on top of a building preparing to take out to an innocent victim that The sniper would be very aware, very attentive and every time his mind wandered from the task at hand, he would focus on her and John said, I don't think that's exactly the attitude they're trying to develop in you. yourself as a psychotherapist or In the attitude you are trying to cultivate in your patients or clients something is missing here and what is missing is a sense of non-judgment, acceptance, kindness and friendship.

Now there are some scholars who say that is included in sati, but the important point is that this non-judgment or acceptance is this skill in itself and it requires some work to cultivate it, let me show you what I mean, join me in look at this guy and just take a picture of him and see what emotion comes up when you look at him and raise your hand if what you're feeling is a sense of harsh, critical judgment, we can talk later if that's the case, but you know you should just look at him and feel something like oh, it's okay now, even if it urinates and defecates at the wrong time in the wrong place, even if it doesn't listen to instructions, we can understand that it's young, it's a puppy, it needs training right now, when you start practicing mindfulness full, most of us, one of the first things we see is that our mind actually pees in poop at the wrong time in the wrong place and doesn't listen to instructions at all, it's quite rebellious and the same kind of loving attitude that we would cultivate towards that puppy, that's what we're going to try to cultivate toward whatever arises in our consciousness, including depression. feelings of anxiety, feelings of physical pain and the like, so putting this together, we could say that therapeutic mindfulness has three components: your awareness of the present experience with acceptance, and today mindfulness is very fashionable in the psychotherapy and it's very trendy in more scientifically oriented psychotherapy, so people are interested. to measure mindfulness and they have developed about half a dozen scales to do this because if they set up a treatment and it works, they want to know if people actually became more mindful and if that was the active ingredient or if there were other elements in the treatment which had made them feel better and one interesting thing about measuring mindfulness is that mindfulness is very subject to what's called the Dunning-Kruger effect now Dunning and Kruger were a pair of social psychologists at Cornell University and They observed that in all types of human beings. activities actual competence is inversely proportional to perceived competence understand that actual competence is inversely proportional to perceived competence you can think of this as the Homer Simpson effect.

Homer is supremely confident when he goes out on one of his misadventures, it's just us in the audience thinking: I don't know, he looks pretty bad, well, people who really think they know what they're doing often don't and this It is no clearer than in mindfulness. What happens is if you give one of these mindfulness scales to someone who's been practicing Oh. meditation for 20 or 30 years they will say oh yeah. I became aware of my current experience once I was on the top of the mountain for about five minutes about eight years ago, when you tell people who haven't practiced much, they say, "I'm sure I'm living in the present." all the time and a kind of conclusion here is that when you return to this practice, don't be surprised if you find many moments of inattention of moments in which the mind wanders, of operating on automatic, of getting lost in the flow of. thoughts and then the constant narrative that goes through our minds and you know, mindfulness is a lot like swimming, eating a gourmet meal or making love, talking about it is not the same as experiencing it, so although.

I'm giving this primarily as a talk, let's take a few minutes to practice mindfulness together and I invite you to put down what you have in your hands and find a comfortable position I'm not sitting in those chairs but find a position and we will do this with the. eyes closed and please do this those of you who are listening to this on YouTube or are streaming it through the Google system, simply allow your eyes to close and find a comfortable posture where your spine is more or less upright and a The way to find that posture is to imagine a rope tied to the top of your head pulling toward the place where this guy moves gently along the spine and in almost all mindfulness practices that's what we do.

We start with a sensory object. of consciousness, some sensation that we can pay attention to and arbitrarily we are going to choose the breath right now, so just start noticing the sensations of your breath and notice all the feelings that happen as you breathe. Inhale and exhale and see for a few moments if it is possible to follow the breath through its complete cycles from the beginning of one inhalation to the end of an exhalation and then to the next, so let's just practice being aware. from the present experience with acceptance, focusing on the breath is an object of awareness now it would not be unusual for thoughts to enter the mind, it's okay, they are our friends, we are not trying to chase them away but to follow a thought along the way.

Normally we would, we are just going to let it arise and pass, as if a cloud appears and leaves the sky, gently returning our attention to the breath. This is a lot like training a puppy, mine runs away, we gently bring her back to her campers again we gently bring her back and all the other judgments I like this I don't like this I can concentrate I can't I'm a good meditator I am a poor meditator those are just other thoughts that we allow to arise and pass by gently training the mind for a few moments to get out of the stream of thoughts and return to our senses, gently bring attention from thoughts to sensations here and now and bring this little period of practice to a close. close I'm going to ring a bell and I'm just going to listen to the bell from the beginning of the ringing until it goes off and you can't hear anymore and you can open your eyes again and check the room and maybe stretch a little bit to feel your body and maybe you'll notice that Just a few minutes of starting to train the mind and training the brain to get out of the flow of thoughts and into sensory reality helps us connect a little with what is happening here and now on a sensory level and you may wonder how Is that, what is that like, what is the awareness of breathing or doing something like that, how is it possible that that helps us deal with all the difficulties of life and with these different emotional states, and that's what I would like.

To explain to you from time to time we will talk about how to use these practices to work with some of the difficult states that arise and to understandThis I would like you to imagine two very different days the first day you haven't done it. You've been sleeping well because you've had a bad cold, and to try to take care of yourself, you've been eating a lot of junk food and other comfort foods, so you're not feeling very healthy. You haven't really exercised. You certainly haven't been meditating. You've stayed up too late watching TV just trying to feel a little better.

You wake up in the morning after another restless night and look out the window and well, if you live where I live. It's 33 degrees and it's raining and you feel a little bad and if you live with someone you go into the kitchen and have one of those five minute interactions with someone else that can ruin your whole day, you know how they are. It starts badly and quickly escalates and then you look at your schedule and you meet with too many people and many of them are not your favorites and it is with this as a backdrop that you get in your car and you start driving to work and at first it is barely noticeable, but you think maybe you hear a knock, but as the miles go by it gets louder now it's definitely a knock, and then you feel it in your body and it's a knock on your thumb and you have a flat tire and you just have The feeling of oh no not today I can't stand this now imagine a completely different day you haven't had a cold or a virus you've been sleeping well you've been exercising heck you've been doing mindfulness meditation right? decide to take good care of yourself so you go to bed nice and early you wake up naturally without the alarm clock you look out the window with 68 degrees in the sun is shining and you go to the kitchen you have one of those five minute interactions with another human being, that makes you so happy of living in the world, human companions, being with other people, having relationships and connections, and you look at your appointment book and it's kind of a Goldilocks day for whatever your profession is, not so much. job where you're going to burn out not enough to starve or get fired and you look at some of the people you're meeting and you realize you know if I wasn't working with these people professionally I'd like to have them. as my closest personal friends and it's with that as a backdrop that you get in your car, drive to work, see the sky, notice the trees and You're at a red light and suddenly BAM you get hit from behind and you're You're scared, of course, but you realize that you're fine, you're fine and you stop your car over the other cart, the other driver stops his car and by some miracle the Other drivers don't have character problems, they are reasonably balanced people and they say “oh, sorry”, you switch roles and you just get the feeling that “it could have been so much worse”, I'm glad it is.

You just know it's going to be some money and some discomfort right now the first day the intensity of the experience was moderately challenging it was a flat tire on a rainy day but your ability to handle it was much less than that so I really felt quite overwhelmed the second day the intensity of the challenge was considerably greater a car accident but your ability to withstand adversity your sense of resilience was much greater than that so you accepted it it dried up many of the things we do to try to feel happier and, In fact, many psychiatric interventions are designed to decrease the intensity of painful or uncomfortable experiences, mindfulness prides itself on the fact that the way they help us with these things is very different, they help us by increasing our ability to endure or be with discomfort.

They're going to help you be more like that Samurai guy with the fly who instead of fighting the discomfort of the fly found a way to accept and be with the discomfort of the fly and mindfulness practices can be very, very powerful. The way they do it, there is a well-known Zen teaching story about a horrible sadistic general who had come to a city in medieval Japan and burned crops and buildings and killed healthy boys and men and raped them. women, it was horrible and this general really wanted to beat the townspeople and he found out that they respected their Zen master, so he took his horse and went up the hillside to the main hole of the Zen temple and they were sitting in the meditation cushions to this little old man, the zen master and the general takes his bloody sword, holds it over the zen master, says, don't you realize that I can put my sword through you without blinking? and the old man looks up and says.

Yes, and my lord can be stabbed with a sword without blinking and he says that at that moment the general becomes disoriented and leaves the city. Now it is not always going to work as a military intervention but he

talks

about how these practices develop our ability to be with discomfort and not having to escape from it and the way they help us be in emotional discomfort is particularly interesting because let's say I'm not a mindfulness guy and something happens to a friend of mine and he's a good friend and I've done everything kind of thing for him and he does something selfish, treats me dirty and I start to think I can't believe you did that to me after all the good I've done for you and every time I have one of those. thoughts, you know, my body gets tense and I get angry and that brings more of those thoughts and we just get stuck in this loop once we've practiced mindfulness for a while, we start to experience emotional emotions differently, we start to experience them in the same way.

The way cognitive scientists actually describe emotions a cognitive scientist would tell us and emotion consists of a few simple things here take a moment to feel, for example, a little bit of sadness yourself just imagine something that maybe makes you a little bit sad, okay, you notice that that starts with a bodily sensation maybe it's a pressure here or here or in the eyes, so an emotion begins with a bodily sensation and includes a thought, a sad thought or a memory or something like that and often includes a visual image and that's all there is to it.

Once we have practiced mindfulness for a while and spent some time letting go of the dream of thoughts and staying on the sensory level, let's say anger arises and all I experience is the body tenses up, the heart rate increases, increases breathing, increases blood pressure, well, you don't. I don't feel the blood pressure, but the body temperature rising and maybe the thought passing like a cloud in the sky, maybe the image of decapitating my former friend dancing in my mind, but it all seems like some kind of impersonal process. of mental contents that arise. and fleeting, and when we can experience it that way, we get a lot less caught up in it and it's a lot easier to let it come and go, so by combining this mindfulness practice, the way it's going to work for us is, instead, it will support the experiential approach. of experiential avoidance because when something uncomfortable comes up in mindfulness practice instead of doing it quickly, how do I change it, how do I fix it, how do I get more comfortable, we learn to be with it, this starts on a very sensory level, just when a acorn The itch comes up when we practice meditation, you just sit with the pain or the itch and maybe direct your attention to the pain or the itch instead of the breathing and that develops this muscle if you want to be able to stay or be there. with discomfort, it helps us get out of the stream of thoughts instead of believing in our thoughts so much that we begin to see them as mental contents as thoughts that come and go, so we don't get so caught up in them in the process, curiously we become much less self-focused, so all the nightmares about falling behind are not being good enough and not getting the best review at work and all that's not that I don't want you to try hard, you work at Google, but it you know everything. -worries about esteem begin to calm, we no longer always compare ourselves to others, we are no longer so focused on ourselves as we observe how things are constantly changing in mindfulness practice, we begin to understand that everything is constantly changing, Everything changes constantly, so we are not so scared that our children will go to university or some health problem or some other change and finally these help us live in the present moment and living in the present moment is enormously useful, one of my studies favorites in this area.

It was made by a guy named Matthew Killingsworth and he was a graduate student at Harvard. He was in Dan Gilbert's lab. Dan Gilbert wrote a book called Stumbling Upon Happiness. He's a guy who's done a lot of research basically on the things we do to try. to be happy, that doesn't work, so here was Gilbert's studio. He developed a smartphone app and this app would call people randomly throughout the day and ask them three things: What are you doing? What are you feeling? and where was your attention at the moment? moment the phone called you and what you discovered was that it didn't really matter what people were doing in terms of what they were doing it didn't predict how they would feel what it predicted how they would feel was where their attention was at that moment the phone rang telephone, so, to use a fairly clear example, if someone was washing the dishes and paying attention to the experience of washing the dishes, they reported greater well-being than someone who was eating the gourmet food or making love but thinking about other things .

Simply training attention to be in the present moment begins to increase our level of well-being. Another very interesting study was done in the early days of neurobiological research on this by Richie Davidson in the affective neurobiology laboratory at the University of Wisconsin. He and Madison had studied ordinary people and had discovered that when people experience states that are happy, enthusiastic, energized, and engaged, there is a lot of left prefrontal cortical activity in the brain, a lot of activity behind this area, and when people are hypervigilant, meaning they scan the environment for danger and make Lucy's type one error, or are depressed or anxious, there is a lot of right prefrontal activation and this has been studied in ordinary people, also known as second graders college year, but they actually started at Grown Ups Too and it helped help, that's right, so Ritchie invited a Tibetan monk into the lab who had tens of thousands of hours of meditation practice under his belt and this guy was just off the charts. in terms of the degree to which it had abandoned the prefrontal region. activity but not the correct prefrontal activity was lateralized in a way that would make him incredibly happy rich is a good scientist so he asked the question well maybe people who become monks in Tibet are predisposed this way maybe there is nothing to it do with the practice of meditation maybe That's how he grew up or who he was, so he and his son Jon Kabat got together and did a wonderful little study.

They took a group of stressed biotech workers and randomly assigned them to two groups and subjected one group to them. an eight-week mindfulness training course and the other group was just doing the same thing as usual and everyone before the study was leaning to the right, there's a lot of right prefrontal activation because it was a stressed out group of biotech workers, not like at Google , where they take Good Care after the eight weeks, the group that had gone through the mindfulness training had shifted much more towards left free frontal activity compared to their peers, they also gave everyone a flu shot at that time. moment and it turned out that the people who had gone through the mindfulness training had a stronger response to the flu vaccine than the people who hadn't and then the second group was put through the course and they caught up with the first group and also They were leaning to the left, so it became quite clear that it is actually the practice that does this is not simply being born as a monk, but someone becoming a monk in Tibet now, as these practices will help us emotionally by helping us. to feel emotional discomfort instead of trying to escape from it.

Studies on pain and Mindfulness become very, very relevant here and there have been a number of studies done on experimentally induced pain and these are studies where they take people and put them in fMRI machines that are like video machines that take an MRI and their feet stick out so they do terrible things to their feet, they give them electric shocks, they shoot them with a laser, nothing harmful except things that are painful and what they discovered by doing that was, Compared to novice meditators, experienced meditators found the same stimulus much less unpleasant, they could observe their pain.

Much less reactively, they discovered that open monitoring, which is a type of mindfulness practice in which, instead of focusing on an object like your breath, once you develop a certain level of concentration, you open yourself up toWhatever predominates in the field of consciousness than overt monitoring makes people feel that the plane was less unpleasant and also have much less anxiety about anticipated pain. One of the things you see in these studies is that simply waiting for the next shock causes great discomfort, not so much in the meditators and then they left. To see what's going on biologically and to understand this, I just need to describe a couple of brain structures to you.

The first structure is the insula and that is where it is in the brain and is associated with inner perception and the perception of sensations in the body. it's about visceral, visceral feelings and it processes transient sensory perceptions, things that come and go in the body and it gets activated a lot during meditation practice and it actually grows in meditators and gets bigger over time, which which is not a surprise because you can imagine it. that tuning into what's happening in the body would sensitize you to this and we know that neurons that fire together wire together so that whatever part of the brain you activate becomes bigger this way.

The other area we want to discuss here is the prefrontal cortex and that evaluates our emotional responses and regulates emotions, that is the part of the brain that is involved, let's go back to Lucy's experience of saying yes, it looks like a lion, but lions They are not generally found in this part of the savannah, so it is probably a beige rock. It is basically our thinking capacity that helps modulate our emotions, so what do we find more biologically? Meditators who practice open monitoring, this type of mindfulness where you take in what arises when you are exposed to pain, have priestly activity on the side. prefrontal cortex, so the part of the brain that thinks about it and evaluates it was relatively calm, but they had greater activation in a part of the posterior insula, so they actually feel it more vividly, so what we saw or biologically it is exactly the same.

Monks have been reporting for 2,500 years and anyone who adopts these practices can see for themselves that they feel pleasure and pain more vividly, but are less bothered by it and become scared by it and why they do it. You become less bothered and less scared is because you no longer resist, you make the transition that the samurai warrior made from hating the fly to being with the fly, so in our last moment I want to give you an idea of ​​how you can use these skills to work with guys of everyday problems? Anyone here feels anxious.

Yes, we all do it and it happens quite a bit. When cognitive scientists and clinical scientists study anxiety, they say it has three components and anxiety disorders have three. components of them as well, the first is physiological arousal, which is the activation of the autonomic sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system and what is called the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, which is basically a hormonal system that fits with the sympathetic nervous system to create to secrete adrenaline and create that feeling of excitement that we all know very well, there is a cognitive part of it and that is all the negative fantasies about the future, this is you know, imagining terrible things happening, which We all do enough. easily when we feel anxious and then there is a behavioral part and these are typically our avoidance strategies and these are the most critical in the development of a real anxiety disorder because, as I mentioned before, not feeling nervous, that is the problem that is avoid. things to try not to feel nervous, that becomes our problem, to tell the truth, even when I'm in the water, I don't feel that comfortable.

One of the things we notice when we practice mindfulness is how often we are anxious and need many ways? Which of you practices mindfulness with any regularity? I'm just curious, that's all I know. Google has all these wonderful supports for it. Do you ever feel restless? Do you ever feel like I want to get up? Now do you ever feel tension in your body, these are all signs of anxiety, it is very, very generalized and when we start doing these mindfulness practices we start to notice it a lot. Now take a moment to think about something that makes you anxious, just think. about something this shouldn't take long you have to be okay is that thing in the past in the future or in the present what is the whole future true, in fact we find that it is in the future sometimes people say well, No, I really am.

I'm anxious about what I did this morning, but upon closer inspection we realize that I'm really anxious because they're going to put me in jail tonight for what I did this morning. The fact that it happened in the problem is to anticipate what the outcome is. is going to be like this turns out that all anticipatory anxieties and even people who find themselves in terrible present situations worry about the future when paramedics extract people like in a car accident people say: will I be able to walk? Will I survive well? May my loved ones be well. when we are afraid, we are afraid of the future now, this will give you a clue to one of the ways that the practice of mindfulness can help us work with this because the practice of mindfulness is training the mind to return to the present, to the present again in the present and it's also training us to get out of the dream of thoughts because we have, I mean, yeah, every once in a while we go out on the street and a bus barrels down on us and we're afraid of some physical reality and Lucy We certainly had Lions to worry about, but for most of us what makes us anxious are our thoughts, right?

It is an imagined future passing through our minds through the flow of thoughts, so you can see how by removing attention from the flow of thoughts and in addition to that, drawing attention to the present moment which in itself would help us work with This, interestingly, the Buddha had something to say about this 2500 years ago, when he was teaching his monks the practice of mindfulness, he said: When, why am I doing well, always waiting? Fear and Dread What happens if I control that fear and dread by maintaining the same posture I am in when it comes at me while I was walking?

Fear and dread took over me. I did not stand or sit or lie down until I had mastered that fear. and dread, now these mindfulness practices are classically practiced in four different postures, sitting, lying, walking and standing, so what you are saying is that I just stayed with the experience instead of running away instead of doing something to try to escape from it and when it says submit what we're really talking about is holding on simply trusting that all the phenomena will change and I don't have to do something compulsive to fix it. This is a modern example of the same.

This is Professor Gallagher and his controversial one. technique to simultaneously face the fear of heights, snakes and the dark, you don't need a crane to do it, all you need is a meditation cushion, all you have to do is be afraid and not escape from it, everything what do we have to do. Doing this in mindfulness practice is simply staying with the breath and beginning to see the goal, not as how can I stop the anxiety but as how can I increase my ability to be with it and how do we do that over time. Anxiety disorders tend to decrease in intensity.

There is now much neurobiological evidence that this is so. There are changes that occur in the brain with mindfulness practice that are associated with getting better at it. The amygdala is another structure. It is almond shaped. part of the limbic system and this helps us evaluate threats to decide if it is a lion or a beige rock. It turns out that among meditators the amygdala tends to shrink. We know from neurobiological research that in rats if you place them in a stressful place. In some kind of rat hell, your amygdala will grow well. It turns out that if you put humans on a meditation course where they learn to practice mindfulness, their amygdala actually shrinks because it becomes less active and atrophies a little bit, and there have been a number of studies showing this in one of they there is an eight week mindfulness training for anxious patients and in the mindfulness group the amygdala activation decreased more, they reported a greater decrease in anxiety than people, the other people were in a stress reduction group general that they had more activation of the prefrontal cortex, this was being able to evaluate whether something is really dangerous or not and come to the conclusion that it is not and more connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala now, finally, if you feel particularly anxious , it may be It is difficult to sit and do meditation, follow the breath, but because we are too anxious, we are too restless, but there are many other different types of meditation practices, there is walking meditation, eating meditation, nature meditation, the sensory object the one we serve does not have to be like this. sit still and be with your breath and I'll mention a resource at the end, but I'll also mention it now.

I have a website that is mindfulness: solution, calm and many different meditations, they are there just for free download. which you can use to try different modalities and find one that is relatively easy to work with so let's talk about another very common problem which is depression and now I'm not necessarily talking about serious clinical depression but we all get depressed from time to time . In fact, many times when we get depressed it is because our rank in the primary troop has fallen, somehow we have had some disappointment, some feeling of failure, or someone rejected us or we didn't get the job or the promotion or something like this and we start to give up and feel dejected about it, who here is an engineer?

How do I guess right now when you look at a sine wave if you alter this so that the bottom half of the sine wave doesn't? the fall is low, what is going to happen to the upper half, it is not going to rise as high, everything is going to compress because it is symmetrical around the neutral, this is what happens to us in depression when the mind and brain try order not automatically because it really is a quite automatic process closed in the face of a painful experience we end up compressing the entire range of emotions so that we do not feel joy we do not feel commitment is what we were talking about before, so we could think of depression and, by the way, only To make this clear, I should have said this before.

I am not saying that, for example, the propensity for anxiety or depression does not have genetic roots and that there are not all kinds of causes for this. as serious pathology in terms of, you know, child abuse issues, growth, genetic predispositions, everything we know in psychology and psychiatry is true. I'm just discussing the mechanisms by which the actual feeling of these things and the experience of these things and the behavioral components of this develop and how mindfulness can help us with this, so depression implies that while there is all this genetic material and everything that it entails, it also entails moving away from the experience, moving away from the pain and because mindfulness turns towards the experience in question, it ends up challenging the depressive stance this is what Bonta Guan around Honda him He is a Buddhist monk, he wrote a nice book called mindfulness in simple English, he says that you become sensitive to the real experience of living two things.

In reality, you feel that you are not just sitting there, developing sublime thoughts about the life you live, and this comes from simply connecting with the sensory experience over and over again and not fearing painful emotions brings us back to life, so when we use mindfulness practice to work with depression, we are actually interested in what painful thing may be masking the depression, covering it up or blocking it and we discover this by looking at what is happening in the body at the moment if I feel depressed what exactly is happening in the body what emotions may be manifesting there we also look at our relationship with pain am I fighting it?

By resisting, am I being like the samurai guy with the sword or can I just hang out with her and then see if we can be compassionate with ourselves if we can get on with it? And as one of you mentioned, there is a lot of hopelessness. involved in depression and there's an interesting cognitive model developed by the people who developed it called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in which they said when we get sad we just feel sad, but when we get depressed there's a whole matrix of thoughts. that are circulating out there you know it's useless I'm a failure I'm worthless I loved it all these kinds of thoughts happen and if we are prone to depression then every time we get discouraged in some way this whole collection of thoughts comes and visits us again and causes pain again, so if we can see these thoughts come and go like an itch or an egg orLike the clouds passing through the sky, we will have a much better time with depression. do with the practice of mindfulness to see that thoughts are not facts I am not my thoughts refute them often fails if you try to get out of the depressive stance you have adopted, that I am sure does not tend to work, but if you change your relationship with thought and you begin to see all thought as changeable and unreliable, it becomes much easier.

There have been studies done on this using mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and, just to say briefly, what they found was that after a year this was a treatment. people who had had major depressive episodes and put them through this mindfulness program when they were not depressed to see who would relapse and found that after a year, 66% or 2/3 of the people who had received mindfulness-based cognitive therapy full NBCT had failed to relapse, while only a third with tau, which is the usual treatment, had failed to relapse, thereby halving the relapse rate and halving the fall rate of people in major depression and by the way, this is what came back in 2000 was the first big study that really put mindfulness on the map in terms of funding to do research on this because it was a very powerful result.

Another thing you can do is practice what we might call Affective or Emotional Meteorology, which is simply to notice that thoughts emotions change and when you feel depressed simply ask the question: when have you not felt depressed in the past and what will they be like? Are your thinking patterns different? and usually what we notice is that, oh yeah, well, back then I really had some hope. I thought I was fine, I felt good about myself, but when we're depressed we think I was fooling myself, right? That was an illusion. Now I know you know I'm doomed to true opposites when we come out of the Depression, we remember the depressive thoughts and think, oh yeah, well that was just the depression talking.

What we begin to notice through mindfulness practice is that these thought patterns change like the weather and they are all really, really, really unreliable, so to summarize the kind of attitude we might adopt toward our experience of conscious attitude towards the experience of dealing with depression, anxiety and other things. I want to quote Rumi, an Islamic mystical poet from the 13th century and there is a very well-known poem that he wrote called The Guest House and this is how it says, this human being is a guest house every morning, a newcomer, a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary consciousness arrives like an unexpected visitor, welcome and entertain them all, even if they are a multitude of sorrows that violently sweep your house and leave it empty of furniture.

Treat each guest with honors, it may be leading you to a new delight, the dark thought, the shame, the malice, gather them at the door, laugh and invite them in, thank whoever comes because each one has been sent as a guide from the beyond so I think that's about this for our time in terms of resources this is the website I mentioned mindfulness: calm solution and there is a download meditation section for that and you can download this probity of the different meditations that You can also use within the Google system. There is a complete list of references for the various studies I referred to today.

You can consult it if you wish. If you're interested in learning more about this, there's a book that goes with the website called The Mind from the Solution, which I wrote for general audiences and that

talks

about how to develop a mindfulness practice step by step over the course of a lifetime. busy and then how to use it are separate chapters. I'm using it to work with anxiety with depression with interpersonal challenges with chronic pain difficulties with aging with a wide variety of everyday practices everyday problems and you're welcome to Check it out too, so thank you for coming, thank you for your attention.

I'll ask you how long you think the average Googler would need to start practicing mindfulness before they would start seeing a difference in themselves. What's interesting when Jon Kabat-zinn sets up? He created a program called Mind from Space, Stress Reduction, which was one of the first programs to include the practice of mindfulness and he spread it to secular audiences and used it in the medical world. In that eight-week training program, he asked people to do about 45 minutes a day, so you can get a pretty intense commitment and if you do it over the course of eight weeks, you get these profound changes in function. brain, the structure of the brain, you really feel it now, some people won't be willing to do that.

Personally, I notice that I am doing better if I can spend 20 minutes a day compared to not doing the practice and there have been a number of studies showing that relatively small doses over relatively short periods of time still have effects, but this tends to be related to the dosage and the longer the time, the deeper the effects tend to be, so I have done a bit of this type of meditation and I have tried to be with the thoughts but not interact, and what I find is that o I get carried away completely or I go back to three reflections where I just tune out and tune out.

I'm interested if you have any advice on how to be with it but not let go and run, yeah, well, you know. In the various mindfulness meditation systems there are different meditation objects that are suggested. Most systems start just with sensory experiences like breathing, sounds, sights of nature, like the sensation of the body sitting in a chair, but can also then expand to mindfulness of feeling and mindfulness of feeling. thought, but it is much more difficult to do it until you have a fairly strong foundation in concentration, exactly what you are describing because, unless the mind is in the habit of the state, it is accustomed to staying with a given mental object as soon as as it enters the realm of thought, you know it tends to take off, so we feel like we have two options, one is to ignore the thought or just start thinking, so for me personally it's really only when I've been meditating more and I have a little concentration drive I pay a lot of attention to mindfulness, a thought that most of the time I stay on the sensory level, but the sensory level includes emotions in the sense that on the sensory level comes fear, anger, joy, sexual interest or sadness, because all of these things start as bodily events, so I can stay at the sensory level and continue to explore many experiences, but I usually choose when I do the practice.

I won't try mine unless I'm on a retreat where I'm really developing a lot of concentration because I'm meditating for hours at a time in one way or another and then there's enough awareness and attention to be able to see a thought without getting caught up in it, but exactly what you're describing is what's described, you know, historically over thousands of years of people experimenting with this, okay, so thank you very much for coming everyone.