Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 61: Dr. Judson Brewer, Using Mindfulness to Beat Addiction

Episode Date: February 15, 2017

Psychiatrist and addiction expert Judson Brewer was researching better treatment options for alcohol and cocaine addiction patients and found, through clinical studies, that meditation could significantly help break these behaviors or "habit loops" and prevent relapses. Brewer, who is now the director of research at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine's Center for Mindfulness, founded a company called Claritas MindSciences, which uses neurofeedback techniques combined with mindfulness exercises for several conditions, from eating disorders to smoking addiction. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And B, if you like the show, do me a favor. Take a second and subscribe, rate the podcast, and if you really want to hook me up, tell some friends about how they too can find us. Now here's the show. From ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Dr. Judd Brewer has had a huge impact

on my meditation practice in the way I think about meditation for many years. He's an elite neuroscientist who looks into what the practice of meditation does to your brain. He's also a psychiatrist with an expertise in addiction. Interestingly, he's never had a classical addiction. So that's been a sort of interesting thing to discuss with him given that I've probably got more experience in that area than he does but he definitely knows how to treat it and he has a new book which is called the Craving Mind which is really good How they recommend it talks about how we get into these addictive loops, even if it's, you know, unlike, so in my case,

it was drugs, but I'm, what I realized reading his book is that I've got these addictive loops around things like food and technology. And for a lot of people, it's love and romance. And he really breaks down how we get into these addictive loops and how meditation and mindfulness can help. So enjoy this conversation because this is a really interesting dude. I always start with the same question, which is how you came to meditation.

Your story is actually kind of interesting. Can you lay it on us? Sure. I was suffering. I had been engaged to my college sweetheart. We were starting MDPHD programs together. In St. Louis. In St. Louis.

And we broke up right after signing leases for apartments that were down the hall from each other. It was pretty funny. I can say that now it wasn't at the time. You were really young to be engaged right out of college. Yeah, they kind of brainwashed us at Princeton to you know It marry each other so they'll get more donations or something like that. Yeah, well in this case the brainwashing didn't work So you were freaking out you were starting this incredibly stressful MDPHD program and your

X fiance was living a few doors down from you Yes, and I was having trouble sleeping for the first time probably in my life and down from you. Yes, and I was having trouble sleeping for the first time probably in my life. And somehow this John Kabat's in book landed in my lap, you know, his full catastrophe living. I read a bit of it and started listening to the cassette tapes. Let me just jump in because John Kabat's in for those who don't know him. He's kind of the grandfather of modern, mindful, modern, secular mindfulness. He doesn't like the word secular, but he's not here, so he's a punch me. But basically, he invented this thing called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which is what has been studying in the labs and really given a lot of credence to mindfulness. And you

kind of now work for him, because you work at the Center for Mindfulness in Massachusetts, where he's with the president of meritists or something like that. He's a meritist, yes. Yeah. Anyway, okay, so you found his book. I found his book and it was a new, you know, it was a new phase of my life. I was starting medical school. And at the time I just decided, you know, this might be a good time to try something else

new. And so I started meditating my first day of medical school. And how did it go at first? I fell asleep pretty regularly about six months. That makes me feel better. I was just meditating slash sleeping before you came. But not only did you fall asleep, you also were kind of banging your head up

against the well in some ways. Yes, I think, and it wasn't just the first six months. I think for several years, If not more than several years, I was using what I knew to try to meditate. What I knew was this brute force method of, let's think my way, let's force my way, let's push my way through whatever the problem is. Yeah, I mean, a little background on you that you also talk about in the book that I think is really interesting, that I didn't actually know until several years into knowing you, but it's very, very compelling

is that you had grown up in a not-a-wealthy household. I think you used the word poor in the book in Indianapolis, single mother, father had left the family. And I, she had, she's a remarkable person who had put herself through law school, if I recall, while you guys were on food stamps, and she had instilled in you a very sort of hard charging attitude.

Yes, my mom is amazing. She raised four kids by herself, and at one point we were on food stamps. I think when she was in law school, at that point we were not, and she was providing for all of us, even putting us through, we all went to Jesuit High Schools because she felt that education was really important

and Indianapolis, the Jesuit High School was very good. So yes, I learned the go-for-it attitude from my mom. Yeah, I mean, from that background to Princeton, to an MD-Ph PhD program at one of the most prestigious institutions, I can understand how you would approach meditation wanting to win. It's so ridiculous. But yes, that's what it was. So I would sweat through t-shirts in the middle of meditation retreats, like just going for it trying to force my concentration. Yeah, it didn't, looking back at that, it didn't work out so well,

except that I learned that that was the wrong way to do it. But you really stuck with it, why? I like challenges. That's one way to put a positive spin on it, and I just, I think that's one way to put a positive spin on it. And I just keep, when I get fixated on something, I just keep going for it. And it affected the course of your, really affected the course of your medical career. It did. I had started meditating just as a way to, you know, be less angry, you know, to relax while I was going through medical school and going through graduate school.

And I was studying the molecular basis of stress and how stress affect the immune systems, so making genetically modified mice and studying immune system development and function. And just meditating, I started meditating, I was doing it daily and joined a community that I would sit with once a week and then started going on weekend and then week long retreat. So through graduate school, it kind of built and built

and built, but I was really seeing this as separate from medical school and separate, from graduate school. Well, when I went back into my third year of medical school, they kind of split it up, you do a couple of years, and then you do your graduate program long enough, so you can forget everything you learned in medical school. And then you go back on the words. I had, you know, I was thinking, well,

I'll just see how this might help a little bit, and I was shocked by how helpful it was to pay attention as I was interviewing patients, as I was shocked by how helpful it was to pay attention as I was interviewing patients as I was working with team members and all of this. By the time I graduated from my MD-PhD program, I had decided to go into psychiatry, which was the last profession I thought I would do. It's not portrayed particularly well in the media, And also had found that I wanted to stop doing animal work. I wanted to really work with people because that's ultimately where the

rubber meets the road. And in particular you started looking at addictions, right? I did. You know, I was drawn to, well, the underdogs. I could relate to being an underdog growing up. And there was something about people with addictions, not only did they get the beat down from society and from themselves, in particular, often very, very hard in themselves, but also they were speaking the same language as the language that I had learned with the Buddhist psychology as I was learning the theoretical background behind the practices that I had learned it with the Buddhist psychology as I was learning the theoretical background behind the practices that I was doing.

What do you mean by that? They're speaking the same language, craving, clinging. Literally, they were talking about getting caught up in their cravings, and I said, oh, I know that language. So for people who are familiar with the Buddhist psychology, how talk about that intersection? Well, the most famous, I think the most famous tenets of Buddhism are the four noble truths. And the, so this first truth is that there's like an unsatisfactoriness and the second noble truth says that the unsatisfactoriness comes from craving. And then the third noble truth says,

hey, if you pay attention and let go of the craving, that's going to help a whole lot. So, you know, of these four noble truths, basically all four of them center around craving as a central tenant. That was fascinating to me. And then, and at what point did you really decide to focus your research? Because you're not only a clinician, you're doing this really cutting edge research on the impact of meditation on the brain.

The first studies we did were to just see if there was an impact on people with addictions because I wanted to find a behavioral signal before I spent time trying to understand neurobiologically what was happening. So I learned how to become a clinical researcher. I did that even during my residency training at Yale. They fortunately had a program where I could do some research during residency training. So I basically trained up to become a clinical researcher as compared to a mouse researcher. And did my first clinical study during my third year of residency where we looked at

mindfulness training compared to gold standard treatment, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for alcohol and cocaine dependence. How did it do? The study went pretty well. It was as good as gold standard. Now this is a pilot study, so it has to be taken with a grain of salt. But as far as relapse to drug use, it was as good as gold standard. And when we looked at physiologic and psychological measures of stress,

when we stressed people out, because that's a big thing that causes people to relapse, we found that they did better. They were less stressed out, and their physiology showed that as well. So let's break that down again. You're treating people who are addicted to cocaine and alcohol, So let's break that down again. You're treating people who are addicted to cocaine and alcohol, and there were, quote, unquote, gold standard treatments out there, the best treatments available that were commonly used with folks in these categories. And you came in and said, well, let's use a mindfulness-based approach, either instead or on top of, and then you tested which one did better.

Yes, we randomized people to get gold standard or mindfulness training. How do you use mindfulness to deal with, I mean, as a man who's got some history of cocaine, how do you use mindfulness to deal with cocaine addiction? Well, I can tell you now how we do it, which is slightly different than how we first did these studies. But basically, the, you know, the habitual reaction is when there's a craving, well, cravings typically don't feel pleasant because they say, do something, you know, you're lacking something. Yeah, jumping out of your skin. Right.

So we want to run away from those. We either, you know, tamp them down until we can't do that anymore or we indulge in them. So we give them what they want. Paradoxically, here, mindfulness is about turning toward those cravings. So we train people to, instead of, reinforce those old habits through succumbing or trying to resist them, to just turn toward them and get curious about what they actually feel like in their bodies. So like surfing the urge as it sometimes describes. Yeah.

See the urge coming again, I have a lot of urges. So an urge will come over you and instead of either acting on it or trying to pretend it's not there, you just look at it. Like look at how does it feel in the body? What kind of thoughts am I having? And what you will see is that it may be painful, but it ends. It may be painful, but it ends and, if we inject an attitude of curiosity into that.

So cravings are unpleasant, but is, what does curiosity feel like? Definitely pleasant. So we can flip the valence of that, from unpleasant to pleasant in the moment if there's a strong level of curiosity there. And that's also an important aspect of mindfulness. The second factor of awakening is investigation or curiosity. Yes, so there are just to put some context around what you said. The factors of awakening, there are these seven factors of awakening

that the Buddha talks about. The Buddha was pretty OCDE at a lot of lists. And one of them was the seven factors of awakening, meaning basically, he's talking about enlightenment, but one, we could talk about it more and just sort of waking up into your actual life would be a maybe a more down-to-earth way to put it. And the second factor, the first one is mindfulness, right? And the second one is investigation,

which means just sort of, and it's a second one is investigation, which means just sort of, and it's a huge part of mindfulness, which is just taking an interest in what your actual experience is right now. So, I guess I, when I'm putting myself in your shoes from back in the day when you were confronted with a bunch of patients who were addicted to cocaine and you said, I'm going to teach you how to meditate. Did they say, did they drop a lot of expletives on you or do they think you were crazy? So we, yes, we tried to approach it in a way that where they wouldn't like look for the door and run out immediately. We started actually with, again, one of the tenets of Buddhism, which is

formally described as dependent origination, but in modern days, describe very aptly as positive and negative reinforcement. And we said, you know what, we're going to first see if you can relate to what we're teaching or if we can relate to what you're experiencing. Did you talk about the Buddha? No. Okay. We talked about positive and negative reinforcement.

Well, we basically said, okay, do you guys have triggers? Yes, they all know their heads. Okay, do you have cravings? Yes, they all know their heads. Do you do something about those cravings? Yes, they all know their heads. And we say, okay, let's just start by paying attention to that loop. And notice what happens each time you indulge in that craving, you reinforce a memory that says, Oh, do this again. And this again goes back to the early times there's this saying, what the mind frequently thinks

and ponders upon thus becomes the inclination of the mind. This is a Buddhist expression. And that's basically saying, yes, if you do operand conditioning, you're going to reinforce habits. So, let me just amplify your points just based on my reading of your excellent book, The Craving Mind. What you noticed, which is really interesting, is in modern psychology, based on the work of B.F. Skinner, I believe, there was this idea of operand conditioning, which is sort of reward-based learning, which is that there's a trigger

So it might be I see a commercial for a cigarette and then there's the behavior which is I smoke the cigarette and then there's the Rorde which is the dopamine rush from smoking the aforementioned cigarette. So we all operate On this kind of all all the time whether we're aware of it or not What you noticed was that this actually tracks almost four square with the way the Buddha described the way we operate. He called it dependent origination, which is that his description was much more baroque with many more steps and some metaphysical stuff that we may or may not buy involving rebirth, but basically describe

this cause and effect chain that leads to us wanting, doing, getting a reward, and then doing again. You might explain it by explaining that correctly. Yes, and I'll just add that the loop, they called it somsara, which literally translated means endless wandering. Because we keep feeding it it but we're not actually fixing the core root of the problem. Yeah, you can think of it like a hamster wheel. Yes, absolutely.

And so what you noticed was that the Buddhist lingo and philosophy and psychology that you've been studying as a kind of side deal for a while, you know, matched up with this, with modern psychology. And you said, all right, let's give it a try. Let's see if we can use this on these addictive behaviors and tell us what happened next. Well, it was one of those moments when that realization came together

that it was like all the hair stood up on my arms. It was just amazing. It was like, this cannot be a coincidence. This cannot be a coincidence. These guys figured it out. They didn't have rats. They didn't have graduate students to torture. They didn't have computers. Just by investigating their own experiences, they figured all of this out 2,500 years ago. Eric Kendall got the no go prize for this in 2001. These guys, they figured this out way before Eric Kendall or BF Skinner or any of these early researchers.

Now I personally, and I make no bones about this, totally fascinated by what the Buddhist did and continue to do. But in your milieu, and by this time you had graduated from your MDP, PhD program, and you're studying at Yale, when you started talking about the Buddha, how did that go down? I think the words that were often either said to me or behind me, or career killer.

Well, little did they know. Well, it's not turned out to be a career killer. Yeah. And to be honest, little did I know either. I had a mentor named Bruce Roundsaville who was really open-minded and he said, I don't care what you do as long as it's good science. And I was very drawn to, you know, as a psychiatrist and I really wanted to see how we could help our patients and the current treatments just were not of the standards that I think any of us want to see them at. So I was really interested in looking for things that worked. And I had found in my own life that this had been very helpful for me with working with my cravings.

So, I had no idea what I was getting into, but I just knew that even if it was gonna kill my career, I would rather do that and fail than do something mainstream that I wasn't excited about. Okay, did Indianapolis play a role here? This determination bequeathed to you by your mom who was able to achieve so much with so little, were you, you know, that's stick with you at a moment

like that where you're like, I'm on to something here. And I don't care if people disapproved, you know, have doubt about it right now. I'm gonna prove them wrong. I think there is something to that, you know, my college, my high school college counselor told me I never get into Princeton, so that's why I applied. And so here, they're doing the same thing. They're saying, you know, you can't do this. This isn't going to work.

And it just gets me excited, you know, and to me, it's an empirical question, let's see if it works or not. And regardless, we'll learn something along the way. So it was quite a risk, but I, you know, that's something that I, I'm, and I guess I enjoy doing. Yeah, I mean, and it's actually, we're down to the benefit of your patients, most importantly. So you started with these pilot studies

with cocaine and alcoholism, as compared to what you described as the gold standard treatment at the time, but you went on from there to other addictions. Can you tell us about that? Yes, the next study we did was with smoking cessation. And there were two things I wanted to look at there. One was, could, you know, smoking is often seen as one of the hardest addictions to quit.

A lot of my patients will come in and they'll have, you know, they'll quit the hard drugs, but they're like, Doc, you know, I just don't know what to do about the smoking. Often they've started smoking way before they started using other drugs, and they can reinforce that habit if they smoke one pack a day, 20 times a day. So they'd come in having reinforced this 20 times a day, 365 days a year for 20 years. That's a lot of reinforcement. You can't really go on that much of a cocaine bender, right? You're going to hit rock bottom way earlier.

I tried a few nights. So we wanted to see, with this very ingrained habit, could we actually help people kick that habit? It's also the leading cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the US. It's still a big health issue. The other thing we wanted to look at was, could we strip out the components? The study we'd done with alcohol and cocaine dependence was a combination of mindfulness

with a relapse prevention program that Alan Marlet had developed that's very effective. We wanted to see, what if we just teach mindfulness? What if we just teach one thing and one thing only without giving people more of a kitchen sink approach? Will it still work? And? It did. And actually, in this case,

it was better than the gold standard, right? It was. We were just looking for it to be as good as. And we found, at the end of treatment, it was twice as good and four months later, five times better. Four months later, five times better. So that relapsed prevention. Yes. So people had relapsed to smoking in the gold standard treatment more than in our program. And let me just say to listeners to anybody who's smoking, Judd has an excellent app called Craving to Quit that is very much worth checking out, which teaches you this stuff on your phone

so you can use the instrument of your distraction to overcome your distraction and perhaps overcome this habit which is killing you. I don't know if you want to say anything about the app. Well, it's basically that treatment that we did in person. We cut it into bite-sized pieces so that people could learn it on a daily basis, so five to ten minutes of training. What we had also learned in our in-person study was really interesting that even though we were training people twice a week, they would go several days and forget the practices early

in the training. And we said, oh, we got to stop that. Let's give people the tools at their fingertips. So a couple of things. One is we could give them those tools right at their fingertips when they were smoking because typically when people go out to smoke, they'll have a cigarette in one hand and their cell phone in another. So we might as well use that for good as compared to distraction. The other piece is, you know, they can learn these skills in the context where they've learned to distraction, the other piece is, you know, they can learn these skills in the context where they've learned to smoke, which is really critical. They don't learn to smoke in our clinic.

And so it's somewhat of an artificial place where they're trying to learn a skill outside of where their normal context is. Here we can give it to them right in their context. And I think that giving the bite-sized pieces and allowing people to go back and review practices is really helpful. We can give them those in the moment exercises right at their fingertips. And we can also give them an online community where they can support each other and even I can moderate that community and help support them along the way. And we've actually just added an in-app coaching component that was actually

inspired by your 10% happier app and Derek and Ben at 10% happier helped us quite a bit in just helping us through how that works. But we can basically give people asynchronous coaching so that we've got us by their side. That's awesome. So, I just wonder, there may be people listening who are like, okay, I smoke, there's no way meditation's gonna help me with this. And I'm sure you hear this all the time. So what do you say to those folks? We don't believe us.

Try it. And it's not just about saying, okay, meditate instead of smoke. We start by having them really pay attention. Actually, I love this. One of the first things you say to people is, go smoke a ton right now. Smoke as much as you want. But one, the only thing that we add to that is pay attention when you smoke. And that's a really critical aspect.

We have people coming back saying, I can't believe this. I smoke for 20 years, and I didn't realize how bad it tastes. I've been doing this 20 times a day, and how did I miss that? So there's this quality that, you know, our brain says, give me my dopamine. I don't care what the consequences are.

And when we say, well, we'll give you your dopamine, but we're gonna to show you everything that you get as part of it in that moment, experientially. Sigrets don't actually taste that good. I had somebody just describing to me how, when they inhaled, that it felt like burning going into their mouth and into their lungs. This is a patient in my group that I run out of a clinic. And he was saying, I can't, you know, wow, you know, and so they just wake up to the fact that this isn't as good as they

thought, which is actually critical and goes back to the Buddhist teachings. It's about exploring gratification to its end. When we explore gratification to its end, you know, he described it knowledge and vision arose. And what that means is we never have this devil on our shoulders saying, oh, no, no, but you miss something. You miss something. We're like, no, knowledge, and vision arose. And what that means is we never have this devil on our shoulders saying, oh, no, no, but you miss something, you miss something. We're like, no, dude, I checked it all out and there is nothing good here. So with smoking, it's a little more straightforward

than like stress eating or something like that where we do have to eat to survive. But that's the first step in getting the energy to go through the program is like having this wake-up call that says, oh, this really isn't that great. And then they say, okay, I need to do something about this. So, we're kind of rubbing their face in their own suffering that they hadn't noticed before. So, they're paying attention to it. And you're actually, you mentioned eating, that's the other thing you've been taking on, which is sort of unhealthy overeating. Have you done some studies yet on that?

We just finished our first clinical trial with that. When people are afraid of quitting smoking, they're worried about gaining weight because they'll substitute eating for smoking. We had people report that they were actually changing their relationship to eating, just reading our smoking scripts as we were developing that program. So there was a big aha moment for us to say, oh, wait a minute, let's look into this more.

And that's when I uncovered that this habit loop is actually probably set up more for us to remember where food is than to learn to smoke. So, the trigger behavior reward habit loop that you're referring to earlier, right? Exactly the same. So, instead of, you know, you get stressed and you smoke a cigarette, you get stressed and you eat a cupcake or Oreos.

So, the trigger is the stress, the behavior is the eating and the reward is the dopamine. Again. And the evolutionary psychologists will say that the reason the reward, the dopamine again. And you're, and the evolutionary psychologist will say that the reason, the reward, the dopamine that we get from eating whatever is probably based back to caveman times to help us remember where we found the food. Dopamine helps lay down context dependent memory. So you just, let me brag on you a little bit more.

You also have another app, which is called Eat Right Now, which does for people with eating difficulties of any variety, either really severe or minor, for those who have, does the same thing as you do for those with smoking addiction in the Craving to Quit app. In fact, we did kind of a taster preview version on the 10% happier app. If you go to the 10% happier app,

you'll see a little course with Judd about using mindfulness as a sort of kind of cryptidnight for overeating. But I wanted to ask you about that. Just on a personal note. Because I you about that, just on a personal note, because I'm gonna bug you on a personal note on a bunch of things here. But so I did the course of you, I was the host of the thing,

and we talked a lot about the fact that I have, I have not the understanding the fact that I am scrawny. I overeat a lot, and so I have the worst of both worlds, like I'm kind of skinny I overeat a lot. And so I'm like, I have the worst of both worlds. Like I'm kind of skinny, but I have belly. And I'm put a lot of it around sugar. And it's almost certainly because I'm just not following the advice, but I put a great deal of time and attention

into my daily meditation practice and yet struggle mightily with eating crap that I shouldn't eat. And then I follow it through. I see what it gets me, which is nothing good. Like yesterday morning, I was on the set of Good Morning America. We had a bunch of candy because we always do that. We have like junk at the end of the show.

And I ate like half a jar of disgusting sugar and I was so sick and so depressed the rest of the day. Really, I was with my kid at night and I was feeling awful and looking out fat I am. And I'm not can't guarantee that I won't do it again. So what am I doing wrong here? So for the record, I'm sitting across from you and you're not, you don't have a belly.

I do this. Okay, maybe body dysmorphism and addiction to sugar. We'll talk about that after the show. No, we can do it. It's all fair here. But I think what you're pointing out is something really important. So, this is after your show that you did that.

So, after you do something that takes a lot of energy, I'm sure GMA is, that know, that's a, that's work. You're working here. This is when our brains start to get depleted. So the prefrontal cortex, which is the youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary standpoint, it's great at doing, you know, the restraint and all of that stuff while we've got plenty of energy. But when we get tired, so there's this acronym HALT, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, those are stress basically. That's a big reason that that prefrontal cortex goes offline. So all of the any type, if you had used any type of cognitive control in the

past, so even as a part of the exploration, then all that goes out the window when you're stressed out. In other words, if I was relying on me just to explain to myself logically through my Proof Rental Cortex, hey man, if you eat this, you're going to feel like crap, don't do that. That breaks down when you're tired. It does. So that, I think of that as knowledge, which is really important, but it becomes embodied

as wisdom the more times we see clearly what actually happens. So your wisdom develops from you remembering the rest of the day. So the next time you go to, you know, after the show and there's a bunch of candy, you can just recall, you know, mindfulness sati literally means, you know, to remember. You remember that time, you know, when you are with your kid and after the show and it didn't feel that great. See how that affects you reaching into the candidate. You know what? I've been beating myself up about this a lot because I've had the privilege of

learning about this from you directly, reading all of the scripts that you wrote for Eat Right Now, which are great, which when I say the scripts, which is basically if you download Eat Right Now, you'll see Judd talking to you and I read everything he says to you on there. So I've read all of that. I've read your book. I've sat with you innumerable times and talked about this stuff. And I practice meditation two hours a day. So I'm like, pretty in tune with all of the negative consequences from bingeinging sugar. But I am profoundly addictive in my mindset. And what I'll do is like Sunday night, for example, this past Sunday night,

I ate a bunch of sugar with my wife. I was miserable all day Monday, and I told myself what I always tell myself, which is never again. And then the candy shows up on the set Saturday morning, and I do it. Right right so that telling yourself never again That's the cognitive control piece What and this is different for all of us so genetics play a role

You know a lot of other things play a role what you're describing is you've got knowledge You know to the hill you you know how this works cognitively and you're a smart guy and you get all of this. Now it's about being patient and paying attention every moment that you can when you're indulging because that will help dismantle that loop on an experiential wisdom level and we, you know, it's that is very individual. For some of us, you know, I've had people who are like, yeah, I now every single time I eat a piece of pie, I eat what he calls an inch, you know, it's compared to a fifth of a pie. And I really pay attention and I enjoy it. So like that was something that somebody was able to nail in a couple of weeks. But I think especially,

you know, if you've got a genetic predisposition, this is something that it's just about every single opportunity that you have every time you indulge, that's the moment where you can bow to that as a teacher and say, oh, what can I learn from this? And importantly, you're describing and beating yourself up. That we think of that as going in reverse. So if we beat ourselves up over something that we've done in the past, that doesn't help us move forward that actually reinforces similar types of habit patterns. Why?

Why does it? Yeah. Why and how? I don't, that's a great question. I'm not sure I could explain it completely neuroscientifically, but if you think of the, if you think of this habit loop, there can be reinforcing aspects of beating ourselves up.

So for example, if you think of, let's just do this together. So when you're afraid, if you were to break it down into a feeling of contraction versus expansion, would you say that being afraid is contracting or expanding? Contracting, for sure. Okay. The dopamine rush that comes from anticipating using is a contracting or expanding. Contracting? Yeah.

Now, how about when you get excited about doing something like, you know, you're about to interview somebody that you're really excited to interview, contracting or expanding? Often that's expanding. Okay, so yeah, let's unpack that a little bit more. As long as I'm nervous, if it's like, oh, I was new,

I was gonna see you today that was an expansive, like, oh, I'm gonna see my man, Judd, and we're gonna talk while I was incredibly interesting stuff, but if I'm going to interview, you know, some, if it's gonna be contentious or something like that, I get a little nervous. Right, okay, so'm going to interview, you know, some, if it's going to be contentious or something like that, I get a little nervous. Right. Okay.

So the nervousness aside, you know, and we can maybe we can unpack this in a second because they're, you know, there's often this mistaken quality of where there's excitement that's mistaken, you know, there was a teacher, Saita Upandita, who described, you know, he said, we, the mind mistakes excitement for happiness. Yeah, I think that's brilliant. I was on my list of things to talk to you about. So we'll we'll place that to the side for now. Now let's go back to beating yourself up. When you beat yourself off, does it feel contracting or expanding? Contracting. Yeah. Yeah. So I was thinking about myself. It's all the story of me.

So there may be an experiential quality to that contraction that lines up with this whole habit loop and the self-reference around that. You know, the one thing you said that I realized that I'm not doing that was standing all of the knowledge that I've accrued from hanging out with you. And also some of the experiential wisdom that I think I've maybe at least done a minuscule level accrued from being able to see how you have to have the self awareness that one generates through meditation. The one thing I'm not doing unless I'm on a meditation retreat sugar, I'm actually not paying attention. And I think that might short circuit things, even though you've told me a million times to do it. Right, absolutely. And that's where a lot of our folks really see the big insights is.

So again, I started keep going back to the Buddhist teachings with that. No, no, no, this is a year and a safe place for this. Go. So there was in one of the suit as he was giving advice to his son, Rahulah. And he said, when you're about to do an action, reflect on it before, but if you can't reflect on it during, but if you can't reflect on it afterwards. And basically, you're good at reflecting on this afterwards.

And you tend to beat yourself up a little bit. So that part might be optional. But just reflecting on it and saying, oh, what can I learn from this? Afterwards helps us learn something. As we develop that wisdom, we can then start to plop it in, plop that awareness in as we're doing it. And then that drives us to be able to reflect on it

before we do it. The story I'm telling myself is that I am so sort of deeply addictive in my personality and just such in my personal history that really probably the only answer around sugar is complete abstinence. That's an interesting story, but you you seemed you have argued again, and multiple times to my face, that actually with the proper application of mindfulness, one can enjoy half a cookie. Yes, absolutely.

And I've had, we run this live group at the Center for Mindfulness on Monday nights where we actually pair our eat right now app within person support. And a lot of people come in say, I just have to quit sugar called Turkey, and they come in and they say, you're not suggesting to do that. I'm saying no, because that's, it only works until our prefrontal cortex goes offline. So there's inherent flaw in that.

We wanna find something that's sustainable long term. And so we say, don't worry about, so what they're worried about is like they're like, I'm just going to dolds and suddenly I'm going to, you know, not going to have any control, which is pretty much what they're doing already. They just don't know it. So we say, just, just go ahead and indulge, but pay attention as you do and really see in that moment that you're indulging what it feels like. And that's where they start, they come back and they're like, wow, this is, I didn't go crazy. And actually, I stopped a little bit before, you know, the previous

times that I would stop. And we've had people come in repeatedly now saying, you know, their big successes are, I ate, you know, I really enjoyed it. And I stopped when I was full. I stopped when I was full. I stopped when I was full. So your lesson, your message to me is, do the practice, you already know how to do? Yes, that's it. It's that simple. That's the beauty of these practices. It's simply about paying attention.

It's not about, we don't have to keep anything else in mind. We just have to pay attention. So that paying attention, that first fact of awakening, it makes a lot of sense. If we're not paying attention, we're just gonna be on our habit loops. Now that paying attention is critical, the quality of the mind, as we pay attention is critical, and this is where I'd messed up in my own practice, that curiosity is the key aspect that you rub those two sticks together and it creates heat so that we have the energy to do more practice

into, to actually investigate what our life is like. And that's actually the third factor of awakening, viria, courageous energy. So let's, I'm glad you brought this up because it brings us full circle back to the beginning of your meditation practice because this is a problem for so many people, myself included.

We get into meditation and it sucks. It's like we're paying attention to the breath and it's boring There's a lot of judgment about how boring it is and how bad we are at it and we're just trying to sort of As you say through brute force bring our attention back to the breath and then we get lost and then we beat ourselves up about it But you actually as you said before discovered that this is not the most fruitful way to go forward. So what is, and I think you've given us a little bit of the answer to that,

but what is the answer and how do we apply it? Well, so this only took me about 10 years to figure out. And I think my teachers are probably like, oh, finally, he's starting to understand what we've been trying to teach him. And after going through a number of long silent retreats where I would sweat through t-shirts and even cry on the shoulder of your teacher. Yeah, that was my first wake-long retreat.

I was crying on the shoulder of my who turned out to be my future teacher, Ginny Morgan. I'd actually gone to go a retreat with Bonte Guneratina, this really famous well, you know, monk and teacher who wrote this amazing book, Mindfulness and Plain English. So it's very straightforward the way he describes it. I just couldn't do it or I didn't feel like I could do it, but I was doing the brute force methodology. And I was thinking that, you know, I can do brute force, so I'm just going to brute force

through this. And it was only after about 10 years that when I was trying to do a more refined concentration practice that I learned that it's not about the brute force at all. So what is it about? Curiosity. I think curiosity is key. Okay, I said why? And you've been my teacher on this issue, frankly. For many years, you're the one who's really put this in my head. But a lot of people are going to say, as I have

said, what in the world is there to get curious about with the breath? It is so boring. Yes. I think that's an excellent point. And I think, so there are several things that we can play with there in terms of what is, you know, what in the world is, can we find interesting about the breath, the just getting curious about anything. So if we can kind of ramp up our curiosity, we can then apply it to the breath. So I wouldn't necessarily say, you know, jump right into 30 minutes of breath awareness meditation. I would say, let's practice. Let's let's hone that skill of curiosity. And I'd gone through a period of time where instead of

doing sitting meditation, I would do a couple of hours of walking meditation in a park near my house. And just to really refine that curiosity practice, to look at leaves, on trees, look at the bark, even the patterns in the sidewalk, just to see like how can I let that curiosity get drawn in, you know, like a three-year-old child, three-year-old seem to, they nail this, you know, they they could look at a blade of grass for a half an hour or it'd be pretty concentrated on that. So there's something to be learned there. Yeah, I have a two-year-old who's really interested in seeing the contents

of his own diaper, so get it. There you go. Yeah, the poop meditation. So I think that that's the place to start, not necessarily like the breath is magic. It's about the curiosity is the magical quality that our mind has that we can foster. And as we can start to develop it, then we can apply it to things like the breath. Now the breath also has some very interesting aspects to it that we can dive into.

Like, you know, I will often suggest people, okay, just notice when the beginning, you know, your in-breath ends. Let it just do its thing. If you're doing it right now, well, how do I know in my in-breath is going to add? Hmm, that's interesting. It changes every time. Yeah. So there's a, there's a quality there that we can even tap into to this ever-changing nature

of our body doing its thing where we just get curious. Oh, wow. Oh, it ended this time there. And that's what it felt like on the out breath. When does that end? When is that pause between the breath going to restart? Whether it's an in-breath or an out-breath? Oh, that's interesting. So I think we can get curious about anything if we just bring that, you know, if we just bring that quality in. And maybe because I'm a scientist, that's something that's come a little more naturally to me than others. But I'm fascinated about all sorts of things.

Anything that quality is something that we all have. We can foster, we can develop it. But really, I think it's more about uncovering it. And curiosity itself feels good. think it's more about uncovering it. And, you know, curiosity itself feels good, so it's rewarding in itself. You know, that's what I love about these practices. They're so amazing. They actually tap into this natural reward-based learning process. Yes. Yes. Yes. So instead of that contracted quality of excitement that comes from being about to eat a cookie, we can replace that behavior with curiosity. So the curiosity is the behavior instead of eating the cookie. The reward,

instead of contraction, like, oh yeah, that was awesome. There's an expansion, which is moving one, the quality of expansion to me is not and a different from contraction, it feels. Oh, much more, you know, it just feels so much better. But the other piece there is it's an intrinsic motivator rather than extrinsic. We don't need to eat something to feel good. We just need to tap into something that's already there.

Life is short and it's full of a lot of interesting questions. What does happiness really mean? How do I get the most out of my time here on Earth? And what really is the best cereal? These are the questions I seek to resolve on my weekly podcast, Life is Short with Justin Long. If you're looking for the answer to deep philosophical questions like what is the meaning of life, I can't really help you, but I do believe that we really enrich our experience here by learning from others. And that's why in each episode, I like to talk with actors, musicians, artists, scientists, and many more types of people about how they get the most out of life. We explore how they felt during the highs and sometimes more importantly, the lows of their careers.

We discuss how they've been able to stay happy during some of the harder times. But if I'm being honest, it's mostly just fun chats between friends about the important stuff. Like if you had a sandwich named after you, what would be on it? Follow life is short wherever you get your podcasts. You can also listen to ad free on the Amazon music or Wondery app.

On this issue of curiosity, our mutual meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, has said a bunch of things that have helped me, one and so of you. So I'll just go into a long list of things. One is, and you can interrupt me in amplify at 90.1, one is what I've said to Joseph one time, what is more boring than the breath? It's so boring and he said, well, you might try

meditating with your head underwater. And basically meaning, the breath is not interesting, is not uninteresting, you know, when you really need it. And actually it is kind of interesting if you just notice you are breathing anyway, you know, like the body is running without you. Or as John Cavazin has said, like the nature doesn't let us are thinking cells anywhere near the capacity to breathe. That's just happening without us because if it was up to us we would forget to breathe and die. And so actually just closing your eyes and noticing that this whole system is running without you

is interesting. Just carrying on my list here, the other thing that Joseph's pointed out is that to know that you are breathing, frankly, to know anything, takes no effort whatsoever. So we spend all this, especially type A guys like me and you, we come in, we think we're going to win at meditation, the worst thing you can do. Actually, so we make it super effort full. But actually, if you notice that it is effortless, the mind knows that you're breathing feels the raw data of the physical sensations of your in-breath and out-breath with no effort whatsoever. The only effort that's required is once you get distracted, which is natural, it requires a little effort to return your attention, but even that is happening in a way that's out of your control. Like you wake up and nobody's, you haven't woken up.

It's like waking up has happened. So that's just kind of an interesting thing to look at. And if I could just add to that, even bringing it back. So it can feel like some effort to bring it back to an object. But if there's curiosity, curiosity naturally takes us by the hand and says, oh, let's go back. Yeah, well, like, how did that happen? How did I wake up?

And like, where was I? And, you know, that's all absolutely. Curiosity is huge during all that. The other thing that you have said, you have a little mantra which I love, and I use it all the time in my own meditation practice, especially if I'm outside walking. And this really goes to the effortlessness of awareness, which is let your senses rip. And your senses are working all the time,

whether you're papering over them with your own compulsive thinking or not. You'd be walking outside and notice none of it because you're thinking about, oh, how am I gonna satisfy this craving I have or what am I gonna say in my next argument or what are the things that might to do this.

So you've noticed nothing of the data that your senses are gathering. But in fact, if you just let your senses rip, it is absolutely effortless to just see, hear, feel, and whatever is happening. And not only is it effortless, but when we break through that paper mache that we've covered over it with... It feels good. It's amazing. Maybe this is where Jouad de Vive comes from.

You know, we just have...oh, it's... Yeah, it feels good. Yeah. For anybody who hasn't actually done this, it's going to sound a little poliano. Like, that feels good to be alive. But actually, it does feel good to be alive. And it's just no other less cliché, nothing you can say about that. That doesn't sound hopelessly cliche, but actually just try it. It feels better than thinking,

here, let me go to another piece of wisdom you dropped on me. And I talk about Judd is in the last chapter of my book. He's in the epilogue or whatever it is. Where you talk about BF Skinner. And that BF Skinner had this, he's the guy who came up with Operant Conditioning Award-based Learning, the Modern Psychologist. And was he a psychologist? He was.

Okay, so he had something called a Skinner Box, where he put a rat, and I can't remember exactly how it works, but basically the rat learns to avoid the places in the box where you get an electric shock and go to the places where you don't. That if you can apply this to your own life, how does it feel when you're contracted

into a self-centered craving or anger or whatever? How does that actually feel? If you bring curiosity to that, and then how does it feel if you're actually just kind of letting your senses rip and feeling the wind on your face, noticing whatever you're seeing, noticing whatever you're tasting. If you notice that all day long every day, and then you will just naturally like a rat in a Skinner box, try to avoid the stuff that doesn't feel good. Yes, and I would say, you know, Joseph talks about this in terms of not taking things personally, where it gets even more interesting

is that contraction literally separates us from the rest of the world. So it creates a boundary whether we're going to have a wall, we're putting up walls between ourself and the rest of the world. So if you stop building a wall and you let that wall come down in that expansive quality. You take that to infinity. Now you don't know where you are because there is no you. This puts us in the territory of flow. All right. Say more about that. What is flow? So Mihai Chikzen Mahai was a psychologist who described flow. I think back as far as early as the 70s in

his book, I think called Flow or something like that. And he described this as a selfless, effortless, timeless, immensely joyful state. There are a number of conditions that need to be met to be in flow. This isn't, by the way, we're not talking about some Buddhist esoteric. No, no, no. We're talking about this is like being in the zone and sport. This is exactly, this is synonymous with being in the zone. They just use flow, you know, they're synonymous. And he even described meditation as being one way to help people get into flow.

If you look at those conditions, this is exactly what not only Buddhism, but pretty much all the spiritual teachings that I know of, so my wife said, a Bible scholar and she practices in the Christian and Contemplative tradition, same thing when they call it small self. So when the small self gets in the way, we can't let God flow through us. That's the same thing as expanding to the point where we're out of the way and there's no self. So the Buddhist, the Christians, I don't know many other traditions that well,

but the Sufi, yeah, the Vedavadanta, the Whirling Dervishes, lots of things help us not get caught up in ourselves. And that's what we're talking about here. That's flow. That's Jixama High's psychology of, you know, what these spiritual traditions have been teaching for thousands of years. But I feel like this is, I'm gonna get back to my own neuroses here because whatever it's my podcast. The, I feel like, you know, I've put a lot of energy

into and time into meditating and I'm only seven years into it and you said that it took you 10 years to stop pounding your head against the wall. So maybe I have a little ways to go. But I and I found it to be enormously useful way more for the record than 10 percent. And but I don't know that I'm going to flow state that often. I don't see and I don't think of flow as binary. What you're describing with letting the senses rip, I think in any moment we can either

be contracting or expanding. And if we even just drop into that experience, once we can calibrate what contracting versus expanding feels like in our experience, then we can start to drop into just noticing in any one moment. Oh, what I just did, that lead to contraction, what I just did, did that lead to expansion. And so I think of it more of a continuum of we are constantly moving outward or we can be contracting more and more into a little neutron star. Does it lead to something called enlightenment? I don't know, but it surf feels good. Are you concerned with the issue of enlightenment? Are you trying to get enlightened?

Do you think this is something that people should be thinking about? Well, I think if we try to get enlightened, we can guarantee that we won't get that. Yes, exactly. So I've kind of let that do its own thing and certainly am aiming toward, I mean, I think the idea about enlightenment is described in many different ways, but one is about, you know, ending suffering. And if suffering is caused by this contracted, taking things personally, any moment that I can see when I'm doing that and let go of that, I'm moving toward enlightenment.

Whatever, you know, if we think of that conceptually. Right, whatever that even means. Right. But experientially, in that moment, we're already, we've already let go. And I think this is where it's really interesting to look at the, like, the Zen traditions and the, even the Tibetan traditions where they talk about, we're already enlightened. And Joseph even talks about both and

where we can work toward it and we can also wake up to moments where there are no boundaries. Right, so there are just to fill that out a little bit. So Joseph, our teacher, comes from the old school of Buddhism where there are actually like pretty distinct landmarks that one hits along the way if our teacher comes from the old school of Buddhism where there are actually like pretty distinct landmarks that one hits along the way where you have these experiences of

Nirvana. That culminate allegedly in full enlightenment where greed, hatred, and delusion has been utterly uprooted from the mind without remainder. However, there are many schools of Buddhism where they actually argue that you're already enlightened. All it is is a matter of just clearing away the debt tritus and you in it's right here right now. Joseph actually has a kind of an ecumenical view

which is you can think of both of these. But it sounds to me if I recall that your attitude is don't get to hung up on hitting landmarks or whatever, just it's about how are you expanding or contracting right now. Right. And if we're getting hung up on hitting some landmark, we can notice the likelihood of being contracted in that moment. So that becomes the practice.

Yes. Yes. It's like the catch 22. You can't hit any landmarks if you're trying to hit the practice. Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's like the it's a catch 22 you can't hit any landmarks if you're trying to hit the landmark. So let me ask you to add another interesting aspect of your research which we haven't talked about which is the aspect you've researched. Frankl, that's really made the most headlines which is that you developed a system of neurofeedback for meditators. So starting in FR machines, brain scanners, the big metal tubes,

you put people in there including yourself, but you actually really focused on other people, including a group of very, very experienced meditators, and you allowed them to see the brain activity in a key part of the brain while they were meditating. Do you just tell us about what the study entailed and what you were looking for? Sure. And it wasn't just Wednesday. This was about probably five years of work that led up to it and is ongoing now. When we found those behavioral signals with our smoking cessation program, that in Bolden Mead to say, okay, let's look at what's going on. And one of my advisors said, you know, why don't you look at Meditator's brains to see what's happening?

And I, at the time, I was like, well, I'm sure somebody's done that. And we looked into the literature and, you know, there'd been some early work by Richie David Sinslab that had looked a little bit at that, but with small samples. And so we said, well, let's, you know, we're, I was at Yale at the time at Yale at the time, and we were a couple of hours from the Insight Meditation Society. So we recruited a fair number of people from around the area. That's Joseph's retreat center. Right.

So we had some access, and also there were experienced folks in the Northeast, that we could bring in. And we asked a simple question. We said, if we teach a novice meditator, three different types of meditation that morning, and we teach, and we have experienced meditators do those same meditations in the scanner, how different are their brains? And the first thing we found was that their brains

aren't actually that different, which was a big shock to me. We had carefully controlled, you know, matched our samples so that we wouldn't, you know, there wouldn't be any educational differences or anything or age differences because those can make a, you know, give you a false reading in your scans. So not many differences. The other thing we found was that there was nothing in the brain that showed an increased inactivation, which was something we were expecting to find.

Inactivation of what? Any, so we looked across the entire brain and we said, what part of the brain gets increased in activity during meditation? So does it go up? Does it get activated during meditation? And we found that there were no brain regions that increased activity. Well, that tells you something that it's not about efforting. Yes.

But at the time, I was looking because I was efforting at the toilet myself. So this is kind of the me search, quality to me search. I was like, well, I'm doing something. So they must be doing something. And I was doing something that probably wasn't the practice. So they were pointing out, hey, here's something to pay attention to more. When we then said, well, what differences are there, there were only about four brain regions that came out between these two groups that were different.

And we were particularly interested in commonalities amongst different practices, because if we found commonalities, then we could find some core that could be useful, not just for one specific practice, but for a bunch of different practices. And this is where this brain network called the default mode network came in. There was a particular brain region called the posterior singulate cortex, which is a main hub of the default mode network, which we, which has been you explain with the default mode network is sure the default mode network was discovered by a mark rakels group at Washington University in st. Louis actually while I was in grad school there, I didn't know the research that they were doing and they were using a task that they called base or arresting state where the the instruction was lay still and don't do anything in particular. And they wanted a task that was easy, that people could learn quickly because it's expensive to have people in a scanner and that could be universal.

So we're going to use this as a baseline task and then compare other cognitive tasks to it because we always look at relative changes in brain activity from a baseline. And they started seeing these brain regions get activated over and over and over. And there was this network that they couldn't explain. And they actually sat on their data for two years, I believe, before he published it in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

as his inaugural paper. So he was getting inaugurated into the National Academy, which is like winning the gold medal in the Olympics for scientists. And you get one free paper, basically, where, you know, it's peer-reviewed, but, you know, they kind of pat you on the back and say, good job. You know, we'll kind of peer review this. So he put it in and it's now one of the most highly-sighted papers in all of their imaging

because it's been reproduced so many times. And what they've found in over the last 15 years, they've now, the field is now uncovered that this network is self-referential. So when we're thinking about past or future, when we're craving basically anything, when even physiologic thirst, which is interesting, we can unpack that more later. But even when we're ruminating about something,

so when you're beating yourself up, you're likely activating your default mode network. And in particular, the posterior your Singulate cortex. So this is what this default mode network is. And they call it default mode because this seems to be what we default to. And what we, if you have 10 minutes on the subway, what are you default to, probably thinking about something related to you?

You're checking your phone. Which, yes, same thing. Yeah, same thing. So this is the background in terms of what the default one network is. It, our findings showed that both the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior singulate were decreased in, in experience meditators. So their brain regions got more quiet. Both while they were meditating.

And not meditating. Well, we couldn't look at not meditating because that was our baseline condition for activity, but we could look at connectivity, how these brain regions were talking to each other. And this may be harder to explain on the radio in terms of how, you know, how all those connectivity differences were coming out, but basically these experienced meditators seem

to have a different default mode, even when they're not meditating compared to meditating. So in terms of connectivity, how the brain regions are talking to each other. And basically, there seems to be a self-monitoring brain region that is looking out for the emergence of self. I'm just kind of telling a story about this. This may be not be completely accurate, but this is the hypothesis that we have. That it monitors for the emergence of self, for example, when we get contracted, when the posterior single it gets activated, you know, that during that contraction. And it says, do you really want to do that?

And then we can... Skinnerbox. Yeah, basically. But you need to pay attention to be able to have that Skinnerbox work. So we looked more carefully at that when... This is where we started doing real-time neurofeedback. So we could do these neurophenonologic studies where we could link subjective experience to people's brain activity.

Meaning you'd put people in a brain scanner and they would meditate and they could see what was happening in their default mode network in real time. Yes. Basically answering the age-old question, am I meditating correctly? Moving in that direction. Okay. Moving in that direction. Okay. Moving in that direction.

Because we have to be humble about what we actually know with the brain. Yes. Yes. So what we could do is for the first time, this hadn't been done much before, and I'm not sure if it had been done in cognitive neuroscience to actually bring the subjective experience with brain activity. So often, we'll have people do a task and then we'll measure their brain activity. And then afterwards we'll do the analysis and say,

okay, they did this task and it was related to this brain region. So therefore, you know, this must be happening. And we can, there's this big problem called reverse inference where we then look at a brain region and say, oh, that brain region was activated. Therefore, they must have been doing this. Well, that's a big leap often. And so we can say, well, let's forget any cognitive leaps. Let's just see if this is true.

And that's what we were doing these first studies with was to say, okay, look at a graph. So we have people meditate while they're in the scanner, they're meditating with their eyes open, and they're meditating generally on their breath. And we show them this graph that shows increased or decreased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex. And we say, just check in with the graph from time to time to see how well it correlates with your experience. So we could then link these two together.

And in these first studies, we were finding a very high correlation between people getting caught up in their experience and the posterior cingulate getting activated, and when they were concentrated on their breath in the posterior cingulate getting deactivated. So that was really reassuring to us that this brain region was actually linking to their subjective experience, but we found something really fascinating, which was it wasn't just about concentration, it was about the quality of concentration. So somebody could be curious about something that was happening in their experience, and they didn't have to be focused on a specific object. That curiosity was also showing decreased activation, and people were even reporting, you know,

just noticing thoughts go by. They were, one person said, you know, the less I tried to do anything, the bluer it went, the more the brain region went down. And so we're starting to understand what Yoda is talking about, right? Try not. Do or do not, there is no try. So we're starting to see,

this is where we started to get the hypothesis that it's about the contraction, not only in experience, but this contraction was lining up with the posterior singulates activity. And then it said, oh, well, we said, well, how does this line up with the self reference? This may be an experiential self because contraction, again, like we talked about earlier, contraction demarcates us relative to the rest of the world. So then all these pieces started coming together

more and more and more. And it was a really fascinating time. We did this for about two years. And I remember even testing out loving kindness when we were first testing the scanner out, which is a specific kind of meditation. Right, so loving kindness practice, I had a grant reviewer once say,

this can't be related to self-referential brain regions because there must be somebody doing something. So I wanted to test that myself. I looked, it was loving kindness practice that I was looking at my own brain activity and the thing took a nose dive. It got much more quiet in my posterior single as my loving kindness practice kind of just ballooned out. So I first was doing it for the people in our control room and then it just like took

off. And I'm using this hand gesture of like expansion, it felt really expanded. And that's where my posterior single was getting quiet. And so here, even with loving kindness practice, there can be a rote, I'm gonna do loving kindness. That's how I first started doing loving kindness myself. I was like, I'm gonna use this as a concentration practice. I'm gonna send good vibes to all living beings, et cetera, et cetera. Right, and when I learned it's just about

tapping into that expanding quality in the heart, then it just kind of took a life of its own. And I was like, oh, this is loving kindness. Oh, this is juicy kindness. Oh, and this is juicy. Well, so let me, let me again do the self-referential thing of telling my little story because I, so you, you adapted this technology, this real-time neurofeedback to, to a less expensive and less cumbersome version, which involved instead of being in a scanner which is like a thousand bucks an hour or something like that an EEG rig so like you put these sensors on the brain and you do it based on electrical activity in the brain and

So a couple times I went up there I think one time I went up there and tested it and it wasn't quite right even though it was telling me I was meditating correctly So I felt really good then I went back up again two and a half years ago, and I did a big long test to do, guys, and the conclusion was, like, crystal clear, that I was activating the PCC. I was, I was, I was, that I was meditating correctly. I was crestfallen, and it's still messing with me, this conclusion. And it's what drove me to get very, very, very interested in the effortlessness of awareness, that there's really nothing to do. And nowhere to go, it's, all you have to do is let your senses rip and you will notice whatever's happening right now. But that experience in the scanner, I remember both of us were kind of just like, oh man. I was a little, I was like, oh, what do I say?

I was so bummed. I mean, what do you think was going wrong? Well, the first thing I'll say is remember, you know, if you were like 40 years in your practice, you know, you, you, you've only been practicing a little while. Yeah, there's like four years, five years, yeah. So I don't see this as a, oh man, this is like great. We're helping to play with this now as compared to 20 years down the road. So that's the first thing I'll say.

And the second thing I'll say is I have no idea what was going on, but let's get you back in now that you've been playing with this curiosity. And we could even have you do some curiosity practices in this game. I'm getting all excited. Yes. Let's try that and see what happens, especially as we've refined the practices and we've even brought in some more measures that we can, or some more activity, I should say, some

feedback measures that we can even bring in with what we've got. Because that was a pretty, you know, it's, that was our version 1.0. The problem for me is that, you know, I'm one of these people who really hung up on am I meditating correctly. It's a very common, I find it when we do corporate research for, for the 10% happier app and we try to tap into what people's secret fears are on meditation. One of the big ones is I'm not doing it right. And that's a huge one for me,

even though I hang out in meditation teachers all the time. And so I, but it's still this doubt is always arising in me. And a lot of it keys back to what might be, brain be showing in Judges, G rig right now. I mean, like it's just, it dogs me, even when I'm on a long retreat,

maybe even especially when I'm on a long retreat. So yeah, I probably would be good to get me back in there. And at those moments that that doubt arises, you can notice what it feels like. Oh, is it contracting or expanding? So again, bow to those as teachers like, oh, here's doubt. Awesome. As compared to, oh, what is my brain? Because I'm getting caught.

The wondering what my brain looks like is a form of clinging, clinging to my self-experience. Me and my brain. Yes, yes, yes. Now I'm aware of that. I think actually what I've noted when the doubt comes up is just notice it as doubt. It takes the teeth right out of it.

There you go. But it just happens a lot. Because I now have this. You might have grooved that just happens a lot because I've I now have this. It's you might have grooved that pathway. I've grooved that pathway. We've spoken a long time really without really letting me without me letting you talk with and any great length of specifically about the book. Although I should say that if you read the book and you should, you will hear a lot of this stuff. But let's just direct, let's just attack it head on. What made you want to write this book? And what do you think it will

do for the reader? You know, there was the book arose out of, I think, I'm just going to say favorable conditions, which all unpack a couple of years before I wrote the book, you know, some publishers had contacted me and said, we need a book on addiction and mindfulness. And I actually had talked to John Cobbets in and I was like, you've written books. What's in his like, dude, caution, caution, morning. You know, it can consume your life.

So be ready to write a book. Yeah, except if you can do it in two weeks. Well, and so at that point, I wasn't ready to write a book. And so I said, no, no, no, no, no. And eventually, so I was about two years before I wrote it. Last December, I, December of 2015, I was going to do some self-retreat. And meaning you were going to just close to yourself and your house and do a retreat for a month or whatever.

Right. Yeah, I'd found that going to a retreat center was very helpful and I'd done a number of, you know, month-long meditation retreats at a self-retreat center. But I'd also then started learning that when I'm right in front of my phone and my computer and everything in my house, that's where the rubber meets the road. So there was a quality of practice for me that was really helpful to do that. And so I was gonna do that a bit. My wife had given me as a Christmas present,

that I could stay home and retreat, go on retreat, rather than going to visit her family at Christmas. I love visiting her family and all, but this was something I don't get to do that often now is to go on long-self retreat. So I was setting, gearing up to do that, and then another publisher contacted me, and then I had basically gone back to, I ended up publishing with Yale University Press. There was a wonderful editor there, Jennifer Banks, who has, you know, practice experience and is very interested in these types of things and has published some wonderful books, like Stephen Bachelors' books.

So it just seemed like, you know, the conditions were right. And I can say it felt at that point, like this book was ready to come out. We were, you know, hitting this opioid epidemic with addictions. Our work had kind of solidified. We'd done a bunch, all this research that we talked about had kind of come more to fruition where I was feeling more confident that we could repeat our experiments and all of this. And so it was like, well, let's see if I can add an element to retreat where it's not just sitting and walking, but sitting, walking, writing.

And so I wrote the introduction to the book before going on retreat to make sure I could write, because I'd never written a book in my editor, gave me the thumbs up. And I wrote most of, or if not all of what's now chapter two before going on retreat. And then my instruction to myself was, only write if you're in flow or is in the expanded phase and just let the writing happen and just see what comes out. And so I would sit and I would walk and then when it was right, I would just write. When the conditions were favorable or when it just felt like, okay, it's time to write. And so I just would open up my laptop and just let it write.

And I'd written out kind of chapter headings before that, but that was it. And then it just let the chapters rip. And it came out in two weeks. I mean, I'm actually finding it less surprising now because I notice when I go on retreat, it is the most fertile period of creativity because once the churning, looping, fizzing mind slows down, all the ideas come up. Yeah, so I have actually come back from retreats

and looked at my diary and realized that I had a lot of bad ideas, but a lot of good ideas come to. So what is, for the reader, what, I mean, I can describe why I think it's incredibly useful because you break down the ways in which we're all addicted. You know, it's not just opioids or cocaine or food, it's technology. You get into things like technology, addictions, distraction, addiction to ourselves. You talk about your own addictions, love, as an example, thinking, you talk about anger. So it really breaks down the ways in

which we're all addicted and then gives us the keys to the jail cell. It tries to move us in that direction, yes. That was the aim was, how can we unpack how we all learn this natural reward-based learning process and the whole continuum from the utility of it, like learning how to tie our shoes, to the far end of addiction where we're doing some behavior despite adverse consequences, so that we can all see in our own lives how we might be addicted to this or this or this, and then like you're talking about, you know, not to show people that our lives are a mess, but that we can actually bring simple awareness practices, and especially this paying attention to contraction and expansion as a simple way

to start unwinding those loops. So this would be a good time to pick up the issue that you tabled or shelved earlier, which is the difference, and this is a key thing in a human life to be aware of, the difference between excitement and happiness. We mistake one for the other, and this can actually lead to addiction, so can you unpack that a little bit? Yes, and I'll caveat that by saying this is speculation, but this is my working hypothesis.

And certainly a Buddhist hypothesis, for sure. Yes, absolutely. So building on that and just kind of reiterating what a lot of folks have described earlier. So if we go back to that contraction versus expansion, there can be, it's more obvious with negative emotions. So anger, fear, rage, you know, even pride can have a contracted quality like, look at me.

And there are even studies showing that people describe there's a hotspot in our chest that these all share. When we look at positive emotions, it's less clear. So the most clear ones, as we've talked about, are joy, curiosity, and love that's untainted, I'm going to say. So as opposed to a positive, romantic love. Right. So if there's love where we're right in the throes of an early romantic relationship, you know, that infatuation stage, that's like being on cocaine, you know, where we're

fidgety, where restless, we're constantly thinking about when we're going to see the person, when we're going to get their text or tweets or whatever. So there's this excited quality to experience that overlaps very much with what I see in my patients and so when we look at that that excitement is actually you know, Ducogenic it causes suffering. Ducca being the ancient Indian word for suffering. Right. Ducogenic. I like that. Ducogenic. So we often mistake we're like, oh, I'm in the throes of a romantic relationship. This is awesome. And our co-workers look at us like, and you haven't gotten any work done for two weeks.

How awesome is this really? Because we're not paying attention. We're high on that idea of the other. And the difference between excitement is finite. You know, like you burn out. Or as our teacher, Joseph says, like, how much ice cream can you really eat? Could you have sex for seven straight days? You know, you can overdo things that are exciting.

Joy, sort of a wholesome feeling of happiness, which is expansive. You really can't get enough of that stuff. And that is a key thing to look for your experience and actually can tell you a lot about compulsive addictive behavior. Right. And that also goes back to the intrinsic reward of joy versus the extrinsic reward of I must have X to be happy. Right. So joy in order to be joy has to be right here and readily available. Well, that's the only place that I've found it, yes. As opposed to it's somebody handing you a check or something like that, which not to say that we shouldn't

enjoy those extrinsic sources of pleasure, but be aware that they can lead to addiction. Right, we're just not caught up in those external things. Like, okay, great, I can pay my rent, or I can pay my mortgage. That's never a bad thing. But when I'm like, Oh, now awesome. I'm going to go buy a Tesla, you know, different story, different story, especially, that means nothing wrong with necessarily getting a Tesla. But if you become so addicted to acquiring more and more money that every check you get actually

doesn't give you any more dope. I mean, that's then you're on the loop. Right. Then we're on the loop. Such it such a pleasure to sit here and interview you. You have so many interesting things that you've done and continue to do. Where can people find more information about you? Yes, there's the craving mind, which is as we're recording this before the book comes out, but we'll be posting when the book is available from Yale University Press. But you also have to, you have at least two TED Talks that I'm aware of. I do. There's a TED Talk that's on the TED site itself called The Simple Way to Break About Habit. There was a TED X talk that I gave a couple of years before that one that's just on YouTube.

I think it's called, you're already awesome. Just get out of your own way. I love that one. And then also the two apps that you've got and you're going to be doing more eat right now and craving to quit. Right, so the websites for them are cravingacquit.com and go eatrightnow.com as and go eat correctly in the present moment.

Right. Gotcha. Anything else that we should see any other entry points to the Judd Ruer universe? I have a completely self-referential website called Judsonbruer.com that links to those as well as my research gig at the Center for Mindfulness. So that's kind of a first pass that people can find links to all of these other things. Awesome. Great interview, great book, really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me, this has been really fun. Total pleasure. Okay, there's another edition of the 10% Happier Podcast. If you liked it, please make sure to subscribe, rate us, and if you want to suggest topics we should cover or guess we should bring in, hit me up on Twitter at Dan B. Harris. I also want to thank Hardly, the people who produced this podcast and really do pretty much all the work. Lauren, Efron, Josh Cohan, Sarah Amos, Andrew Calp, Steve Jones, and the head of ABC News

Digital Dan Silver. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. and the head of ABC News Digital Dance Silver. I'll talk to you next Wednesday. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today or you can listen early and add free

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