Breaking Bad (Habits): Dr. Jud Brewer | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] all right dr. Judd is in the house we're ready to rock and roll how you feeling yeah I get super excited to talk to you you you are like the perfect guest for this podcast because you occupy this sweet spot that I don't know anybody if anybody else can claim where you are steeped in the hard science evidence-based science psychiatrist academic neuroscientist but you're also equally steeped in the world of mindfulness like the softer sciences and all things spiritual at the same time so this is like the bull's eye of the things that I'm most interested in and it's a rare opportunity to talk to somebody who who stands on equal footing in both of these worlds usually it's you know hard scientist or somebody who's coming from a completely spiritual perspective and never the twain shall meet but but here you are she's a rare creature well it's been really interesting to just see how hard these hard sciences actually are and how soft these sign itself Sciences actually I don't think that we like to make dichotomies in the world that that's one that really started to fall apart as I've explored both of them yeah well it was an interest it's been an interesting journey for you your entry point into all of this like I think just to contextualize what we're gonna talk about I think that would be interesting to learn more about sure where do you want to start well how about with you know what got you interested in mindfulness and meditation to begin with I mean it was sort of precipitated by a little bit of a relationship crisis memory serves me yeah that is true you know I did start meditating my first day of medical school after going through a bad relationship breakup but I can look retrospectively on my life and realize you know there are a lot of points earlier in my life where I had touched on something that I didn't know what it was but I knew it was really sweet hmm whether it was you know I raced BMX bikes when I was a kid and I played quartet music you know as a group playing the violin and there was something about being in a group of four people and making music we're just ever the world dissolved and we were we were just the music and I didn't know what that was I just knew that I was some strange kid in high school that would rather play quartets and go out and get drunk you didn't know that at some point in the future all the cool kids would be calling this a flow stage I had no idea and here it is yeah so I think I touched on it at various points in my life but it really you know took something that I was really devastated by the to kind of precipitate a big change you know it's starting medical school to new start in my life new points so it seemed like a good place to try something what I thought was new right why that though other than like hey I'm in medical school like I'll get a prescription to help me sleep better or to calm my nerves yeah I've never really been you know I'm a psychiatrist i prescribed medications but I've never really been in - I've been pretty careful about putting medications or any types of drugs in my body and I really felt that throughout my life that just really finding good ways to nourish my mind and body were the better way to go so you know I started getting into eating well in junior high school actually when I was BMX bike racing I realized you know we'd raced these three heats in a race you race over heat and then you'd have to wait and then race another one so you're actually competing in BMX yeah yeah Wow yeah well Indiana there's not a whole lot else to do what I found you know what I would I would eat junk food in between heats and realized that I didn't much energy to race the second or third heat and then my mom was like hey why don't you try eating a peanut butter and honey sandwich and I was like okay and I realized you know wow I had to sustained energy and and I could do much better and so I started getting into that back in high school and I was running across country and track and and wrestling and realizing that that health food was actually really helpful performance and so I think that even extended into when I started really getting into loving to explore things scientifically and not wanting to put things that might mess up my brain in my body but psychiatry wasn't the original plan not at right now so how did that evolve you know I was so I was doing this MD ph.d program where I was studying medicine and I was doing a PhD in immunology and I got into that because I was really interested in the brain mind interaction I was really fascinated by like why we get sick when we're stressed out uh-huh and so I was doing all of this mouse work would make you know knock out gene knockout genes and certain cell populations and mice and see what would happen and that was really interesting and at the time I was just you know I was meditating on my own because I was trying to work with my own stress and realized that you know by the time I finished that program you know it was like eight years into it that I had learned so much more about the mind from my own meditation practice than I had from actually studying mice that I shifted you know I did this major it was a seismic shift in my career was like one of those go big or go home moments where it was like I'm gonna try something completely new and study it cuz nobody really been studying this stuff at that point to you know to the safe you know what I could do I could do science I'd learned to do science but I really wanted to see how this mind-body connection really worked on a human level but it was your experience with IBS that kind of tipped a scale right like realizing the that there really is this mind-body connection that transcends our typical conventional Western medicine protocol on how to treat certain illnesses yeah in college I had a really severe bout my senior year of college I'd love to run and and I I would have to plan my runs around having a bathroom nearby where I could stop you know and go to the bathroom if I need to and I remember going into the to the doctor at the at the University and you know saying oh maybe I got Giardia cuz I did a lot of backpacking and he said you know could this be stress I said no this can't be stressed murdered and I listed like ten things but the reason why I could not pass away you kind of shook his head and it's like well maybe someday and it took me in a you know a while to realize that that was actually my mind that was throwing my body out of whack and so I study I was studying that on a molecular level but when I finished my PhD I wasn't actually satisfied with the answers that I had discovered in in graduate school you know one somebody asked me this question we discovered all this stuff about the immune system and whatnot and how stress affects it somebody said well how do you know that's true in humans and I said well I don't know I would have to actually do this in humans and so that got me thinking about well you know what do we know about the mind-body interaction in humans and how can we actually study this and I had done some medical school rotations in psychiatry and started to see that my patients were actually talking the same language that the ancient Buddhists were talking you know 2,500 years ago there was like I'm craving and clinging in all this stuff and ice I was thinking you know I don't think this can be a coincidence it's really you know there's got to be some connection here and that's when I shifted my career to saying okay let's study mindfulness is a treatment for addictions as compared to you know studying these you know these small molecular pathways in in mice and how is that received by your peers at the time I remember distinctly I always it I would say it's Yale University for my residency training and and there can be you know let's just say there can be some pretense in some folks and some somebody said you know you're gonna kill your career you know this is you know you've done well as a scientist you're gonna you know you're gonna totally - everything that you that you've built up and they people just started distancing themselves from me and I figured well I'd rather fail doing something that I really am passionate about then succeed and just you know just do science yeah so just are you one of those people who when you're told you can't do something you're you're trying to prove them you know otherwise yeah that's that's actually why I went to Princeton was my college counselor told me I never get in oh really well you have an interesting upbringing right like you grew up single mom you know with with uh if three siblings yeah where are you guys yeah on food stamps at one point I think I heard you say it one you know I think when you were talking to Dan Harris I listened to that interview so it's quite it's quite a trajectory for for you to have you know going from from that place into Princeton yes I have a good mom my mom is amazing yes really you know my hero she she raised four kids by herself went to law school at night and we all stayed out of trouble made it through college what are your siblings doing my sister is an emergency medicine doc my brother works at MIT my older brother does this value he's a business valuation person so they're all doing Wow is your mom still around she is yeah I should get her on the podcast you know how to raise I could use a little help in that department right now Wow so that's amazing so you know Princeton you got your your medical degree at Washington right in st. Louis yeah and then you're at Yale and now you seem like you're affiliated with all kinds of universities I can't keep it I can't even keep it all straight like you're you're running institutes at like brown and MIT and you're doing something at at Massachusetts General Hospital well mostly I might at Brown you okay the director of research and innovation there in the mindfulness Center right so where does all of this dovetail into the world of addiction you know it's on a very basic level we're probably all addicted to some degree or another and I say this not lightly you saying oh everybody's got addictions but if we look at this this really comes back to the most basic learning mechanisms that are known to man and it's a matter of you know we're along the spectrum does it get us into trouble and so classically we used to think of addictions you know and and you know this as much as anybody else you know is these the substances like alcohol and cocaine and heroin and whatnot but really I think that's a little narrow of view if we look at this it's it can be virtually anything that gets us into trouble you know I really like there's this very simple definition continued use despite adverse consequences right I learned that in residency and that really stuck with me because it really defines the scope of the problem where we can have you have everyday addictions where it's you know cellphones and technology and you know trying to get our inbox to zero and all these things that are failing propositions well I'm delighted to hear you say that you've written extensively on this subject because I really do believe that there is a universal theory of addiction that when broadly defined is is a net that captures all of us and we tend to think of you know the drunk in the alley or the guy who can't pull the needle out of his arm or somebody who's in jail as a way of distancing those people from ourselves and not having to really look in the mirror but I really think that that addiction is is is a spectrum condition and every single person falls somewhere along those lines so you have the you know the the hopeless heroin addict on the far end of that but if we're all really objectively honest with our own behaviors we're all habituated to certain behaviors or activities or you know the intake of substances that cause adverse effects in our lives time and time again and we all sort of have this sense of powerlessness over our ability to control it or arrest it yeah absolutely and it's I'm so glad you point out that piece because you know for the last 50 years the dominant paradigm has been willpower right and that is proving to be more myth than muscle you know it's it's more legend than than reality so it really you know it's it's fascinating in so many ways one is you know we have to survive so that we can be addicted to things like sugar we're you know we've got to get calories or we're not gonna survive as human beings and then you know as humans we're we're so good at refining material we've been able to hear in the last couple of hundred years refined things like you know tobacco and cocaine you know coca leaves are not addictive but you know if you get it into that little powder yeah that's a whole different story Society has done an incredible job of creating creating pathways and and products that are specifically designed to addictive to hook us and not let us go yeah that's unprecedented in human history it really is and the more we learn you know there's this accumulation of knowledge that just builds on itself and builds on itself you know BF Skinner this famous behaviorist he wrote a novel about this in 1947 yeah where he basically predicted he called it behavioral engineering but he basically predicted what social media has been able to really capitalize on in the last couple of years to just really get us get our focus so narrowed that we're you know they have to paint look up on crosswalks you know in big cities now because people are forgetting the most basic survival things like don't cross the street without looking both ways though the willpower idea it's it's it's amazing that it perpetuates I certainly have up-close and personal experience with trying to master my many addictions through willpower to diminishing ends and as somebody who has always prided myself on myself well this has been a confounding you know sort of experiment that has taken me to some pretty low depths so I know firsthand that willpower does not work I think there's a lot of Education that needs to go into the public for them to appreciate the full extent of that but why doesn't it work yeah well we can dive into that but some of this piece about education I think can't just come cognitively you know we have to you know I I was in the same boat where it's like I had to learn that willpower failed on a personal before I started to let go of it right and was fortunate that I was actually studying this stuff at the same time so instead of saying well why doesn't this work I could actually explore oh this is why this doesn't work and it actually drew me into these avenues of like well what actually does work so if we if you want to dive in yeah let's do that the way I you know the way I think about this is we have this caveman brain mm-hmm you know that was really set up to help us survive we needed we needed food we needed to reproduce and we needed to avoid danger you know they eat and not be eaten thing and it can really be distilled down into a simple process of you need a trigger a behavior and a reward from a brain perspective so if you see food you eat the food and then your stomach sends this dopamine signal to your brain that says remember what you ate and where you found it now this reward based learning process is set up to help us remember things so it actually the dopamine firing is there to help us remember something it helps lay down a memory and often dopamine and modern day gets associated with pleasure but we can dive we can put a pin in that and talk more about that later not really a whole lot of pleasure in that agitated frenetic driven got to do this yeah right and that's that's the drive to use more when we get addicted so basic learning process remember where food is same thing remember we're dangerous you know you see the saber-toothed tiger you run away and then you get to remember okay don't go back there or I won't get to do that again so that process it still it plates the strongest learning mechanism mechanism that's known in science all the way evolutionarily conserved all the way back to the sea slug so really really well-known process yet in modern day it's still at play mmm but we have availability of food 24/7 right we all have refrigerators there you can you can find a diner a restaurant that's open at any time day or night you can get food delivered and he taught day or night so we don't really need to remember where food is anymore we just need to remember our phone is and we can order it yet our brains still Sanwa you know I'm I'm taking up a whole lot of real estate for this learning mechanism so let's use it and so we start to learn to do things like eat when we're stressed or anxious not when we're hungry you know and this splits out hedonic vs. homeostatic hunger you know the homeostatic hunger is like when we're actually hungry the hedonic is based on emotions and based on stress and things like that we learn to take pills when we are emotionally or physically in pain as compared to learning you know to deal with it you know social media is engineered for the the likes and the retweets so yeah it's it extrapolates out even to things like that are as as a nerd is boredom you know it doesn't have to be this sense of disease or some kind of emotional discomfort or or or something that triggers an uncomfortable memory it can be as banal as standing in line at the grocery store yep yeah I don't know if you've ever pulled up to a stoplight late at night and you look around and everybody's crotch is glowing no it's like suddenly 30 seconds at a red light is intolerable right well we only got there because we've let ourselves get there and we can say oh I'm not gonna do that you know I'm gonna be a good boy and and willpower my way way through this forget about it you know like you said it that doesn't work so let's get into why it doesn't like why is it that I can't override that impulse and through sheer force of will like Marshall my mental and emotional powers to prevent myself from doing that thing that I am so lured - yeah it sounds pretty good doesn't it you know we're these rational thinking beings I think Descartes really sent us down a path that's not so good you know oh I'm thinking therefore I can think my way through stuff it's not how our brains were yeah you know the there's a part of the brain the prefrontal cortex that that's involved in in willpower it's the weakest part of the brain from an evolutionary perspective it's the first that goes offline when we're stressed when were angry when we're sad when we're tired you know that's why we wander into the kitchen late at night looking for something because we're you know we've we've learned that and so we can say don't do that but then we just crash harder you know and in the morning we set that resolve to like okay I'm really gonna do it this time but that's just not how our brains work our brains don't don't work that way but we think you know I think it's more of a rationalizing you know willpower it must be something let's study it and there you know there's been a little bit of this and that but it turns out that willpower if you look at the people you know that quote/unquote have good willpower habits there there's some really interesting pieces there one is they actually find things that they enjoy doing so people you know people do something like eat healthy or exercise if you ask them why they do it the people that are really good at doing it and you probably know this personally it feels good as compared to oh I need to get in shape to get a you know my body looking this way for the bridge not like an intellectual exercise not at all and that that part makes sense but that's not willpower and it makes sense because that is real work based learning we're doing something out of the reward of doing it not because we're doing it so that's one of the big misconceptions around willpower is that if you look at reward based learning it's based on the reward it's not based on the behavior itself so if it were the behavior we just say stop doing this but it's actually the reward that drives future behavior and that's where we can start to intervene how does it correlate with intelligence because just speaking from personal experience I've noticed over the years through my adventures and journeys in the in the recovery community that people who are hyper intelligent often struggle the most because they want to intellectualize this we're truly it is an emotional thing more than anything else and so they struggle trying to wrap their heads around how to do this and they can't let go of the idea that that that solution resides within the mind yeah well so hi my name is Judd and I might I'm a thinking addict there he go if you look at the bookshelves in my house they are way too numerous so speaking from personal experience and I think this this applies is there's this it's almost like the thinking part of our brain is kind of like this it's like it's like refined sugar or refined carbohydrates it actually just gets us stoked like oh that's interesting I'm just gonna learn more and I'm gonna learn more and I'm gonna figure out the solution to this thing meanwhile day after day after day you're perpetuating the same behaviors unknowingly yeah I know you're buying every self-help book yeah so what we really need is to land in our body because our body is really really wise and so this is you know this intellectual thing is like you know it's it's that it just drives more addiction where it's like I want to learn more as compared to really landing on our direct experience that says you know dude why would you do that I'll give you an example so with we did a study with with people who are trying to quit smoking and we randomized people to get cognitive therapy or mindfulness training where we train them to really just pay attention to the results of their behavior so when they come into the mindfulness group they don't even know what they're getting you know so they come in they're like I'm here to quit smoking and I say okay next when you go home smoke and they're looking at me like is this the experiment you're running is this the study I say no smoke but pay attention as you smoke and see what happens so they pay attention to the smell to the taste to the feeling of the superheated smoke going into their lungs and they come back and they're this mister yuck look on their face they're like oh my god how about I never noticed that before because they realized that smoking tastes like [ __ ] and they can only get that wisdom from their direct experience I had a guy who said we in our first study we we first class was on Monday second class was on Thursday this guy was smoking thirty cigarettes a day he'd been smoking that for a long time he came back on Thursday and he said yeah I'm down to ten cigarettes and I said well what happened and he said well I noticed that I would drink coffee and the coffee was kind of bitter so I'd smoke a cigarette to numb my from the taste because it's amazing how smoking numbs your taste and so he realized well I don't need to smoke I could brush my teeth and he just went through this litany of 20 cigarettes where they were all he was smoking all these things out of habit where he'd you know he'd learned through this reward based learning process that oh if I smoke I feel better you know whatever this was this is not a good way to go so the idea being you talk about this in your book is diverging from what Skinner calls the operant conditioning right which is behaviorism yes traditional approach to like dealing with these kinds of problems to a more Buddhist perspective which you call or is called dependent origination right and this involves being present for the experience and rather than getting into judgment self judgment to just be curious about what's happening yeah absolutely and it's interesting so one of the one of the first aha moments for us in my you know my research career was when I was looking on studying this operant conditioning or positive negative reinforcement and I was thinking wait a minute this sounds way too familiar and I started looking into this because I've learned you know I on a retreat or something I've learned this this dependent origination piece and it was kind of you know complex or these twelve steps and all this stuff about birth and this sounds like well what is this but when I looked at it and I actually worked with a Pali scholar to really explore this it turns out that dependent origination explains operant conditioning and so the Buddha psychologists had figured this out 2,500 years ago before paper was even invented and so they were describing the same process and importantly this process depend or generation was what reportedly the Buddha was contemplating on the night of his enlightenment as in hey pay attention guys this is kind of important so really important concept that actually is rediscovered in modern day and drives you know and explains a lot of how addictive behavior is formed and that concept is what distilled down basically that trigger behavior reward so I you know you see something you eat something and and you you get some reward or you you know let's use your boredom example we're sitting here bored and so our brain says oh why don't you look for cute pictures of puppies on Instagram or something like that so we look at those cute pictures of puppies and we don't know that we're actually just driving that escape from boredom process and so so that's basically it and it's interesting in ancient times they said that the process is perpetuated through ignorance but in modern day we call that subjective bias because we become biased based on our previous behaviors so if I learn to eat you know eat some junk food when I'm bored or when I'm sad or when I'm lonely I'm actually driving that process where I start to navigate my world in that biased manner where I'm you know it's like any little hint of boredom my brain says oh have something sweet have something sweet or you get to keep pictures of puppies on Instagram or whatever but doesn't that butt up against the countervailing impulse to avoid those things based on past negative experiences with them like how do those those things cry I mean I'm just thinking out loud about like what my own personal interior experience with this kind of thing is which is I'm self-aware enough and I've done enough internal work to to be conscious cognizant when this is when this is happening right it's like okay yeah I know I'm pissed off at this guy and I know I'm feeling like not really in my body and I know that this thing is gonna fix it and I know I shouldn't do it and then I do it and I have a moment of relief followed by you know an avalanche of shame that sends me into a spiral for the next 48 hours I'll need to be repeated again with a sense of powerless yes so that's self awareness as they say in in you know in in the secret society of which I am a member self awareness or you know will avail you nothing in this so I'm interested in how like we have this you know this this reward mechanism cycle that you just described on the other side I have self awareness that this is occurring in real I'm powerlessness to stop it without you know the brake you know as I surmise from from your work is really letting go of trying to control it and just being allowed being in the allowing like being in the present right am I getting that right I mean I've thrown a bunch of ideas at you you are and they're already make sense that's the second step I would say or maybe even the partner so just wake up a little bit so it's you're talking about there there we go cool so the first and I think you've nailed the critic critical element which is awareness but like you're pointing out awareness doesn't do it by itself and can actually perpetuate the process so if we don't know how our minds work we can't work with them and if we're if we're aware that something is causing us pain we might just spiral into another habit leap of shame and guilt and all that stuff so the first the first piece here is really understanding how our minds work if we can see that we're driven by these processes and we can even entertain the possibility of willpower failing which you know often it's it's tough to say oh it's its willpower that's failing me as compared to that was a dead on arrival process you know it all the diet programs want us to think that you know willpower is the way to go and if we're just not strong enough we need to just sign up for another year and then maybe we'll get it next year or the extra special behind the velvet rope vit program that only I will wait only for you yeah if you can pay the admission fee so the first step is really understanding how our minds work and we've actually shifted our programs to training people in that step first it's really you know it's pretty straightforward like we're talking about they're there no there's no secret behind the behind the curtain thing to reward based learning it's like you identify your triggers you see your habitual behaviors and then most importantly you pay attention to the rewards or the results and so that's where awareness actually can become it it can become our friend rather than something that just spirals us into shame and self-doubt and the key there is again looking at the reward because that's what drives behavior so for example with the example of the guy that was smoking he started to see that smoking actually tasted pretty crappy and so his brain started to recalibrate to see oh this isn't that rewarding anymore and there's actually this the neuroscience of this has been worked out pretty well there's a part of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex it stores and updates reward value I I think if this is the bbo part of the brain it's always looking for that bigger better offer so if we can give our orbital frontal cortex information through awareness it gets especially if we do it in real time it gets accurate and updated information so accurate being is when I smoke a cigarette is it that rewarding no it I didn't realize it's not that rewarding we can do the same thing when we overeat we're like Oh how does my stomach feel right now oh wait I've wrecked this gut bomb you know when I did this or even eating you know I found this with with with gummy worms like when I would eat gummy worms it was like I had to just eat the whole bag because you know I was just gonna be jonesing for those gummy worms you know until I just ate it so I started comparing those to eating blueberries and blueberries just have this natural sweetness that's just so much better than eating gum or so I realized gummy ones taste like petroleum compared to blueberries so that came in today with a with a with a box of blueberries we're eating when you arrive I'm a big fan of yeah they're they're great natural energy so that's the other piece is seeing giving our brains that bigger better offer so it can be blueberries over gummy worms but it can also be awareness and curiosity over judgment and that's the piece that can really help us right in that moment it's not like we have to look for blueberries to to you know the blueberry salvation I'm not peddling like blueberry enlightenment yeah well a couple thoughts I mean to to dig a little bit deeper into your smoking example and examining the reward taste is one aspect of it but it's almost an unfortunate byproduct of what you're really trying to get out which is that right that dopamine hit or what whatever it does do you biochemically in your brain that gives you a sense of like a temporary sense of well-being or enhanced cognition or whatever it is that nicotine does the taste can be something you tolerate in order to get to that other aspect of it which is the real driver here is it not so the driver can be the driver again until we bring awareness to that so if you look at you know that especially cravings around any drugs you know alcohol same thing when we look at what it feels like to be totally consumed and under the control of something other than ourselves when we really pay attention to this it doesn't feel very good mm-hmm and so that the dopaminergic Drive it's associated with restlessness with agitation with this one pointedness that says you know you're I'm gonna make your life miserable until you do this and then of course as soon as we do it it's like I'm gonna make your life miserable until you do it again until you do it again yeah you're a prisoner of that's like totally so if we don't pay attention to what we're actually getting from that that feeling we don't realize that this is actually not a good way to live and that that feeling is very contracted you know it's it's closed down and we can actually start to see well is there something that feels better than this and if we just take the binary closed can we find something that actually is more open so what would you say feels more open craving or curiosity well curiosity for sure yeah so if you think of curiosity in terms of mindfulness or awareness we can be totally curiously aware of something that's happening even in our body right now and we can flip the valence from this craving that is all consuming where we're a prisoner to it - oh wow what does this actually feel like and paradoxically we turn toward it and as we turn toward it and it starts to just kind of dissolve on its own because it's oh here's the sensation oh here's the heat here's rising here's there's this this we realized this is this is simply physical sensations that are driving our lives and then the you know the gig is up for the for the dopamine piece yeah it's interesting when you place your attention on what precisely it is it tends to dissolve over time and I've seen this my wife has terrible migraines over the years and she has a practice she has a variety of practices but one of them is to just notice it like what is it like what is its shape what is its color where exactly does it reside in her awareness and the more you get closer and closer to the essence of what it is it moves and it changes and it shifts and it dissipates and I think I've done the same with cravings as they arise okay what does this look like where what is the nature of it what is the texture of it and the more specific you can get it tends to lose its pull in its power totally totally so that awareness helps us awake into these physical sensations that we formerly thought were us but are actually just physical sensations and thoughts and we've had people you know be able to work with panic attacks and realize oh these are thoughts and these are body sensations and be able to write out full-blown panic attacks this way hmm so that's you know the theory seems to be working pretty well we've but again this is where the soft science and the hard science comes together I'm not satisfied with theories or anecdote you know it's great to see something might work in somebody's life it's great to see you know I found tremendous benefit from mindfulness myself but there's this joke and research that research has really me search I don't know if you heard that yeah yeah so the idea is you know we're studying something that might have worked for us and of one but we don't know that that actually works for everybody and so you see all these treatments that are developed based on the personal experience of wine so I really wanted to see you know does this stuff actually stack up you know I had pretty good results in my in my addiction clinic but we started doing research and we our first study was actually with alcohol and cocaine dependence and we found that mindfulness is mindful training was as good as gold standard treatment cognitive therapy in this case for for alcohol and cocaine use disorders then we moved on to smoking we found that we could get five times as a quit rates of gold standard treatment and at that point we started realizing wow there's something to this so we started looking to see well how else does this work you know and it was really interesting at the time we were doing that that work this is around 2010-2011 I was right when you know smartphones were starting to come out and I realized that you know this process was set up for developing a context-dependent memory so we remember where food is so realize well you know my patients they don't learn to smoke in my office you know they don't learn to overeat in my office they don't learn to get anxious in my office so we started stepping back and saying we'll wait a minute could I actually package my office and bring it to them and we started developing you know app based mindfulness training programs and testing those and we've been found you know our our eating program that's called eat right now we got 40 percent reduction in craving related eating wow that's amazing yeah and you have what is it what's the smoking one called it was called to quit you did you change the name I was craving to quit original right now just to to quit okay yeah yeah three words is to hang out for America's tensions and you have unwinding anxiety right yeah I still have that one yeah you have three three apps for it they're all they're oriented around the same perspective and protocols but for treating these three three kind of discreet conditions yeah we we figured that too you know there are a lot of apps out there to help people learn to meditate or learn mindfulness we took a slightly different approach which was starting with helping people understand how their minds work and I think that was a critical piece because I spent years and years you know sweating my butt off on meditation cushions you know I'm silent retreats just trying to willpower my way into concentration and just wasn't working and then it was when all these things came together where I realized oh you know the psychologists the modern-day psychologists they're all talking about this learning process this really strong learning process let's start there and then you know so we started incorporating that piece as as an entree for these for these programs and that's when things really started to hum you know we could we we just finished a study with anxious physicians and got a close to a 60% reduction in anxiety symptom so we're you know with these common mechanisms that are actually relatively simple they're straightforward I'm not saying they're easy to do especially because we have to overcome some of our previous biases around you know I'm just gonna willpower my way through life but we can help people kind of fall on their faces a little bit more quickly in terms of seeing like what is it actually like when I smoke a cigarette what's it actually like when I overeat so we we move away from prescription like okay valve shouts you know do this this or this - well just pay attention and see what the result of your behavior is remember as they learn how their mind works they can start to see that result when they when that value from the old behavior drops then we can start to offer them something new because they're hungry for they say well this is crappy what else is there and that's where the curiosity piece comes in that's where the kindness piece comes in you know with with our eating program and our unwitting anxiety program we saw tons of people who had these habit loops around self judgment and shame and blame and all this stuff I see this with my patients with addictions as well it's like one of their number one habit loops oh it's huge with me I mean it is it's it's it's such a massive thing because you just you're like I did it again and the beat that the cycle of beating yourself up becomes it sound like you said like its own addictive loop you know there's something I have to believe that there's something about that like that shame spiral that that is doing something for me right like I there it's serving some purpose you know I don't know it's not you know like I wish it didn't and I don't know what that purpose is but I keep doing it so whether there's some kind of evolutionary imperative to it or or it's a self to some other wound that I still need to look at that seems to be the big piece but but by there's something about the curiosity and the paying attention that that kind of just allows that to you know slowly evaporate totally completely but just being present doesn't give the space for that judgment to come in or at least there's a time delay there right well that's where the attitudinal quality is really important so curiosity I think of it as like the other side of the coin of awareness you know we can be aware and like this sucks you know or we can be aware and go oh wow that's interesting you know what's going on here what's what's actually happening in my body what can I learn from this and so we can take these and we can actually take moments where we're really struggling and we can bow to them as a teacher when we're truly interested in understanding how our minds work and we can also truly bow to them as a teacher when we know that we're gonna learn something now we're motivated because we're like well I'm stuck in this right can I can I actually get some useful information from this and we can even move from you know I think of this we always think of this - you know Stu two steps forward one step backward one step forward two steps backward you know if you look at this if we're learning every time we fall on our face does that count as going backwards right to me like we're always moving forward if we're learning something because we can't go back when we've just learned something about ourselves so even there that attitudinal quality helps us really keep the momentum moving forward even if feel if it feels uncomfortable at the time yeah that's just a perspective shift like what lens are you choosing to perceive this experience through we're kind of raised to believe that you know we can't fail or failure is bad I mean it's a broader conversation about you know failure in general and and what we choose to deem in that negative light but but there's such a relief when you can kind of let that go but the mental twist here is that the trying isn't the path right like in the same way that you you explained you know your journey through meditation and like being this you know achievement oriented go getting you know I don't know if you're Taipei but I would even a lot in your life so you know you're gonna you're gonna you told damn like I'm gonna win at meditation like that kind of mentality which is the same mentality that that that drives that intellectual to read all the self-help books but still remain prisoner to those behavior patterns so the learning curve is is not intellectual but in letting go of that intellectual exercise and and to get yourself into that place of allowing where you can release your attachment to doing it right or well and just be present and that is so difficult to to learn and to really fully croc you know man it for me being the type a go-getter you know drive drive drive I remember being on my first week long meditation retreat and I remember about day 3 or 4 I was bawling on the shoulder of the retreat manager you know didn't know the woman she seemed nice enough she landed her shoulder and I just I was it was a river of tears because I you know it's like I Princeton I got into medical school and I can't pay attention to my breath what is going on here and I was just I was done you know I was totally at my wit's end and she like a she ended up becoming my teacher for about ten years ended up being this this amazingly wise teacher I but I you know I've been trying to willpower my way through everything and I figured I well paying attention your breath that can't be that hard it was the hardest thing that what does she say to you did she drop some kind of Yoda like wisdom suffer you must yeah no I think she kind of knew I don't remember what she said but I do know that she didn't say much because she kind of knew I just had to hit bottom and you know I remember being on another retreat where the the teacher was so frustrated with me she said well judge your path to enlightenment is gonna be through striving because like she's you know just drive strive strive strive strive I was just like you're really good at working hard but she knew that that wasn't going to be the way true so you know the the way out what's that saying the way out is through mm-hmm I had to go through the process of trying to willpower my way through into meditation and and fail and fail and fail and then wake up and realize that like you're talking about it was about letting go and the way for me to let go was through curiosity and it started going back to it back to when I was a kid or when I was in high school like I was totally fascinated by stuff I just wanted to see how stuff learned worked and so I would learn naturally through simply being curious and I realized I could actually be curious here too and it totally flipped my entire meditation practice I could go from you know like sweating through t-shirts trying to meditate to you know I learned that if you pay attention to the process and look you know it's actually in a causal chain that I could I could be one-pointed for several hours without any effort at all and that was to breakthrough serene for me one no more effort I realized that that is not the way to go into that it really is about just bringing these conditions together and everything will come together on its own reframing this as curiosity is is pretty compelling because linguistics are important and when you frame it as letting go or surrender that just you know gets a type a person's cockles I was like I'm not gonna I don't surrender you know I don't let go you know it's like that's not gonna happen you know I had to be so beaten down before you know I was even willing to entertain that what I was trying to do was not gonna work but just by kind of tabeling those two words and replacing them with curiosity is a much less threatening and inviting way of approaching all of this well curiosity itself is rewarding and so it actually hacks that same system of you know if we're if we're addicted to our cell phones we can get curious about you know what do I get from this mmm-hmm remember there was a just one example one of the residue physicians that was there was training with me she was in her last year of residency and she she came in as a skeptic which is the best type of person to come in like what is this crap and how did you actually help people with addictions are you crazy so she was you know she was using one of our apps I don't know if it was our craving to quit or our eat right now program and in reading my book and she woke up to the point where she had two relatively small kids and was standing at out away from the dining table like on a Saturday night her two kids were eating dinner and she was away from the table checking her newsfeed and she had to have that moment where she woke up and she's like whoa how did it get to this to the to realize that that she was under that spell and that's when she got really curious like oh wow and she totally got into it had a you know lost weight she didn't you know a bunch of things that were kind of just as a byproduct of her starting to realize her own habit patterns and wake up right as somebody who's who's made a lot of headway in terms of solidifying or hardening these soft Sciences I want to talk about what is actually going on in the brain like the neurology the the neuroscience of it all because it's super interesting how you talk about these different areas of the brain and how they get activated and what activates them and how we can adopt certain practices to you know to get us on on a better track well I was I've been fortunate enough to retool when I was in residency to learn neuroimaging and neuroscience and so I've been doing brother almost two decades now we've been studying the neuroscience behind how this stuff works and my lab starts with finding a behavioral outcome you know we need to make sure that something's actually working so you know when we got five times the court rates of smoking it was smoking with our with our mindfulness training or saying okay there was something there's something worth looking at here so we started by looking just looking at experience versus novice meditators to see what was happening in their brains and we wanted to find if there were common mechanisms that were different with folks that had practice for a while versus nine so we actually looked across a bunch of different types of meditation we had people pay attention to their breath you know as a standard concentration practice we have them do this thing called loving-kindness which to me was like the LEAs gooiest nastiest sathyas you know I was like and I'll tell you a little bit how it's a great practice it may be it has a branding problem but it may I and in my set well maybe give you a little story about how I actually learned that in a big but it probably does have a branding problem and then we had people do this practice called choiceless awareness where they would just pay attention to whatever was coming into their awareness it could be sound it could be things that we're seeing could be things that were feeling things they were thinking and we found that there was a brain network called the default mode network that was deactivated in experience versus novice meditators now this was a surprise to me I think I learned the most when my hypotheses are disproven you know cuz I was thinking well I'm working pretty damn hard so there's got to be some brain region that's getting activated that's lighting up when I'm meditating because you know my spanker tone is certainly pretty pretty high right now and you know it turns out that there wasn't a single brain region that was increased in activity in experience versus novice meditators and so I was like wow how could that be but when we looked at the opposite when there were decreases in activity we found that this default mode network was the own it was the major difference between experienced and novice meditators as in their default mode network got quieter and the way I think of that is it's kind of like you're just like you're driving your car with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas if you take your foot off the brake you don't have to add more energy into the system but the hard drives faster and that's exactly what I think we're seeing with meditation is if we get out of our own way our brains naturally work better you know and and we can really start to totally get in sync with life and get into you know almost get into the flow of things so to speak well let's let's elaborate on this default mode Network where where is it in the brain and what is it responsible for there are a bunch of brain regions that are involved in the network so we can we'll just talk about the two main hubs of the network there's a part called the prefrontal cortex which is kind of more in the front of your brain the medial prefrontal cortex in particular in midline in the middle and then there's one called the posterior cingulate that's and the back and kind of also midline and those two seem to be the main hubs of the default one network and if we don't zoom in on the posterior cingulate it's an interesting brain region from an addiction perspective because it gets activated when people who are addicted to all sorts of substances see their substances when they're triggered so alcohol cocaine gambling and even even chocolate when you know one of my friends who's a Food Research Trail Dana small she did this study where she would you know feed people chocolate and they were like this is great and their posterior saying it would activate huh interestingly it also gets activated when she keeps feeding people and feeding him feeding more and more and more chocolate and they're like oh you know what there used to be their favorite chocolate there now like heating also activates the posterior cingulate so it seems to get activated when we get caught up in like wanting more but also activated when we get caught up in wanting less so when somebody gets caught up in ruminating in depression for example or perseverating like worrying about the future also that brain region gets activated so that that network seems to be involved in a ton of self-referential processing so it's basically you know anything related to us past future anything related you know oh that was I can't believe I did that that was terrible or oh no that might happen to me that will be terrible it's why bill and Bob called alcoholism a disease of self obsession totally and that's totally rooted in the neuro chemistry absolutely and we now know the brain regions associated with with what they observed experienced so such a long time ago that's so fascinating is there is there a difference in the brain chemistry or the like the neural makeup of somebody who is let's say like a substance out of like cocaine or heroin versus somebody who who just doesn't have that like there are people out there that just they're not triggered by these things in the way that you know somebody who's an addict or an alcoholic is there seem to be some Jeannette there certainly genetic differences that can predispose people to addiction versus you know kind of help people become resilience a or less predisposed to them I don't think that there's at least from my perspective there hasn't been anything that's like oh this brain region is it I think it's a very complex picture and it's going to take a lot of more work bringing together genetics with you know the environmental work and whatnot to to really find things that are that are reproducible it seems that with addictions in general that's where the posterior cingulate seems to be one of the reliable markers at least from what we've seen and if you wanted you know I think this even broadens beyond you know we've been talking about these classic addictions but this is where it really starts to come into the human realm as in where you know we all have this human tendency to get caught up right you know so it could be as simple as getting caught up in a political view you know when somebody says oh I disagree with you and you know and we get we get closed down and we you know we get this defensive posture and you know all this stuff there's that feeling of contraction that's the same feeling that comes when we get caught up in a craving when we want something and when we want a substance or we want more chocolate or we want this we want them to agree with us there's also a loss of our ability to control our our bodies and the words that are coming out of our mouths right like when you get like if you take a political argument for example it's like you know you then you're like wait what did I just do we're not even like we're not in control and how is that any different than an addiction yeah it's not it's in same brain processes so from that standpoint it seems that you know it from a neurobiological standpoint we can see where there's this common denominator and it's it's interesting because we've done we've done some neuro phenomena logic work which is just a fancy word where we can link up subjective experience with brain activity using real-time neurofeedback we can actually directly link people's subjective experience with their brain activity and this is where it got really interesting for us so for example when people's minds are wandering when they're daydreaming or whatever this default mode network has been shown to be activated and when people are concentrating on a task or when they're meditating this it gets deactivated that's what some of our in those studies that my lab had done but it was like okay that's interesting but what's actually going on here and when we started to line up people's subjective experience we found something really interesting which was that they were they were it was this caught-up quality when somebody gets caught up in thinking that's when the default mode network gets activated when somebody gets caught up in a craving and we even had some some really really illuminating moments where some of these you know like we had experienced meditators there was a remember one who said you know I was trying to meditate harder and somehow pay attention more and that's when his posterior seen you as default mode Network got increased in activity it's like oh wait a minute this isn't about trying this isn't about doing yeah that is that's the trick right that is the trick this self-obsession these these stories that we loop in our minds about who we are the rehashing of the past the you know foreshadowing of the future the catastrophizing all of these things that we get caught up in this is where it resides yes and so essentially what you're saying is meditation these mindfulness practices are a way of like lowering the volume on that and in turn allowing us to then be more focused more present more curious and less self judging absolute is that the most element elementary way of explaining this yeah yeah and Jon kabat-zinn who really led the way in a lot of the scientific you know beginning of the scientific studies around mindfulness talks about you know we are human doings rather than human beings and that lines up very nicely with this whole process you know we can we get stuck in the habit loop of doing if I just do something here if I'm anxious I'll just do something to make it go away if I'm you know I'm gonna do something to make myself lose weight but the point that we're missing is that that doing is another form of addiction where we get addicted to doing I'm just gonna do do do do do you know that badge of honor of I'm busy cuz I'm doing also guilty of that but we can wake up to that and ask ourselves what am I actually getting from this and again bring that curiosity and look at that cause-and-effect relationship and my guess is when we you know I don't know what what it's like for you but when you really take perspective and step back and say well what am I getting from all this doing a lot of that doing starts to fall away because it's you know the doing for doing sake is not very rewarding well I can come up with a number of arguments about you know why I'm doing all the doing but they when you really examine them they start to fall apart I mean a lot of the doing is to distract myself from whatever emotional state is making me uncomfortable and the external validation that I'm chasing that has you know diminishing returns over time so you just nailed that diminishing returns piece that's when we start to see oh this isn't doing it but the problem is until we see until we find something that works more consistently and is better right that bigger better offer we're gonna keep doing that and I think that's where we you know as a society it's just doo doo doo doo doo until we pay attention and see the dependency returns that's when our orbitofrontal cortex starts see it not as rewarding but then we start to play with being whether it's being curious or being kind or you know those are those are the two key elements of awareness where we can just notice right in this moment oh lost in the past lost in the future what does this feel like oh not that rewarding what's it like just to be curious or what's it like to simply be kind of myself in this moment and shift from maybe self-judgement like oh I can't believe this - oh what's happening in my body and then that wisdom starts to land and starts to grow over time we start to see how wait a minute this isn't doing it for me it's not doing it for me and we start to you know sometimes it can happen quickly more often and I see this myself and with my patients we see this more gradually where you know our brains have to be totally convinced this isn't gonna work for us right this old way are you finding in your studies with all of these people that that arriving at this place is becoming more difficult because we have such a reduced tolerance for any form of discomfort because we always have a way to opt out like it seems to me you know I would be interested in what's happening with you know teenagers and young people who don't know what it's like to ever be without a smartphone the impact on that on on the human animals ability to just be present with one's own discomfort it's hard because you have to you have to be you have to in this journey towards being right you're gonna hurt you're gonna go through this period of having to be uncomfortable as you start to you know figure out how to become curious yeah right yeah the only way out is through its it's impossible to know exactly because we can't you know kind of clone the human race and then do the parallel experiment without smartphones but we can look at how how children adolescents learn and they learn from modeling you know and so if they see adults modeling distractions so if adults are bored or feeling anxious or whatever and they're turning to their smartphones they're gonna model that for the teenagers as compared to modeling to stress tolerance or modeling curiosity and so that's one piece where you know we can look to see well what are we modeling for the next generation and then we can you know I teenagers are pretty smart and so you know the sooner they hit rock bottom with the you know the the job of liking all their friends posts or whatever and start to break out of that you know teenagers are tremendously curious you know they're exploratory creatures and so I truly trust that they'll be able to you know find their ways into this be even better if we can model this or you know throw them some bones and say hey you know try this try this but we can't make them do anything the more we shake our finger and especially you know say do this they're gonna say you know screw this right and and go the other way one of the things that you're you're doing in hardening the soft sciences is these studies using fMRI right to really look at this brain activity and people can watch the 60 minutes where Anderson Cooper you know goes through this experience but that was that it eg we are different right for him but we used source estimated EEG for that but it's basically the same same idea right like let's here you can look at a screen you can actually see what's happening in the brain when you're meditating when you're not meditating and you can quantify it yeah it's it's pretty remarkable and I think as a as a hard son growing up as a hard scientist that being able to quantify what's actually going on and Link it to brain mechanisms is pretty rewarding and it's even more rewarding when we can link all of these things up so as a as a clinician scientist the holy grail for me is having a theory that lines up with brain mechanism that lines up with outcomes and so if I can make the connection between all those three that's really gratifying for me because as a clinician you know I don't want to just learn stuff that's esoteric and interesting that might you know feed my own addiction for knowing stuff and learning stuff but I want to really see how is this gonna help my patients down the road or even immediately and so for example we just finished a study we just published a study with our smoking program the to quit program where we we scanned people we put people in there from our eye scanner at baseline who wanted to quit smoking and we show them a bunch of pictures of smoking cues and we activated their posterior cingulate you know like sup like lights up like a Christmas tree and then we randomized them to get the to quit program or the National Cancer Institute's quit guide so we'd have an act of comparison and we'd scan them about a month later to see does change in brain activity actually predict clinical outcomes and lo and behold we found that there was a significant correlation between a reduction in posterior cingulate activity and a reduction in cigarettes only in the to quit program we actually found a really strong correlation even with the number of modules they completed even though both groups completed the same number of modules so here we're seeing a dose-dependent relationship and a brain specific effect that was affecting clinical outcomes based on a theory that we had been exploring you know over a decade before and so we're able to link up this theory of mindfulness helps us be with our cravings and not act on them it affects this brain network that gets activated when we're caught up in craving it gets deactivated with you know with with mindfulness and here it's affecting clinical outcomes so that's been really gratifying to be able to see you know to be able to live that process you know we've been doing research now for about 20 years to line all of these things up it's yeah in a long time coming and walk me through the exact protocol that you put these people through yeah like it's one thing to say be curious write or meditate but like what is the actual program so the the craving to quit app is basically we give them a short bite-size modules every day so one thing I learned clinically when we did our first studies was you know we'd have people come in once a week to learn this mindfulness training we'd teach them mindfulness they'd go home come back a week later one thing we learned was a lot of them were struggling with during the practice is doing the practicing just setting up the habit to do it what we know is from habit formation is you know you need to knowledge you need to do little steps and as much as you can do that consistently so then we graduated to twice a week and that still wasn't enough and then we said screw this you know it threw all that away and said let's take this manualized you know evidence-based treatment and cut it into bite-sized pieces and deliver it through people's phones and so that's where we can actually move from you know in the office to in context right right it goes back to the people don't learn to smoke in my office so with the apps we can actually deliver ten minutes of training every day you know where they really learn the the practices importantly they start with helping them understand how their mind works so we basically show them the habit loop help them start to identify you know okay what triggered smoking what do I get from smoking and importantly we have them pay attention as they smoke that's the first step and start to really pay attention to what do I get from this what do I get from this what do I get from this so that reward value starts to drop then we give them an exercise and all this is all you know automate it through the app where when they have a craving they can click on that craving button and they can actually imagine smoking a cigarette so we walk them through okay you light it up what does What's it feel like when it goes in your mouth what's it taste like what's it smell like afterwards what does your body feel like and that can give them a gauge to how disenchanted they are with the smoking right how much is that reward value dropped and if it hasn't dropped in the past it helps them really pay attention to see how much that engenders a craving and if it doesn't gender a craving then we have them smoke mindfully and go through that smoking mindful exercise so that it lays down that new reward value that says oh how good was this and as they repeat that over time that's when they can start to move from smoking mindfully laying down that new reward value and then just moving to imagining smoking and then when they win that reward values drop when they imagine doing it if their bodies like why would you do this and actually look you know this this occurred to me when I was on a plane was actually on a plane to fly out to California a little while ago and I was offered the airplane food and I went through this simulation in my mind I was like do I want the food and I imagine eating it like that process crap so I realized I was like wait a minute we can actually turn this into an exercise that will capture whether somebody is disenchanted with the behavior or not so we do this with our smoking probably we do this with our eating program and if it if it if they're not disenchanted yet that's fine we have them go into the into the actual EM experience so smoke or eat or whatever so they can start to build that disenchantment so as they go through the program you know it's 20 30 modules as they go through this they can build that disenchantment in their direct experience mmm I would imagine you can if you can master that practice it becomes applicable not just in smoking or airplane food but almost in every situation you could use it to do I want to you know say yes to this opportunity do I want to you know do I want to go to this place like all you know you could run that calculus for anything absolutely so this is where I this is like the the the stealth of this practice is you know as we learn something you know if you think of knowledge you can learn knowledge about one thing like okay this is how this thing works but if you develop wisdom you start to see oh this works in the same way as this as this as this is this in this and we start to develop this wisdom around life where we're like wait a minute this is how my mind works as compared to oh this is how I work with eating or smoking or anxiety this is on my wine work so I can actually apply this to relationships I can apply this to this for example I had a guy in our who'd come in for alcohol treatment and he was this really big muscular mechanic you know he'd come in it's hard to get oil off your hands after working you know working in an engine all day so he'd come in having tried to wash his hands but still you know pretty pretty gritty and at the end of the program I asked him what was your what was your favorite aspect of this and he gave me this sheepish grin and he said you know I've actually changed my relationship with my dad this program has taught me to actually work with that and realize that you know this is the loving-kindness practice for him which is the you know the last thing I thought he was gonna say but he had generalized this knowledge of working with with using mindfulness to work with drinking to changing his lifelong relationship with his dad mmm I would imagine on some level that gets to the underlying impetus for a lot of addictive behavior right like I'm interested in how your work squares with like let's say gab or Matta and all the work that he's done with impact of childhood trauma on how you know these behaviors manifest later in life or Johann Hari and you know his thesis on lost connection and how this is really an epidemic of connectivity among human beings I think it's squares perfectly I was just to spend some time with Gabor a little while ago at a conference and we were really you know just it's so fun to geek out about this stuff with with with folks and it's totally it makes complete sense if you think about you know loss of connection for example so we feel lonely that's the trigger we do something like drink or drug and then we basically numb ourselves to that pain so it's as temporizing measure we get this brief relief and then we have to repeat it so if we never get at the heart of the issue which is you know the disconnection we're always going to feed it in a way that's not healthy so here we can you know mindfulness can help us wake up to those patterns and see how we're feeding these in very unhealthy ways and then open ourselves to finding different ways of relating right smoking drinking you know these behaviors are you we do them because they work right like their respect we work while they work until they stop working they're serving it they're serving it they're filling a need they're serving a purpose yeah that works for a period of time until it until it stops working but they're not necessarily the problem they're like the solution to the problem there are like a bandaid on the problem right so you're dealing with this condition at the behavioral tip of the spear someone like at war is dealing with this at it's at its inception point right where it where it begins and and so I would imagine that on some level a combination of these two approaches would be you know the comprehensive solution here like you got to deal with you got to quit smoking you got to break this cycle of craving you got to create you know strategies and behavior patterns for for managing this but you still also have to go to the root of like what is you know creating this level of discomfort to begin with or what is it that continues to creep up and makes you feel uncomfortable in your own skin driving that need to escape out of whatever it is you're experiencing through whatever behavior that you're choosing yeah absolutely and in the moment you know in the moment that we are uncomfortable if we can learn to be a little more embracing of that discomfort it can help us open to seeing where we've you know where that heart of the problem and you know oh it where we haven't been willing to look at disconnection or willing to look at you know all this stuff that can just keep feeding it because it's just been too painful and then we've trained ourselves to numb ourselves when we can train ourselves to actually be with that discomfort that opens up the possibility for true and deep healing mm-hmm and how does all of this square with traditional 12-step approaches I think it works beautifully you know there's a there's a book called one breath at a time I don't know if you're familiar with it but the guy lies lays out that how all the 12 steps line up very beautifully with with Buddhism and mindfulness practice yeah you know the step wine I am not in control wait a minute willpower doesn't work you know so you know and you just go on and on and on with each of the steps and there's there's nothing that's that's discontinuous or at odds between these that's one thing I like about it mindfulness practice is it's not about some big philosophy or you know you must do a bunch of things it basically distills down to pay attention see what the results of your behavior are repeat and that can that can work with any spiritual tradition and it can work with the twelve steps and I think it can enhance a lot of work that people are really struggling with you know a number of patients who go through his 12 steps and it takes them a long time to get through you know there's some steps that are just really really tough that they were just like wow not ready for this doesn't have to but it tends to people get hung up on around four and then there's a very protracted long period of time before I was thinking of more in particular and I agree it doesn't have to especially if we can build up the ability to be with our own discomfort that's when it can help us see for as a strength rather than as a big barriers like oh god I got to do this as in oh here we go you know let's do this rather than being afraid of confronting those difficult complex emotions being curious about them yeah can open up that door yeah and then of course the word meditation appears in the state it doesn't get traditionally it's sort of the bastard stepchild like it doesn't really get the treatment or attention that it deserves but there's nothing about it that says that it shouldn't yeah yeah and you can look it so let's take fear for example on a very experiential level what we were finding is it goes back to the neuroimaging work that we were doing we can actually we're finding that this contracted or closed down quality of experience correlates with increased activity in the posterior cingulate cortex cortex and that's open experience correlates with decreased activity and so on a very basic level we can help people really pay attention to what is you know just pay attention to that closed feeling when you're afraid and bring curiosity to that and it starts to open that piece right right in that moment and so we can really bring that curiosity and kindness in as a as a way to directly you know clean out that wound in those moments where people are really struggling with say the fourth step or whatever from what I gather from your work it doesn't seem to matter that much what type of technique you decide to adopt meditation technique yeah I think I've practiced a ton of different techniques and I was a technique junkie for a while because I was thinking you know I got just find the perfect technique mm-hm and then I realized I was asking the wrong question it's it's different you know different techniques work for different people and so it's important that people find a technique that they can really resonate with but underlying all of these techniques is this you know am i working am i closing am i clenching am i forcing verses am i resting and resting and awareness because these practices share this common underlying element of awareness itself and that attitudinal quality of curiosity so there's no evidence from like an fmri perspective like Oh loving-kindness does this and vasana does this and you know can you can you calibrate them in that way when we've looked we found that you know loving kindness that Vipassana that concentration practice is that a bunch of different we've even done some pilot work with with christian and contemplative practice all of them share this core element of letting go you know whether and the language might be slightly different but the letting go is the same you know and whether it's letting go into concentration letting go into just noticing the changing nature of reality and if I pass on to practice whether it's letting go of the small self and letting God flow through you in christian contemplative practices all of these share that common element and we and we see that shared element in fMRI prac in fMRI studies what is the most counterintuitive or surprising thing that you learned about this whole world as a neuroscientist like did you go I would imagine you go in you're trying to be objective but you're like oh this is gonna prove this right and then you discover oh my god it's not that way at all yeah I mean how much time do we have there were we there are a lot of things that were really surprising I think the biggest surprise was the one I mentioned earlier around this wasn't about doing something this was about I'm really just relaxing and letting letting things be and there was a you know actually even more surprising to me was the what I'm gonna describe as the causal nature of these things and this related to everything from concentration practice to even finding flow where there there's this you know the Buddhists they have they're famous for lists you know yeah for this very good at the 8th this whatever so they have this list of these 7 factors of awakening sounds like a pretty important list to pay attention to i'd always tried to memorize the list and could never do it you know it's these seven things i can't remember i can only learn things if i understand why they work and it occurred to me after years probably my teachers beating their heads against the wall they come on god i'm that this list goes in a particular order and it starts with awareness and basically curiosity or dumb of a taya means like in interest or kind of exploration you know like investigation and so if we if we pay attention something and we get curious about and we investigate it what they describe is the third factor of awaking naturally coming as a result of those first two where a Veria can be translated as courageous energy so we actually when you're curious about something or when i'm curious about something i actually wanna lean i get energized like wow wow you know it's like reading a good book you know we're tired late at night but we start reading good book and like wow it's 3:00 in the morning how that you know and we had all this energy to read so this actually leads to this fourth factor of awakening which is joy or rapture which then leads to tranquility and then concentration so i've been doing this all wrong in my own practice and I also studying this in a way where I was thinking we're gonna find that forced part of the brain you know part of the brain that's that's gonna be involved in meditation well there wasn't anything as I mentioned that they get got increased in activity but it was that decrease when we started to let go that concentration naturally emerges out of these conditions when we're interested in something and we're curious and we're not forcing anything when we're tranquil it actually is rewarding in itself and so it's a feed-forward mechanism that winds up beautifully with operant conditioning remember reward it feels good that the concentration naturally emerges out of these conditions and in itself feels pretty good so when we're totally consonant concentrated in something it feels great and when we're really concentrated on something we totally lose a sense of ourselves and we start to merge with the rest of the world and we'd even seen this in experienced meditators there's this concept I'm you know it well I'm sure flow no you know me I took some oh hi talks about flow in terms of being selfless it's effortless its joyful you know it's like this this thing a lot of extreme athletes really they'll die for and seen this a lot you know there's some great books written about how dangerous it is for for athletes to get addicted to flow we had people in our fMRI scanner getting into flow and reporting on it we've got a snapshot of their brains as their posterior cingulate took a nosedive in activity just totally quieted down as they were merging with their environment and if you think about it this there's closed quality of experience this contracted quality is a marker of okay I'm here and the rest of the world is out there well when that starts expanding when you take that to infinity where do you end and where does the rest of the world begin so we're gone stuff is happening it's no effort and we're totally dialed in and in the brain all of those levels are going there's no area of the brain that's being activated by this it's just a d volume ization of every component open mind I would say we only looked specifically at the posterior cingulate cortex so these self-referential brain regions are getting really hard it's responsible for that yeah given that's super interesting so given that addiction is a condition of self obsession the more self-obsessed we are the more imprisoned we are by these cravings and desires the dissolution of that that myth of differentiation is part of the path that walks you towards this solution so I'm curious about your thoughts when it comes to things like ayahuasca and psychedelics like these are substances that that dissolve that illusion of self and allow us to like merge with this you know to be at one with the universe and there's certainly interesting studies that are that are happening right now in this field like where where's your head with all that I'm glad you asked that question because it's a really burgeoning field of science and serendipitously when we published our first big finding with experienced meditators where we found the default mode network was deactivated two months later in the very same journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this group from London led by David Nutt and Robin card Harris published their first study with psilocybin so the the active ingredient in magic mushrooms and they found basically to achieve the same two main hubs of the default mode network were really quiet and I immediately contacted them and said dude this cannot be a coincidence they said dude this cannot be a coincidence and so that started the road down exploring you know what are the similarities here and there's you know roland griffiths at johns hopkins has really led the way in the u.s. with this research looking at experienced meditators and you know help using things like psilocybin to help people with addictive disorders the way I think about this you know to the point where Michael Pollan wrote a great book - nobody's talking about this book yeah so he actually came in and visited my lab we had him do get into our neurofeedback rig and just remember a time when he had done a psychedelic remember a psychedelic experience and that memory could put him into the feeling of what it was like to let go and we could see the corresponding reduction in brain activity in his posterior cingulate cortex which was pretty trippy like literally but also fits very interestingly with what the you know this translation of mindfulness the ancient word for it is sati which means to remember so many people translate you know or interpret what that means you know to remember to be in the present moment or you know to me it's a lot related to well remember what happened when you did this last time you know do you really want to go there again as were being in the present moment recalling what happened previously so he recalled what happened previously and he was reliving you know this this trip that was actually manifesting in real time in reduction in his brain activity was pretty far out so how does this how do you foresee this field playing out well if I had a crystal ball that actually worked I mean I I guess my perspective is I'm super interested I mean there's there's amazing things that are happening in the world right now to the extent that anybody can come up with productive solutions to help heal people that suffer I'm completely supportive of that at the same time as somebody who you know is very much an addict and an alcoholic in recovery for many years you know my like talk about like you know my default node Network like firing like here's my solution I just need to do more drugs this is the path that I need to be on yeah like and then I and then I have to then be curious about what that's about like what is driving that compulsion yeah so realizing that there's an unhealthy aspect to that as well absolutely so I think there are two pieces here the first one is if people don't know or can't remember what it's like to let go it's pretty challenging to train them in that direction so we can use things like neurofeedback we can use things like our app based mindfulness training programs to help people really see what it's like to get contracted and then identify moments when they're letting go and I think that's also where where we can bring together things like digital therapeutics and and psilocybin and other psychedelics where you can you know in a in a very careful way help people you know taste what it's like to let go with a psychedelic mmm and really help them integrate that experience with feedback training with direct experience from their own life so we can say okay you just have this you know we just did this the assessing session with you really zoom in on what it's like to be contracted versus letting go that can kind of give them that guiding star to say okay now as you go throughout your life we're gonna train you to notice moments when you're moving away from that when you're getting closed down and notice moments when you're moving toward it when you're opening up and importantly we can train you to link those two things up so again learning through reward based learning we learn from cause-and-effect so if we can see the cause of when we get contracted and we can see how painful it is it can help our brain reduce that the tendency to go there in the future if we can notice moments when we're open like when we're curious or when we're kind we can see really pay attention and say oh what was that like and our brain says oh that was good I want to do that again so we can really pair the two give them that guiding star where they might not have had that before or remembered it and then train them to do that over and over and over yeah a big part of me managing my addictions is being part of a community to which I'm accountable and I'm interested in and if there's any Studies on the neuro chemistry of what happens to our brains when we feel you integrated in a group of people that care about us that we know are looking out for us and conversely what happens when were of service to others right I would imagine that there's a curiosity component to that there's an in there's there's sort of a an engagement that occurs that that that allows us to transcend our self obsession and invest ourselves in other people that is a huge part of my you know solution but I'm interested in the scientific kind of lens on that yeah yeah absolutely we're actually starting to collect so we I think that community is a really critical component and we've actually built very carefully curated online communities for the program people in our programs so for example to eat right now programming of this large community the unwinding anxiety program large community so we can actually start to look at their direct experience in relationship to themselves as they progress through the program and as they keep you know a lot of people will keep a journal in the community and support each other and learn from each other that way it's got to be a huge part of long-term success I mean if you don't have that in place you might get great results over 30 60-day 90-day period but it's gonna start to fall off it that could absolutely be the case and I think we can also do this experiment so I actually wrote a whole chapter in my book around this around you know what's it like when were mean versus nice for example and we can look at generosity for example being service being of service from a simple lens of reward based learning so if we see somebody in need and we help them and we truly help them in a selfless way where we're not looking for them to thank us so we're not looking to be able to tell our friends like I helped this person but we just truly we see somebody need we help them we can notice what that reward feels like it's clean it's energizing it's not depleting which is completely different from the martyr who's like you know and we see this in health care you know the physicians and clinicians like oh I gotta help everybody god help everybody and when we're not actually doing that from a healthy place we get burnt out we get deplete it and so we can all do this experiment ourself and see what is it like when we're truly doing service for services sake not when we're depleted but when we're really at the place to do that and that's different you know we can't say oh I I should go out and be generous because it's gonna help me mm-hmm yeah that's that's dead on arrival but it's truly like when we're at the place when we can do service and in it's important when we can we you know to be there because often we think oh you know I'm being selfish by taking care of myself well that's not true we're not separate from our society if we're not helping ourselves we're not actually going to be able to help others as well so we really have to be at that foundational level to be able to be of service and then when we just explore what's it like when I do service when I'm of service to others we can see is it actually energizing or depleting and then it starts to feed forward I think there's also a placebo effect with that in the sense that if I not to play devil's advocate but but I think that I Devils that I think that even if my service action is motivated by selfish reasons like let's say I'm you know I'm having a bad day I'm just I'm throwing a pity party for myself things aren't going right I'm I'm fully invested in myself obsession I do still have enough self-awareness to say I know that's why I'm suffering and you know what I should do right now I should just call somebody up who is having who I know is having a worse time than me and just ask them how they're doing like a small gesture I'm not going to a soup kitchen or something like that but it's a way to break that cycle of self obsession and interrupt that kind of thought pattern that's looping in my head and just momentarily invest myself and somebody else's well-being and that interruption even when motivated purely by selfish reasons like I'm not you know some white knight you know who's purely doing it for you know for reasons I wish you know we're motivating me it still has the same effect like I will feel better it is interrupted that I feel good because I know that I that I you know made myself available even when I'm busy for somebody else and that's a practice that is you know served me well over many years yes I don't think that's in Congress at all if you look at it as I'm gonna help somebody in order to feel better then that can loop in a negative way but what you pointed out was two things one awareness you're self aware of this is a habit pattern that I'm stuck in and I can do this to step out of it that's absolutely skillful as compared to I'm gonna perpetuate the cycle of I have to be helping people for me to have self-worth mmm right so that's the big difference is you're helping yourself step out of the cycle as compared to perpetuating a cycle that's unhealthy right what are the things that that trip people up the most like let's take quitting smoking for example like even they come to you they're like I get it Judd I'm in like tell me what to do I'm doing it I got the app and the whole thing but they're still like oh I thought I was clear but you're still doing that thing yeah we used this this analogy so big fan of riding bicycles so we actually came up with this gears analogy and first gear is about noticing our habit loops right if we can't move notice then we can't move at all we're always moving backwards second gear is exploring what the result is like what do I get from this and that's a really critical step that people try to bypass as much as they can because intellectually they know you know smoking or overeating it's you know I know it's not good for me and they want to jump right to third eye to the end yeah yeah so third gear is when we're actually stepping out of the loop so we're being kind we're being curious we're using these mindfulness practice this is to actually step out of these old habitual behaviors so what I see most is people trying to jam it from thirst and a first and a third gear and of course you know they right they it doesn't work you know you're on a hill and for you however on the bike are installed a call yeah yeah yeah so you have to just embrace the process as its laid out yeah in front of you yeah and the second the second step or that second gear is the most illuminating because that's really where our brain starts to shift from these unhealthy behaviors seeing that oh this isn't rewarding to finding the motivation to look for something higher and that's where that's when we can actually shift into third gear it's it's not glamorous but it's quite cool what is the research that has not been done yet that you would like to see be done that could shed additional light on the craving mind oh boy there's a lot one of the pieces that we're working on now is really lining up the specific mechanisms around the people doing these mental imagery exercise or not imagery but kind of these mental imagination exercises where they imagine going and eating overeating or imagine smoking in lining that directly up with the with the change in reward value in their brain so we've only done you know we've done some nura mijung work with smoking but we want to see this also in the eating program we want to see this even with anxiety and I think it's really important to show that we can across different types of behaviors that there's a common underlying mechanism we see this behaviorally where we can see these you know strong results was smoking with eating anxiety I want to also see that this is true neurobiologically because that helps us line up these mechanisms in a more sound manner I mean we see this clinically we see this behaviorally but there's something that would be really nice to be able to say look here's a general generalizable even scientific concept that applies to what the true underlying mechanisms of mindfulness actually are mmm so the craving mind your book it's an interesting story that got you here right like this was a furious product of a self-imposed home retreat yes yeah I mean did you ever doubt it like the power of meditation and mindfulness practices in terms of unleashing your inner creative you know fire like you're the poster boy yeah that was it that was an interesting experiment so a couple of years before I wrote the book I remember waking up one Saturday morning and I was just you know I've been thinking through this concept of lining up reward-based learning with these you know these seven factors of awakening whatnot for a while and one morning I just was a Saturday morning I can remember what the temperature was outside that it was partly cloudy all this stuff I just went down to my dining room table pulled out a couple of references and watched this paper write itself in three hours and I put that and you close my laptop like wow that was amazing what was that and the paper got published without with very few revisions you know whatnot oh wow I can actually you know I've been I've been learning to get into flow through like mountain biking and playing music and whatnot I was like wow I can actually do this when writing so fast forward several years I when the book felt like it was ready to be written and that was actually a critical piece I can't just like say hey I'm gonna write about you know cooking and sit down and write a cook I'm you know I don't know how to did pester to write a book for a while right I had business yeah so you know several publishers is hey we'd like you to write a book this and that and it just hadn't felt right and so I kind of been like oh someday I'll do it someday and then finally the conditions came together and so I did it as a as a experiment as a meditation retreat so I my wife it was over the holidays so as a my wife went off to spend time with her family for the for the holidays and so I was it was just myself at her house with the cats and so I decided to do a self retreat so I'd done month-long self retreats before at home which is really good practice because like every distraction is there but this one I decided I said I would just do I would sit walk and write as in you know regular sitting and walking meditation and I would write only when I felt totally in flow like vandals like it was just coming out and so I'd sit down and write and write and then as soon as it started to feel contracted I would close the computer and just sit and walk and it was really interesting because I wouldn't even like the thinking wouldn't even come up about the writing it would just sit and walk and then I would get up then remember this one point where I was like and then I you know rest of the day sit walk sit walk and then I got up the next morning I was like cool and this whole chapter came out Wow so basically two weeks you know a two-week retreat and in the book was written that's unbelievable it was really fun and it contravenes but this sort of Steven Pressfield war of art like shell for the page every day no matter what like push through like you are in this is more of a surrender like in allowing like I'm just allowing this to happen and the minute it feels constricted to use your word you walk away from it without any judgement absolutely and I think that book experience was a really good reminder that we can actually train ourselves to live our lives this way each moment yeah each moment we can be looking Oh did rich asked me did I answer Rich's question well oh that was a crazy do we have to be two decades into our meditation practice to avail ourselves of this us we don't so one thing that I want to do to be of service it's you know I've fallen in my face a lot you know it was over ten years that I would you know struggle and struggle and struggle with meditation before I started to wake up that it wasn't about the struggle and the struggle taught me something so one thing I want to do to be of service is to help other people like learn that they don't have to the struggle is not it you can learn from the struggle but the struggle is not it and so we you know that's why we set up our that's why I do this research to really try to understand what are the mechanisms what are the most efficient ways to deliver this this is why this turned you know we started developing apps I had no idea me making app based trainings but the aim was can we deliver this in a way that is as efficient and as helpful as possible and I think you know we can use these weapons of mass traction our cellphones in a way that can actually be helpful if people are already you know if they already have these things and are using them ubiquitously why not use them as a way to help us train our lives and then we can learn that the cell phones the technology is not the problem it's that we don't know how our minds work and we can start to learn to work with our my yes our relationship to them you wrote an interesting piece where you talk about the I mean there's a lot of sort of self-help apps out there that are oriented around losing weight or you know what what have you but you kind of canvas the the efficacy of these things and it was something like they purport to be for the most part something like 70% efficacious but in fact only two percent effective two point six or something like that yeah basically there's very very very little science behind any of these things and there are a lot of folks that claim Oh based on science well that's mean yeah exactly what does that mean and when you dig into it and people have done Studies on this when they've dug into it it doesn't mean a whole lot for most of these so hopefully the field will actually mature where there will be good science behind these things but it takes years and it actually takes interest in doing that and a lot of companies don't have that much time to survive they've got this clock taking this this runway that's gonna run out if they don't sell a product fortunately you know we were one of the homegrown where I really want to understand mechanism I would really want to make sure something works you know and if if we can put it out there and help people great but I'm not gonna base this on you know we've got a you know 10x are whatever yeah and this is this is like consumer facing but it's also used for like enterprises right like you're using us with with just corporations and health care company any like companies that want to make sure that their employees are you know mindfully healthy yeah well I think companies are finally waking up to the fact that they you know it costed a lot of money it costed a lot of productivity and it's so gratifying to see that companies are actually looking at the well-being of their employees you know that used to be in the soft side of HR was like oh well being yeah we'll throw a little money at that to say that we're doing this they're really saying well you know well-being is actually a critical element to our employee you know to keeping employees here long-term you know the reducing turnover and all this stuff so I think they're really starting to look at this much more carefully to say you know where are the scientifically based programs that can actually move the needle for us and so we've started to you know we've been getting a lot of incoming traffic where companies are very interested in in seeing this because you know we've been doing the science but 20 years it's got to be really gratifying for you as somebody who's been in this for so long to see the culture kind of catch up with where you've been at for some time and really embrace these ideas in a mainstream way yeah yeah going from boy Jed you're gonna kill your career yeah - whose have you called that guy recently you're like hey yeah 18 million on my TED talk dude well I sent him a postcard yeah yeah well that on the TED Conference of course the the e I know how ungratified ego gratification actually play that one out like alright well it feels good for a minute and then the hangover afterwards of like oh man it I said it like it yeah I know but I can at least propose it it's a good thought experiment we got to wrap this up here but I want to kind of close this with some just practical wisdom on meditation I loved everything that that you had to say about the letting go and the allowing and and and trying to get into that place of letting go of all the self judgment and and the willing of the process to be something other than it is right this battle like I'm gonna be a good meditator I'm gonna sit here until I conquer my my thinking my god damnit you know as being like absolutely the wrong path and it's so difficult I think that is the biggest kind of conventional wisdom hurdle that people need to overcome to just embrace this process and show up for for you know for what it is absolutely that is that is number one you know let's move beyond willpower you know it's had 50 years of stuff let's say let's move on to really understanding how our minds work and I think we're way past being able to do that yeah and the first if somebody's listening to this and they they're they're caught in well let me just back up and say if you're listening to this and you know you don't identify as somebody who's an addict in the traditional sense I would encourage all of you to think more objectively and and really do you know do an analysis a forensic analysis on how you live your life every single day and I don't think there's anybody out there who who won't be able to you know see and identify some behavior pattern whether it's a tendency to get into a certain kind of relationship or a certain kind of social dynamic that you perpetuate despite you know negative outcomes there is always something that can be pinpointed that needs a little redress and I think you know what Joe does shared today can be instrumental and helpful in helping you understand a that you're doing that and be that there is a path forward that can allow you to ultimately transcend it amen brother yeah and it begins with what awareness awareness and this if somebody doesn't know what awareness is though like what do you mean by that I mean paying attention like really being truly awake in the present moment and importantly not being pushed or pulled by our biases you know you know colored by oh this is the way the world works but really being colored by curiosity like oh is this the way the world work is this actually true so that we're observing what's actually happening rather than what we think should be or want to be happening hmm so difference between curiosity and listening I think we can listen curiously or we can listen in a biased manner so if we're listening waiting to hear a certain thing or hearing things a certain way yeah and I'm sure we've all experienced this we're like oh I thought I heard this and somebody said no I said that so we can listen but if we're I would think I would say this is somewhat synonymous with deep listening where we are totally out of our own way and we are just totally in the process of listening that's you know that curiosity piece and the awareness piece and even flow we really just so engrossed in a conversation that's totally synonymous all right I think that's a good place to land the plane how do you feel oh great are you craving anything right now no idea I went this long Wow two hours is good the book is the creating mind it's a great book I'm well into it at this point I highly recommend everybody check it out there's so much good stuff in here plus an amazing foreword by Jon kabat-zinn which is beautiful and if people want to learn more about you dr. jicama what's the best place for them to go yeah we've got a that's our resource website dear Ju decom where they can learn about my research about the book about our apps and we've got a bunch of animations on there that teach people like everyday addictions and things like that right all the apps can be found through that that portal yeah absolutely and check out his TED talks right you've got to - well Ted and the TEDx and a big Ted yeah how many views does that thing have now I'm crazy number of you a lot yeah all right you don't want to admit that you check once in a while man come back in and share with me more I love what you're doing I appreciate the work that you're doing I think it's really important you know addiction is the epidemic of our time it's why we're obese it's why the opioid crisis exists these are massive problems that need to be solved at scale and so the science that you're doing and how it merges with these traditional historic methods of mindfulness I think is super important and worth everybody's conscious investigation so thank you thank you alright peace plants you

Channel: Rich Roll

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Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, Dr. Jud Brewer, The Craving Mind, neuroscience podcast, psychiatry podcast, habit change podcast, how to quit smoking podcast, how to quit drinking podcast, meditation science, evidence based practice habit change, how to break a habit, addiction podcast

Id: G-H0_BlN2ac

Length: 116min 12sec (6972 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 06 2019