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

[Music] good evening what I like to do is have a start off taking a couple of deep breaths together ready inhale hold in exhale inhale hold in exhale it's a great way to prepare for any important meeting activity or event actually should relax you and get you more focused and it's certainly going to help me in this presentation so how am i doing so far you like me what category would you put me in friend foe neutral or possible mean now before you while you're pondering that I should say because I have trouble with it sometime I'm off the market okay not available so if you had that uptake on me ladies or gentlemen sort of a demo the reason I asked that question is because we make value judgments about people we don't even know in the first few seconds we see them we all do it we do it subconsciously we're wired that way we're actually looking for threats our ancestors many years ago we're just looking for the saber-toothed Tigers they were worried about who they encountered and whether they would be Friend or Foe that's how they survived and we carry that with us today Joseph LeDoux from New York University says that we're not there's no evidence that our brains are hard-wired for fear what he does say is that we have the circuitry that allows us detect and respond in pre-programmed ways that's modifiable so what I'd like to talk about tonight is mindfulness and meditation so that you can better modify and regulate you're pre-programmed to deal with this global digital world in which we find ourselves the the benefit of that is when you get a bad email you don't have the same reaction as if you saw a saber-toothed tiger and it's bigger than that is not just for those events like that but it's for devastating events in your lifetime how do you go about and make sure that you can manage those properly for me I had a divorce and what I found is through mindfulness and meditation I was better able to make better choices make better decisions and found a way to happiness and peacefulness faster than I would have otherwise and that's what we're gonna talk about tonight I've been a student of this for some number of years now and I became very annoying to my friends because once I learned this I kept telling him that all the time I decided that wasn't the right forum so I'm glad I have an opportunity to speak with you tonight about it the best way to understand mindfulness is to understand the circuitry of the brain there's three parts the first part is the brain stem it's the oldest part it's referred to as reptilian brain 400 million years ago it does basic things it regulates the body and it also allows or initiates to fight flight and fear of freeze response that you see in ripped reptiles the next area is the limbic system found in mammals reference many times is the emotional part of the brain this is the part that records every memory of behavior that that created both bad and good experiences in your lifetime it generates our emotions these two together the brainstem and the limbic system our causes many of our automatic behaviors and impulses that come from trained instinct trained reactions and instincts from that area of the brain the prefrontal cortex is the most of all its most evolved in in humans and it's the executive function of the brain and what it does is have the ability to pause before we take impulsive behave your actions it has the ability to calm and regulate the limbic and brainstem areas of the brain so you're driving your car and you're supposed to be merging and the guy or gal cuts in front of you and if you engage your prefrontal cortex you rationalize yourself well he must be in such a big hurry that he cut me off you don't do anything if you don't engage your prefrontal cortex you honk your horn you get all worked up you flip them off and maybe even go into road rage to be determined so mindfulness awareness practices according to Daniel Siegel is the ability to create a state of activation that allows you to harness the power of the prefrontal cortex in that moment and so that's very important to be able to do that it's able to help you better manage your thoughts and your emotions through meditation practices if you look at long-term meditators what you find out is they have less emotional reactivity than the rest of us they don't get worked up like we do the brainstem and limbic system-- prefrontal cortex is what we're gonna be talking about tonight and we're going to try to deal with what you'll find is that the once you learn how to use these things that you're better able to be reflective versus reflexive you can take stock in the situation and do the right thing as opposed to just not our best leaders around the world are people who have this skill some people call it emotional intelligence but it's the ability to manage these things allows you to lead people allowed to deal with difficult situations difficult conversations I think that today we find that we need to employ these things even more so than before because of the world in which we live in does this look familiar to anybody anybody here in school just got past midterms whether you're a parent whether you're a worker whether you're student the days have gotten longer and more intense we get more email more notifications alerts messages Facebook Twitter snapchat posts than ever before if you want you can operate 24 by 7 365 unfortunately many people do and worse are the people to expect you to pay that way 60 minutes had a series Alliance saying that in fact that the smartphone and the applications like Facebook have become addictive and you see people using them all the time I'm sure you can relate to that you can see people walking down the street and almost hitting stops on street signs because they're focused on their phone I almost did it this weekend forcing and I'm supposed to be mindful now worse is the fact we also in addition to those externalities we have the all this goes on in our lives in general we have the fact that didn't get the fraternity or sorority that you wanted to get in to get that job break up with a girlfriend or boyfriend I mean it's tough being human it's very tough being human and I like to whoops I like to describe it as that our lives are continuous accessions of ups and downs twists and turns of agreeable and disagreeable situations the US Army War College has a term they call bucha volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous they describe it for wartime situations because you don't know what's going to happen next that's what our lives are like 2017 is a pretty good example that and I'm not talking about the Cubs winning the World Series so the problem is that we think the world revolves around us we think the road should be straight and flat we think it should be simple simple certain predictable that's hey I'm the star of the movie here right that's the problem because we want everything to go with the way we want when the world is a windy road we get stressed out so causes our stress not having things work out the way we expected them to work out so what happens when that happens is two things first if you look at the on a macro basis Harris International did a study and showed that we lose about 300 billion dollars a year in lost productivity because work-related stress on an individual basis Matthew Killingsworth did a study with happiness calm when he tracks your happiness found out that 47% of the time you were either distracted or your mind is wandering because of issues going on in your life 47% of time he also found that when your mind wanders is typically negative I think you're not very happy when your mind wanders because it's about some another issue now I take a section to that because I when I was in business school one of the professor's was noticing that one of the students I haven't happens to be the prettiest students in the car class was not in the lecture at all and he for whatever reason decided to say so what are you thinking about you're clearly not listening to my lecture she said well I'm having a sexual fantasy in the middle of the class that was the end of that class we couldn't even get back to class because it that was it yeah yeah he had to blow a class so this is a this is a problem now Matthew Killingsworth would tell you that my wandering is a cause not a consequence of unhappiness and then I think that's what we're gonna dress tonight so we have to deal with this unhappiness because being unhappy is really detrimental to your success and well-being there been over 200 studies of 200 to 75,000 people that shows that being happy improves every domain of your life marriages your work your health your relationships you know it's it's a case where we all have a pursuit of happiness and we and we're actually happy people by default problem is all distress we bring in our life makes us unhappy and that's what we're trying to trying to deal with and then there's the other you know point which is how many people like to be around work with unhappy people anybody know so we want there's a there's a desire to be happy and and what I'm going to propose tonight is one way to do that this is my definition of mindfulness paying attention in the moment in an open accepting way to what you're experiencing paying attention the moment an open accepting way to what you're experiencing let's break that down a little bit paying attention the moment Eckhart Tolle wrote the book called the power of now it's a groundbreaking book at a time and what he talked about was the fact that you never experience think do feel anything outside the present moment and you never will our lives are based on the present moment so our focus should be on making the present moment the best we can the problem we have is we have this thing called the monkey mind or chatter that comes in our brain from that limbic system it remembers everything that ever happened it was bad to you is like that part of the memory is is like velcro for bad things and Teflon for good things it remembers every single bad thing that ever happened you and it's bringing this forth so it's it's bringing out guilt resentment bitterness sadness all these things that cause you to get out of the present moment that mind-wandering what you've got to realize is you got to let it go you can't those events are done there's nothing you can you can learn about them but now they're done you should have learned and now you got to be in the present you can't take away from the present did you see this a lot of times with sports psychologists they say to the players the football players who missed the catch they say forget they missed the catch next play it's always next play or the guy who gets his car stuck in the mud and he beats himself up I'm an idiot I got my car stuck in the mud again I always do this as opposed to saying hey I got my car stuck in mud what I'm gonna do now to get my car stuck out of mud dwelling the past does it help it just it takes you away from the present so your focus should be on the present the same is true of the future anxiety tension unease and fear they're all there if you want them to be and they will be thing is they're the few they're the future and they take you away for the present we try to predict the future but we never do a very good job of it it's always worse than what we think it is I remember my son got a bad grading in one of his classes I thought he's gonna get a bad grade for their for the class I thought his GPA was gonna go down I thought he wouldn't get into a good college I thought he'd get depressed and then he'd be homeless right that's what our mind does that's where our mind does so we've got a you know basically the future will get here and when it does get here it's what our actions and an attitude are at that moment in time that matters that's where your focus should be so now we know we don't be in the past we don't want to be in the future when ever be in the present but now we're in the present so now we need what we need the right mindset we need a positive mindset and in my definition of mindfulness we want to be open accepting and learning we want to be curious we want to be growing we want to make the present the best it can be by having a good attitude as opposed to having a negative mindset negative mindset which is could be judging comparing controlling all the negative things that come in and the the problem is that you know we compare all the time it's what we do it's part of our egoic mind is always comparing and I can tell you that if you compare against better people than yourselves you're gonna be unhappy I can tell you if you compare yourself with less for forcing people you'll be you will be happy though if you're going to compare at least compare with lesser people but I'm not suggesting you compare in the first place and I think the problem we have today in our society is that it's much more easy to compare because of social media everybody's posting this and that and you get to see everything everybody is doing everywhere so Barbara Khan at the University of Pennsylvania has been studying this FOMO fear of missing out for the parents what foam is and she she's done studies to show that basically this is making you unhappy she gives the example of a person who gets to go to this exotic wedding and having a great time at the wedding it's a there's a really I mean unusual and different wedding he goes back gets on a computer finds out that all her friends at the beach is that weekend and she's missing out she's thinking she's not going to be part of that experience that that group creates and she'll be missing out so what does that do it dulls her experience at the wedding now if you asked her to do it all again what would she do she'd still go to the wedding but what she's done is she's taken herself out of the present not enjoying something that's remarkable because of that comparison so that's what you have to watch out for likewise we judge all the time we think we know what's what's the best thing for us the problem is we don't always know what the best thing is for us so take the boy in the neighborhood who gets a horse and everybody says what a lucky boy next day he falls off the horse breaks his leg what an unlucky boy next day war breaks out all able-bodied boys go to war he stays home what a lucky boy we don't know what's good or bad for us we think we do you connect the dots later in life there may be a silver lining if you make it and no matter what happens to you so if you get worked up about something that's not what you want keep this in mind so here's my mental framework that I'm suggesting that you try to use it's called getting in the zone so it's kind of summary what I've been talking about you want to be in the present not the past or the future you want to have a positive mindset not a negative mindset and that's where you want to operate now you say well Barry you just told me that 47 percent of time my mind's wandering how am I supposed to do this how am I supposed to stay in the present my mind keeps going the future in the past ha that's where meditation comes in meditation is the concept of being able to actually train your brain to be able to stay in the present there are many forms of presentation but the one we're going to talk about tonight actually deals with concentration and how to keep your mind in the present moment so what we're going to do is and we're all going to do this we're going to focus on our breathing we're gonna do a little meditation and a focus on our breathing and what's going to happen is your mind's gonna wander that's what happens so our milah wander and then we'll notice it's wandering and then we'll bring our attention back to our breathing and this circle the cycle will continue by practicing this daily you can develop the neural circuitry in your brain to help better concentration and I can tell you I really wish I knew about this when I was younger because I would have been a much better student a much better person in life because it's all this other stuff that gets in our head that causes us to have the problems we have so this technique is one that you can do and we're gonna do it now okay so if you would get your feet flat on the floor you can either close your eyes or you can lower your head looking down at the floor and again we'll start off with a couple deep breaths if you would inhale in hold in exhale inhale hold and exhale now what I want you to do is just breathe normally kill yourself relax in your chair soften your knees your stomach your shoulders your jaw the muscles of your face and now just focus on your breathing notice when your in-breath begins when you hold it on an end and find that place in your body where it's the easiest place to notice your breathing is that your nostrils your chest your stomach okay you get the idea that's all it takes the more you do that the more you bring your your mind being able to bring it back your breathing you'll develop the circuitry your brain to know oh my mind wander to the present or the future I need to bring it back to the present so let me finish with the following this is life it's a continuous succession of ups and downs twists and turns of agreeable and disagreeable situations in your life except that that's what it is except it's not a straight road except that you are not the star of the movie there are all these other people in the world that actually have other things they want to do to try to be stay in the present moment when these things happen take a couple deep breaths when something happens to you it strongly suggests that's what you do try to understand how to be present so you can best decide what to do and how to behave if you do that I think you'll find a path to peacefulness and happiness thank you very much for your time [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 237,535

Rating: 4.7367349 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, Behavior, Brain, Health, Technology

Id: CYr7qJq7bJk

Length: 21min 57sec (1317 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2017