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Happiness, 6.05 (V) Week 6, Video 5 - The Benefits Of Mindfulness I

6.05 (V) Week 6, Video 5 - The Benefits Of Mindfulness I

[MUSIC] Namaste my friends and welcome back. Hopefully the discussions thus far have given you a better idea of what mindfulness is, and also given you some glimpse, into why it is such a powerful determinant of well being. It not only makes us feel calmer, but also gives us an ability to react to situations in a more flexible and conscious manner. Which means that we are going to respond to events in our life with a lot more emotional intelligence. The idea that the practice of mindfulness improves emotional intelligence is, in fact, the main point of an excellent book on the topic of mindfulness called, Search Inside Yourself, written by Chade Meng Tan. I highly recommend the book, particularly if your mind is wired like that of mine, like an engineers mind. Meng works for Google by the way, which explains the books title, and he does a great job of breaking down the somewhat subtle nuanced concepts relevant to mindfulness and to logical and simple language. Back to the benefits of mindfulness. Apart from calming us down and improving our emotional intelligence by enhancing response flexibility, it also gets us to settle down into the present, which increases our ability to view even ordinary things with much more curiosity and interest and perhaps even and feeling awe it turns out, has the ability to make us feel like we have a lot more time on our hands, than we might otherwise feel. As this paper that you now see on your screen shows. What I want to do now, is turn to the myriad other positive effects of mindfulness, both on physical and mental health. I want to start by showing you a presentation by one of the most productive researchers in the area of Mindfulness, Professor Shauna Shapiro of Santa Clara University. Before I play her video though, let me quickly ask something that you might find useful. Professor Shapiro at one point will mention something called wait list group. By this she means the group that did not get to do the mindfulness training. This is the group of participants that volunteered to get the mindfulness training, like those that got the mindfulness training did, but were assigned to the control condition and were told that they were in the waiting list to receive the mindfulness training at a later point in time. With that background, let me play the video for you now. Listen. » Some of the research that I think is most interesting, and actually, most optimistic, is the research on meditation and the brain. So I wanna give you just very brief background. This has nothing to do with meditation. But basically, positive and negative emotions look different in the brain. So when we're feeling happy joyful vital alert we have higher left to right ratios in our prefrontal cortex. When we're feeling depressed anxious in fact even people who have post traumatic stress disorder or severe depression we have much we see much greater activity in the right to left ratio in the prefrontal cortex which is this part of the brain that developed more recently. So, when they did a study on meditators they brought in this Tibetan lama. And what they found was his left to right ratio was much higher than any of the other 175 subjects they brought into the laboratory. And so they asked, is this just a random artifact, right? Was he kinda born happy and so then he decided to be a monk, and a meditator and meditate? Or did the tens of thousands of hours that he had dedicated to this practice actually have an impact? So they did the gold standard which is a randomized controlled trial. They took 41 biotechnology employees who had never meditated, if they can do it anyone can. [LAUGH] They randomly assign them into a mindfulness group taught by John Kabat-Zinn a wait list group. Then they looked. Is there change in the activity of the brain? What they found is that four months later there was significant differences in this left to right ratio where they had much greater activity in left to right, with greater positive motions, vitality. This is extraordinarily hopeful, and I wanna explain why for those of you who aren't psychologists. In psychology, there is something called,a happiness set point, and it's been repeated over and over again in the reasearch that we find that people basically just like you have a weight set point. You have basically have this kind of continuum of happiness that you're born with, and you can't really move it too far. So what they found is that when you win the lottery, you have this initial blip of yes life's gonna be great forever and then a year later you're back to your baseline level of happiness. If you're in a terrible accident and you become a paraplegic you have this huge dip and then within one year you're back almost to your baseline. When I first read this I thought it was shocking, so surprising and yet they replicate it again and again. So, this is great news if you were born happy,right? It's, like, it doesn't matter, you know? If you get divorced, you lose your job, whatever, and you just pop back up. It's like you're a bobo doll. [LAUGH] This isn't such good news for most of the people that I work with who are coming to see me. Where, they weren't necessarily born happy. And so even if you work really hard, and you make a lot of money. And you get the house in Hawaii, or you win the lottery, or you marry the perfect person or you have, it doesn't actually change your happiness level. What is so hopeful about this new research is what it says is that even though changing your exterior circumstances, winning the lottery, doesn't change your happiness level. Changing your interior landscape, can. Changing our interior environment through training the mind and heart and body in these practices. Can actually shift our levels of happiness. Richie Davidson, who is the principal investigator of this study, he says. Happiness can be trained, because the very structure of our brain can be modified. So what he's talking about here is neuroplasticity. Our repeated experiences shape our brain. Does this remind you of anything? It's exactly what this monk told me, what we practice becomes stronger, everything that we practice, every single moment matters. So these are brains from Harvard. I think that makes them a little more special [LAUGH] [LAUGH] And basically Sarah developed this early research and what she found is that meditator's, the actual parts of the brain that have to do with attention, concentration, emotional intelligence, compassion. Those parts of the brain actually get stronger, bigger it's what's called cortical thickening. And that this thickening is correlated with practice. What we practice gets stronger. So the way I like to think of it, is we have these super highways of habits. And there just like there well grooved pathways in our brain. Right? They just [SOUND] they're what we automatically do. And what mindfulness is helping us start to do is to kind of build. I think of it as digging a country road, you're clearing all the brambles in your brain, you're creating this new neural pathway. That's like oh, I'm gonna actually do it with compassion this time. Or with a little more patience, or a little more presence. And so instead of going down that same superhighway of habit, we're shifting and we're going down a different pathway. And every single time that we do this, we're strengthening that pathway. So that eventually, that pathway becomes the habit. » There are many fascinating facts that Professor Shapiro mentioned in that video, some of which I'll get to later. For now, I want to focus on the point that she made about how our happiness set point can be changed. As you saw in the video, findings show that normally we find it very difficult to change our baseline happiness levels. or set point. So if you were born with unhappy genes, the belief in the scientific community was that you were out of luck, you were doomed to be unhappy for the rest of your life regardless of what happened. But the findings on mindfulness challenge that belief. Specifically because mindfulness doesn't just change how you feel in the moment, but rather changes your very brain structure. It has the potential to move your happiness set point upward. This is awesome news for those of us who are chronically depressed or anxious, or we're just born unlucky with not very happy genes. Two other themes emerge from the video that we'll get to later, which are one, you don't need to have practiced mindfulness for years and years to derive the beneficial effects of it. And two, every session of practice makes a difference. Both these points I'll get to in a later video. For now, let's continue with the discussion of the benefits associated with mindfulness. We have already seen that it can lower stress levels. Give you a greater response flexibility by lowering attentional blink, and thereby improving your emotional intelligence. Enhances feelings of curiosity, interest and even awe, which increases perceived time abundance. And finally, improves happiness levels by changing the physiological structure of our brain. In the next video, I'm gonna discuss a number of other benefits of mindfulness. Until then, bye bye. [MUSIC]


6.05 (V) Week 6, Video 5 - The Benefits Of Mindfulness I

[MUSIC] Namaste my friends and welcome back. Hopefully the discussions thus far have given you a better idea of what mindfulness is, and also given you some glimpse, into why it is such a powerful determinant of well being. It not only makes us feel calmer, but also gives us an ability to react to situations in a more flexible and conscious manner. Which means that we are going to respond to events in our life with a lot more emotional intelligence. The idea that the practice of mindfulness improves emotional intelligence is, in fact, the main point of an excellent book on the topic of mindfulness called, Search Inside Yourself, written by Chade Meng Tan. I highly recommend the book, particularly if your mind is wired like that of mine, like an engineers mind. Meng works for Google by the way, which explains the books title, and he does a great job of breaking down the somewhat subtle nuanced concepts relevant to mindfulness and to logical and simple language. Back to the benefits of mindfulness. Apart from calming us down and improving our emotional intelligence by enhancing response flexibility, it also gets us to settle down into the present, which increases our ability to view even ordinary things with much more curiosity and interest and perhaps even and feeling awe it turns out, has the ability to make us feel like we have a lot more time on our hands, than we might otherwise feel. As this paper that you now see on your screen shows. What I want to do now, is turn to the myriad other positive effects of mindfulness, both on physical and mental health. I want to start by showing you a presentation by one of the most productive researchers in the area of Mindfulness, Professor Shauna Shapiro of Santa Clara University. Before I play her video though, let me quickly ask something that you might find useful. Professor Shapiro at one point will mention something called wait list group. By this she means the group that did not get to do the mindfulness training. This is the group of participants that volunteered to get the mindfulness training, like those that got the mindfulness training did, but were assigned to the control condition and were told that they were in the waiting list to receive the mindfulness training at a later point in time. With that background, let me play the video for you now. Listen. » Some of the research that I think is most interesting, and actually, most optimistic, is the research on meditation and the brain. So I wanna give you just very brief background. This has nothing to do with meditation. But basically, positive and negative emotions look different in the brain. So when we're feeling happy joyful vital alert we have higher left to right ratios in our prefrontal cortex. Quindi, quando ci sentiamo felici, gioiosi, allerta vitale, abbiamo rapporti più alti da sinistra a destra nella nostra corteccia prefrontale. When we're feeling depressed anxious in fact even people who have post traumatic stress disorder or severe depression we have much we see much greater activity in the right to left ratio in the prefrontal cortex which is this part of the brain that developed more recently. So, when they did a study on meditators they brought in this Tibetan lama. And what they found was his left to right ratio was much higher than any of the other 175 subjects they brought into the laboratory. And so they asked, is this just a random artifact, right? Was he kinda born happy and so then he decided to be a monk, and a meditator and meditate? Or did the tens of thousands of hours that he had dedicated to this practice actually have an impact? So they did the gold standard which is a randomized controlled trial. They took 41 biotechnology employees who had never meditated, if they can do it anyone can. [LAUGH] They randomly assign them into a mindfulness group taught by John Kabat-Zinn a wait list group. Then they looked. Is there change in the activity of the brain? What they found is that four months later there was significant differences in this left to right ratio where they had much greater activity in left to right, with greater positive motions, vitality. This is extraordinarily hopeful, and I wanna explain why for those of you who aren't psychologists. In psychology, there is something called,a happiness set point, and it's been repeated over and over again in the reasearch that we find that people basically just like you have a weight set point. You have basically have this kind of continuum of happiness that you're born with, and you can't really move it too far. So what they found is that when you win the lottery, you have this initial blip of yes life's gonna be great forever and then a year later you're back to your baseline level of happiness. If you're in a terrible accident and you become a paraplegic you have this huge dip and then within one year you're back almost to your baseline. When I first read this I thought it was shocking, so surprising and yet they replicate it again and again. So, this is great news if you were born happy,right? It's, like, it doesn't matter, you know? If you get divorced, you lose your job, whatever, and you just pop back up. It's like you're a bobo doll. [LAUGH] This isn't such good news for most of the people that I work with who are coming to see me. Where, they weren't necessarily born happy. And so even if you work really hard, and you make a lot of money. And you get the house in Hawaii, or you win the lottery, or you marry the perfect person or you have, it doesn't actually change your happiness level. What is so hopeful about this new research is what it says is that even though changing your exterior circumstances, winning the lottery, doesn't change your happiness level. Changing your interior landscape, can. Changing our interior environment through training the mind and heart and body in these practices. Can actually shift our levels of happiness. Richie Davidson, who is the principal investigator of this study, he says. Happiness can be trained, because the very structure of our brain can be modified. So what he's talking about here is neuroplasticity. Our repeated experiences shape our brain. Does this remind you of anything? It's exactly what this monk told me, what we practice becomes stronger, everything that we practice, every single moment matters. So these are brains from Harvard. I think that makes them a little more special [LAUGH] [LAUGH] And basically Sarah developed this early research and what she found is that meditator's, the actual parts of the brain that have to do with attention, concentration, emotional intelligence, compassion. Those parts of the brain actually get stronger, bigger it's what's called cortical thickening. And that this thickening is correlated with practice. What we practice gets stronger. So the way I like to think of it, is we have these super highways of habits. And there just like there well grooved pathways in our brain. Right? They just [SOUND] they're what we automatically do. And what mindfulness is helping us start to do is to kind of build. I think of it as digging a country road, you're clearing all the brambles in your brain, you're creating this new neural pathway. That's like oh, I'm gonna actually do it with compassion this time. Or with a little more patience, or a little more presence. And so instead of going down that same superhighway of habit, we're shifting and we're going down a different pathway. And every single time that we do this, we're strengthening that pathway. So that eventually, that pathway becomes the habit. » There are many fascinating facts that Professor Shapiro mentioned in that video, some of which I'll get to later. For now, I want to focus on the point that she made about how our happiness set point can be changed. As you saw in the video, findings show that normally we find it very difficult to change our baseline happiness levels. or set point. So if you were born with unhappy genes, the belief in the scientific community was that you were out of luck, you were doomed to be unhappy for the rest of your life regardless of what happened. But the findings on mindfulness challenge that belief. Specifically because mindfulness doesn't just change how you feel in the moment, but rather changes your very brain structure. It has the potential to move your happiness set point upward. This is awesome news for those of us who are chronically depressed or anxious, or we're just born unlucky with not very happy genes. Two other themes emerge from the video that we'll get to later, which are one, you don't need to have practiced mindfulness for years and years to derive the beneficial effects of it. And two, every session of practice makes a difference. Both these points I'll get to in a later video. For now, let's continue with the discussion of the benefits associated with mindfulness. We have already seen that it can lower stress levels. Give you a greater response flexibility by lowering attentional blink, and thereby improving your emotional intelligence. Enhances feelings of curiosity, interest and even awe, which increases perceived time abundance. And finally, improves happiness levels by changing the physiological structure of our brain. In the next video, I'm gonna discuss a number of other benefits of mindfulness. Until then, bye bye. [MUSIC]