For my most recent project, I participated in a world-first experiment, in which a team of scientists to put mindful meditation to the test. But after a 30,000 kilometre journey from the bright lights of Manhattan to the dusty refugee camps of the Middle East, what began as a self-experiment, transformed into a life-changing experience.
The resulting documentary and book inspired a high-school teacher to get in touch recently to see if I could help with an entirely student-led TEDx event – run by young people, for young people.
TEDx events are about encouraging communities to give a platform to “ideas worth spreading” and he wanted to know if I would share what I learned from My Year of Living Mindfully with the students. Of course, I said yes.
In this talk, I reveal the surprising conclusions of my year-long experiment to a group of young people who are facing radically different challenges to anything experienced by previous generations. In a world facing rapid technological disruption, increasing political polarisation and climate change, half of all mental disorders start by 14 years of age.
In my TEDx talk I was able to share what I wish I'd known as a teenager;
I hope you can find a moment to watch my talk and share it with the young people in your own life.
I think you'll find the students did a remarkable job of running the event; from the backstage management to the sound, lighting, and even the editing.
]]>Frances, who is Chairman Emeritus of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine, was the lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is essentially the mental health profession’s equivalent of the Bible. In 2010, prior to the publication of the most recent edition, DSM-5, Frances went rogue. “We're taking every day experiences that are part of the human condition and we're over-diagnosing them as mental disorders, and way too often providing a pill when there's not really a pill solution for every problem in life,” he told the Cochrane Australia podcast, The Recommended Dose.
Frances’ criticisms were further bolstered in 2019, when researchers from the University of Liverpool conducted a detailed analysis of five key chapters in the DSM-5 on schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, and trauma-related disorders and concluded that “although diagnostic labels create the illusion of an explanation they are scientifically meaningless and can create stigma and prejudice.”
Another leading advocate of the mental-illness-isn’t-real camp is clinical psychologist Lucy Johnstone. In a 2019 article for the Institute of Art and Ideas she wrote that it’s not that the torments of our mind we currently label “mental illness” aren’t real – anyone who’s known suicidal despair, heard hostile voices, experienced crippling anxiety or mood swings will tell you the misery is very very real. Rather, she argued, these experiences are not an illness.
Johnstone highlights that unlike with diseases such as pneumonia, liver failure or breast cancer, there are no established patterns of chemical imbalances, genetic flaws or other bodily malfunctions which directly correspond to the labels and symptoms of what we call mental illness, despite decades of research. “If we ask ‘Why does this person have mood swings/hear hostile voices?’ the answer is ‘Because they have ‘schizophrenia/bipolar disorder’. And if we then ask how we know they have ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘bipolar disorder’, the answer is: ‘Because they hear hostile voices/have mood swings.’ There is no exit from this circle via a blood test, scan or other investigation which might confirm or disconfirm this diagnosis,” she wrote.
Even the pharmaceutical industry now concedes that the “chemical imbalance” explainer for mental illness, which was first popularised in the late 1980s alongside marketing campaigns for prescription medication such as Prozac, is oversimplified and inadequate.
At a 2015 event hosted by Intelligence Squared, which asked panelists to debate if “psychiatrists and the pharma industry are to blame for the current ‘epidemic’ of mental disorders”, the former senior Vice-President and Head of Worldwide Drug Development at Pfizer, Declan Doogan, acknowledged that selling drugs using the biological model of mental illness was a mistake. “There’s no blood test for depression and nobody’s said we’ve found the cause for it. We don’t actually mean that if we give an SSRI, your problem is serotonin deficiency. That was a naive and simplistic view put forward many years ago,” he said.
Doogan’s debate team ultimately persuaded the audience 52-46 percent that the Big Pharma did not intentionally create the epidemic of mental disorders (with 2 percent undecided), but his concession shone a whole new light on the chemical imbalance story that was sold to me in my teenage years and young adulthood in the late 1990s and 2000s; a time when the anti-depressant medication Zoloft was being prescribed to almost every emotionally distressed person I knew and was the sixth best selling pharmaceutical in the U.S.
It turns out, despite the mass media’s popularisation of the concept, there has never been a single peer-reviewed study to directly support claims that chemical deficiency is the cause of any mental disorder.
This is not to say that there aren’t biological signatures for people experiencing inner misery. There is robust evidence, for example, that childhood abuse and neglect results in permanent changes to the developing human brain. But as Professor Richard Bentall from the University of Sheffield argues in a 2019 panel discussion hosted by the Institute for Art and Ideas, everything is biological. “The temptation has always been to say, we’ve got something going on in the brain scanner, that means it’s a biological illness, it doesn’t mean anything of the sort…. What’s going on is their brain is responding to events in the world. So where is the cause of the mental illness? I’d say it’s the events in the world and the brain is a, what we’d call… a mediator.”
Although Bentall may not be a household name, he’s been enormously influential in modern psychology, having authored more than 200 peer-reviewed academic papers, conducted large scale randomised controlled trials of psychological interventions for people diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and psychosis, as well as written a number of books including, Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature and Doctoring the Mind: Is Our Current Treatment of Mental Illness Really Any Good?
His conclusion, after more than three decades of research? “What we should be wary of is seeing these phenomena as medical phenomena, which require medical intervention rather than responses to a world which is challenging and difficult to live in and difficult to navigate our way through,” he told the Institute for Art and Ideas panel.
Most recently Bentall’s research has focused on why childhood adversities such as poverty, abuse, and bullying provoke the mental and emotional changes that lead to what we call mental illness. He’s found that a child who experiences a significant traumatic event before the age of 16 has a three times increased risk of psychosis in adulthood and that there’s a dose response relationship – the more severe the trauma, the greater the risk of psychosis.
All this is to say, I’m now coming to more deeply understand that our very real mental anguishes – from our persistent low moods, to our social neuroses, to our compulsions to use substances that do us more harm than good – could be seen not as diseases or illnesses, but as understandable, natural, normal responses to life’s adversity.
Viewed through this lens, the rise in environmental anxiety among our teenagers is a reasonable response to a very real threat. The disproportionally high suicide rate in Aboriginal Australians is an understable outcome of hundreds of years of intergenerational trauma. And increases in tech addiction and social disconnection? A natural relationship with devices engineered to get us hooked. Perhaps it’s not that we are sick. It’s that the world in which we live is sick. Or, as Bentall said recently in an interview for the BBC Radio podcast, The Life Scientific; “madness is in the world, not in us.”
Somehow I don’t think any of this is going to catch on meaningfully in mainstream mental health policy and reporting any time soon though. A headline screaming that “Six Out of Ten People Have Perfectly Reasonable Anxiety Response to Pandemic Related Lockdowns and Sudden Financial Instability…” won’t generate the click-traffic that online editors need in order to meet their KPIs. But all this will significantly reshape the direction of the work I do in the future.
Although I still think there’s great utility in having widely accepted concepts of mental illness, and that efforts to destigmatise our suffering must continue; although I will also continue to advocate for mental health workers on the frontline who need more and urgent support; and although prescription pharmaceuticals prescribed in the right circumstances, at the right time, have saved the lives of people I love; I now also see that the real solutions to our collective mental distress will likely found when, in addition to helping individuals who are suffering, we start making meaningful efforts towards understanding and treating the root causes of that suffering.
Perhaps one of the most striking studies I came across during my latest deep dive was done by researchers from Public Health Wales and Bangor University, who knew that men in prison are at increased risk of poor mental health and suicide and wanted to know why. They interviewed hundreds of men imprisoned in Bridgend, South Wales and found 84 percent of them had experienced at least one Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE), compared with the Welsh average of 46 percent. Nearly half of the prisoners (46 percent) reported they had experienced four or more ACEs such as abuse, neglect, domestic violence, or parental drug and alcohol addiction, compared to 12 percent in the wider population.
Knowing all this now, I can’t help but wonder if we could do more to help people by better understanding the steps that lead from childhood misfortune to mental illness? And what would happen if the events that shaped those men, who committed those crimes, that put them in that prison, never happened in the first place?
I'll leave you with words of award-winning mental health activist Doctor Eleanor Longden, who’s TED talk about her personal experiences with voice hearing has been viewed more than five million times, and who was once told by a psychiatrist that she’d be better off with cancer than schizophrenia, because cancer is easier to cure; “...the most important question in psychiatry shouldn’t be what’s wrong with you, but what’s happened to you.”
If you or someone you know needs help:
Lifeline: 13 11 14
Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636
Headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation: 1800 650 890
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In the four years since my book was released, nutrition science has come a long way. In the midst of epidemics of obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes, increasing evidence now draws the link between what we eat and drink, how well we are, and how long we’ll live.
We also know that the average adult gets half of their daily energy from something researchers call “ultra-processed” food – the soft drink, confectionery, sweet biscuits, ice-cream, and savoury snacks that my son’s well-meaning friends gifted him when they were celebrating the end of the school year. These foods are almost always made in factories by combining substances derived from foods with synthetic additives. A key feature is that they are usually cheap, convenient, practically imperishable, and contain substances that are never, or very rarely, found in home kitchens.
It’s not just chronic metabolic illnesses that have researchers worried. The more ultra-processed food we eat, the more likely we are to become sick with a range of chronic diseases, including asthma, cancer, and depression.
To be clear, I’m no purist. I take no issue with the occasional treat – and I’m aware that common wisdom advocates that it’s better to let kids indulge occasionally than ban junk altogether. I also adore watching the delight on my children’s faces when I announce a spontaneous visit to our local family-run gelato shop.
My problem is that sometimes food has become everyday food. And that somewhere between my childhood and adulthood, jelly snakes have replaced the age-old tradition of eating sliced oranges after sport, and kids now hand out sugary sweets instead of Christmas cards at the end of the school year. My problem is also that every well meaning friend, coach or relative who offers my kids a “treat” thinks that they’re the only one.
My biggest problem of all though is knowing that the dietary habits established in childhood, set us up for the rest of our lives. Up against an enticing celebratory snack, which has been scientifically optimised in high-tech labs for its irresistible salt, sugar and fat content, I’m all too aware that my seven-year-old son and his four-year-old brother, don’t stand a chance.
I discovered my son’s bag full of loot one evening as I was tidying his room and couldn’t hide my shock at it’s abundance. “That’s not even half of it,” he said. “Where is the rest?” I asked. “… I ate it,” he replied with a rueful grin.
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My Summary – Indiana Jones meets game changing science in a book which offers a completely new way of thinking about healthy eating.
I’ve lost count of the number of interviews I’ve done with diet experts. From macronutrients to micronutrients, to the gut microbiome and fasting, from what we can do to eat better despite the obstacles to why junk food is so hard to resist; so I thought I was across the broad brush strokes on pretty much every hot button nutritional topic being investigated by scientists. That was until I read Eat Like the Animals, and realised that as the Wildling character Ygritte from George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones says, “You know nothing Jon Snow.”
This book reads like an adventure novel, as Professors David Raubenheimer and Stephen Simpson from Sydney University’s Charles Perkins Centre, recount their global adventures from the urban fringes of Capetown to the swamp forests of Borneo, and how they uncovered that most living organisms know instinctively how to balance their diet.
Despite being about food and nutrition, this is not another fad diet book and you won’t find a sales pitch for the latest eight-week program subversively hidden in its pages. Rather, Raubenheimer and Simpson offer a fresh new way of thinking about what drives our appetite and what that means for human health.
The scientists began their careers studying the eating habits of insects and developed their Protein Leverage Hypothesis after discovering that locusts continue eating, sometimes in carnivorous plague proportions, until they’ve consumed a minimum amount of protein. After studying 40 different animals species, they now believe that most animals, even we humans, eat too many fats and carbs not because our appetites for these macro nutrients are stronger, but because our appetite for protein is strongest of all. The theory is that if protein is diluted in our food supply (a la nutritionally empty processed food), we overeat until we satiate our protein appetite. The implications for solving the obesity epidemic are game changing.
I laughed out loud many times while reading Eat Like the Animals (...a calorie is after all a handy measurement for working out how much food it takes to heat a bathtub) and felt constantly curious, until, in the end, I was overcome with a surge of motivation to raise more awareness about the role of ultra-processed food in fueling our entirely preventable chronic disease epidemic.
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My Summary – If you enjoyed my film The Connection, you will likely love this book.
Given that I’ve now made two feature films and written two books which essentially explore the latest science revealing the connection between our mind, body and health,
I can’t believe I’ve only just come across the 2018 book, How Healing Works.
The book’s author, Dr. Wayne Jonas, has a fascinating background. He was a lieutenant colonel in the medical corps of the United States army and director of the holistic branch of the National Institute of Health before spear heading a significant body of research investigating the efficacy of alternative therapies as the CEO of The Samueli Institute. As such, the voice in this book is that of a uniquely open minded military man who’s on a genuine mission to put the care back into health.
In How Healing Works, Jonas explores the chasm between Western reductionist medicine and ancient healing practices, as well as the new science of the mind-body connection, including the importance of therapeutic encounters with our healthcare providers and how the world around us shapes our healing response.
Jonas writes with honesty and heartfelt sincerity about his failings and successes as a family physician trying to do right by his patients. It’s also clear that as a researcher he’s on a mission to contribute a meaningful body of research that isn’t underpinned by a reliance on drugs and surgery. In many ways, it’s as if Jonas has penned the doctor’s perceptive on my own 2017 book, The Whole Health Life, in which I outline my whole-person approach to living with an autoimmune disease.
Jonas isn’t without his critics because he dares to lend credibility to alternative therapy, but in an age where one in two people experience ongoing health issues, such as chronic pain, migraines, fatigue, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and depression, this book is an important contribution in our global efforts to find real solutions to the epidemic of chronic disease. The clear and important message is that we can change the way we approach healthcare and take more control of our own recovery and lasting wellbeing.
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My Summary – A book about the all important “how” of using technology with more intention and purpose.
When the synopsis of Digital Minimalism promised that I’d never again mindlessly sacrifice my productivity to click bait or lose 40 minutes of my evening to my social media feed, I was immediately intrigued.
As I wrote in my recent review of the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, I have a small gripe with the movement working to disrupt Big Tech. Although their message is bang on – we do need to review and regulate the all-powerful mega platforms that have turned our attention into a lucrative commodity – my issue is that few of the “tips and tricks” being offered by the industry whistle blowers actually work. We’re told to delete our social media, ban our kids from screens, and turn off all notifications. But as a person living in the actual world, with kids being assigned app-based homework, with soccer team updates to monitor, with a career in the media, and the need to be able to readily access my email when I’m on the road producing documentaries, despite my best efforts, I constantly find myself getting sucked into click bait, busy work and brainless chatter.
In this book Newport, who is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University, outlines an unapologetic antidote to our digitally saturated environment – Digital Minimalism.
Although it felt at times that Newport was preaching to the choir and making a now well-worn case for cutting down on technological distractions and enjoying the benefits of an offline life, I appreciated his recognition that our efforts to turn off notifications, delete superfluous social media and observe “digital sabbaths” don't go far enough. He writes, “In my experience, gradually changing your habits one at a time doesn’t work well — the engineered attraction of the attention economy, combined with the friction of convenience, will diminish your inertia until you backslide toward where you started.”
Yup, that’s me.
Newport’s solution is to learn from the habits and daily actions of a growing community who thoughtfully and intentionally cultivate their own relationship with technology and advocate a "less is more" approach. Digital Minimalists decide, on their own terms, what technological tools to use, for what purposes, and under what conditions. Although I haven’t yet fully joined the minimalist movement, this book did encourage me to think deeply about my own philosophy for technology use – and the one I want to model to my kids.
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My Summary – Life wisdom packaged in the form of an entertaining audio play.
The fact that my final review is not of a physical book, but rather an audio adaption from Susan Trott's best-selling novels, The Holy Man and The Holy Man's Journey may very well unsettle the 1993 critics of Peter James’s electronic novel that I mentioned in my introduction. But as a busy mother with two young kids and a full time work load on my plate, the truth is, most of my “reading” time is done while I’m washing dishes, driving home and at the gym. I for one, am hugely grateful for the electronic literature revolution.
Regular readers will know that my latest journalistic deep dive involved committing to mindfulness meditation training every day for a year, so when my audio book subscription service offered me this audio play for free, I thought I’d give it a go. I’m glad I did.
The Man on the Mountaintop tells the story of an unassuming 72-year-old Holy Man named Joe, who lives in a hermitage at the top of a mountain. Brought to life by a full cast (including Stanley Tucci who you might know from movies such as The Devil Wears Prada and The Hunger Games) and backed by original music and sound effects, the story is a series of simple parables told through the lens of people who are waiting in a long line to meet with Joe.
This is by no means a spiritual deep-dive, but if you’re after easy, uplifting, down-to-earth wisdom, mixed with delightful performances and an engaging story, you’ll enjoy this. Joe is a crafty trickster who teaches wisdom in unexpected ways.
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These days, my If-Then planning has evolved, but it now looks something like this:
A meta-analysis of 94 studies examining the effect of taking this approach showed a significant impact on people following through with their intentions. As I wrote in my free resource, A Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Mindfulness Practice, it turned out to be one of a number of key strategies I used throughout my mindful year.
It’s now day 1184 of what was supposed to be a year-long commitment to meditate every day. I still find the practice difficult. I still have trouble focussing my unruly mind. And truthfully, after a long hard day at work, I’d still rather check-out and watch a great TV series than make the effort to train my mind. But, if you've seen the film or read the book that resulted from my year-long effort to meditate every day, you’ll know that there’s a very good reason I’m still at it, day in and day out.
It was my first-hand experience of an all-too common phenomenon that, in part, inspired my latest project, which investigated if there was something that I could be doing for myself – something that didn’t require medication, or weekly trips to an expensive therapist’s office, to improve my wellbeing.
Although I found studies demonstrating all manner of things that could provide a short-term mood boost, ranging from listening to music, having a massage, writing in a journal, immersing myself in art, hugging, laughing, exercising, or even drinking tea and chewing gum; as a health journalist, I was after something more concrete and long-lasting.
Regular readers will know that ultimately my search led to a project that became known as My Year of Living Mindfully and involved enlisting a team of scientists to track everything from my stress hormones, to my immune system, brain structure and function, genetic expression and cellular ageing. But it was most surprising that of all the multitudes of scientific markers we measured, in the end, there was only one that really mattered to me – how I felt.
As I neared the end of my mindful experiment, I realised I needed help in order to make sense of the World Health Organisation’s Quality of Life assessment (WHOQOL-100) that I had filled in as an afterthought before I began my experiment protocol of meditating every day. I wanted to know if scientists would be able to measure my my feelings of being, well, better.
I got in touch with Kimina Lyall, a Doctor of Psychology (clinical) candidate at Deakin University, who has a special interest in mindfulness and subjective wellbeing. Kimina’s doctorate supervisor, Robert (Bob) Cummins, is renowned in wellbeing and quality of life research. He's surveyed tens of thousands of people over almost 20 years and found that the population average for subjective wellbeing sits around 75 percentage points, give or take a few. That is, most of us score 75.02 out of 100 in questionnaires about wellbeing and quality of life. (You can take the questionnaire that Bob developed here.)
From all this data, Bob has developed a theory called Subjective Wellbeing Homeostasis, which has some similarities with another concept in social psychology known as the Hedonic Treadmill. Like all social science, there’s nuance, but generally, the evidence suggests that despite the highs and lows we may experience in our lives, most of us have a happiness baseline to which we are destined to return. The Hedonic Treadmill is why people who win the lottery ultimately end up no happier, or how it is that people who have debilitating accidents are often able to bounce back emotionally.
According to Bob’s specific theory, our homeostatic system maintains our wellbeing “set point” within a range, allowing for minor variations from day to day, or even year to year.
Small disappointments or achievements are unlikely to nudge our subjective wellbeing outside of that range, however, when really bad things happen; say we lose our job, go through a horrendous divorce, or a loved one dies, we can be knocked out of our set point range.
The theory is that if we’re able to draw on external resources such as our finances and support networks to get us through, then we can find new behaviours and habits and get back to normal. If, however, the challenge is greater and more prolonged, or we experience multiple debilitating events at the same time, we can go into "homeostatic failure"; aka depression.
Unfortunately I hadn’t collected enough data at the start of my experiment to know for sure, but if I was to speculate, I’d say that the challenge of working-motherhood had knocked me out of my own set point range, even bordering on what Bob’s theory would call “homeostatic defeat.”
Kimina’s compelling (but as yet untested) theory is that mindfulness meditation training could be a tool to help people like me return to our natural homeostatic range.
What I find interesting is that before the experiment, I was exercising regularly and eating a healthy, mostly junk-free diet. I lived in a peaceful, stable country, had meaningful work, healthy kids, a loving husband and good social support. I ticked all the boxes for what “should” constitute a subjectively happy person. And yet I was still below average on the wellbeing scale.
Without giving away too much about the ending of my mindful experiment, I can reveal that by the end of my mindful year, I still had all those things going for me, but when I added daily mindfulness meditation into the mix, my score improved markedly.
As for my final conclusions, although it would be nice if there really were “Five Proven Ways to Boost Wellbeing” as the click-bait headlines in my social media feed suggest, researchers like Bob and Kimina still have a lot more work to do in order to investigate the most effective methods to restore our homeostatic wellbeing when we’ve been knocked off course.
In the same way I don’t think that yoga will work for for everyone wanting to do strength training, or that running marathons is ideal for anyone wanting to develop better endurance, I suspect that the answers will end up being different depending on our unique life circumstances and dispositions.
I am certain of one thing though, I may not have a scientific test to prove it, but with hard work, consistency and dedication; and under the guidance of expert teachers, my daily mindfulness training has most definitely bought me some all-important wiggle room to face life’s inevitable setbacks and my own wellbeing and quality of life is immeasurable improved.
Our current approach to mental wellbeing, which predominantly relies on one-on-one therapy and medication, and treats people only when they’re unwell, is fundamentally flawed. “It’s like we’re waiting for the cancer to be at stage three or four before intervening,” Willem said.
I got in touch with Willem when I was in the midst of my latest journalism project, which involved a 30 000 kilometre journey around the world in search for the evidence-backed, mental wellbeing equivalent of a 30-minute workout or eating a daily serving of five fruit and vegetables. (You can hear my extended interview with Willem here).
I was looking for something that I could do for myself, and something that I could teach my kids to protect, nurture and nourish our minds. While the role of things such as diet, sleep, exercise and social support are recommended for good mental health, I needed something more concrete; a kind of psychological fitness training.
Willem is the lead author of a paper published in The Lancet which demonstrated that an eight-week program called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), which is delivered in groups and involves daily homework for participants, was equal to medication for preventing recurrent depression. At a time when approximately 300 million people have depression and every 40 seconds, someone, somewhere dies by suicide, this is no small thing. Willem is now undertaking a study investigating if mindfulness training in teenage years can prevent depression later in life.
As encouraging as it is, research of this kind, which has the potential to transform lives, is actually rare and woefully underfunded.
Mental health research has long been the poor cousin of medical science. In the UK for example where Willem is based, they spend 25 times more on per capita cancer research than on per capita mental health research. And it’s not just governments that have a blind spot for mental health research. Here in Australia, the private and corporate sectors donate 11 times more to cancer research than to mental health research.
When the impact of mental illness comes with a national £105.2 billion price tag in the UK and a $60 billion dollar bill in Australia, the lack of funding seems nonsensical.
Since start of the COVID19 pandemic the Australian Government has made a series of announcements promising a total of about $130 million to “improve mental health care and reduce suicide rates.” Putting aside the fact that, by way of comparison, $400 million dollars has been granted to foreign film and TV production companies to “incentivise the international screen production activity,” during the same period, from what I can tell about how the mental health funding will be spent, the bulk of the $130 million has been allocated to mental health hotlines, apps, support services and outreach programs, which are all worthy causes, but only about 3.6% is for research.“The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to ten thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.”
Michio Kaku
American theoretical physicist
Among the 18 leading mindfulness scientists I interviewed throughout the production of My Year of Living Mindfully, six were neuroscientists and that’s in addition to the three neuroscientists involved in studying my brain to see what would happen as a result of my meditating every day for a year.
Although the results of my self-experiment were fascinating, what really stunned me was learning that although scientists have discovered more about the human brain in the last 20 years than in all prior human history, something that is as real to me as my conscious awareness is still only theoretical.
It also turns out, the old “triune brain” model, which pits a primitive “lizard brain” against more recently evolved “mammal” and “executive” human parts of the brain, has been debunked for more than 20 years. And while it was once thought that brain functions could be pinned down to the isolated operations in single brain areas (i.e., “the amygdala is your brain’s stress centre”), it turns out, mental activity results from complicated, dynamic interactions of brain areas, that operate in large-scale networks. Basically, my brain’s 100 billion neurons work together to form a matrix of globalised, Internet-like complexity.
All this is to say, that scientists are increasingly studying the brain not from a “regions” or “area” perspective, but from a “network” perspective, and there’s one network in particular that I thought Andrea would be interested in – the default mode network (DMN).
The DMN lights up in brain scanners when scientists tell their subjects not to do anything in particular. I think of it an automatic mental program that runs when there’s nothing more important going on. And it’s designed to force me to think about my place within the world; to make sense of all things related to ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I.’
According to cognitive scientist Matthew Lieberman from the University of California Los Angeles, having a DMN makes perfect sense from a survival-of-the-species, evolutionary perspective. Being pre-programmed to spend our downtime processing and re-processing social information is Mother Nature’s way of ensuring that we work well with others for the good of the tribe. And there’s usually absolutely no problem with having a robust DMN. After all, it’s helpful to be able to remember who I am each morning and I have some of my best ideas when I’m in the shower taking “mental time-out”.
But there can also be huge downsides to having an inner social network. Like Mark Zuckerberg’s social media network, it’s notorious for hijacking my inner thoughts, taking me off task and making me feel like crap. One famous study called “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” asked thousands of people to report their mental focus and mood at random times throughout their day, and concluded that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is happening. The researchers also concluded that doing so generally makes people unhappy.
Learning all this made me realise that Mother Nature didn’t intend for my default self-system to make me happy, she designed it to automatically force me to mull over my life. Whenever I internally replay my verbal blunders or conjure fantasy conversations, whenever I sink into childhood memories, obsesses over an irretrievable email, or throw myself and my family into a horrible hypothetical future, that’s all my DMN coming online.
To be clear, the problem is not having a DMN. It’s the extent to which I get caught up in the drama of my thinking and take it all personally. Overthinking, or what experts might call “excessive worry”, “rumination”, “self-criticism” and “loneliness” are all hallmarks of the inner social network, which unsurprisingly is also linked to a range of disorders from depression and anxiety, to post-traumatic stress. It seems, there are times when the worry about the problem is worse than the problem itself.
And this is where mindfulness training enters the picture. When I was shooting the film, a time before COVID19 changed global travel indefinitely, I flew to Florida in the U.S. to meet with Associate Professor Amishi Jah from the University of Miami, who’s a long-term meditator and leading mindfulness neuroscientist. Amishi explained that she believes mindfulness training is kind of like a cognitive-yoga or an inner mental workout, which trains us to be able toggle between brain networks.
Although there is currently not yet a “neural signature” for mindfulness training, Amishi thinks there are at least three major brain networks involved. “So for example, a simple exercise like mindfulness of breathing, the key aspects of that are to notice what’s happening in the body tied to breathing, select some aspect of a sensation, and then when the mind wanders, to return it back. So, the keywords that I take away are notice, select, and control (or notice mind wandering), and it ends up that that fits very nicely with very well-established brain networks,” she said.
These networks are the salience network (SN), which is said to be a bit like an air traffic controller, filtering and sorting the bombardment of sensory input from the outside world; the central executive network (CEN), which is our “thinking hard” network and comes online when we’re putting effort into focussing and sustaining our attention; and the… default mode network.
Remarkably quiet default mode networks have been recorded in the brains of long-term meditators both when they are and are not practicing. On the flip side studies in patients with major depression and anxiety show heightened DMN activity, both when they’re resting and when they’re doing a task. The more DMN activity in depression, the more correlation there is with the severity of rumination and depression. It seems, there is a big difference between ruminating and problem-solving and when it comes to having an optimal default mode network, the Goldilocks principle might apply – not too little, not to much, just right.
Amishi’s theory is that mindfulness training is like doing “mental push-ups,” giving me more mental strength and better ability to toggle between different brain networks and the next step is to work out if doing mindful mental push ups could boost resilience and prevent trauma-related mental illness for people in high-performance and high-demand jobs, such as doctors and nurses, soldiers, firefighters, and police.
So, as I spoke to the 348 people from Andrea's organisation over an online team "Town Hall" earlier this week, my mission was to answer Andrea’s question about whether it’s possible to “just turn our minds off.” The answer, unfortunately, is no. But as Professor Richard Davidson, the Director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Maddison, explained in my most recent podcast episode, this all comes down to the simple idea that wellbeing can be learned. That wellbeing is actually a skill.
After my year-long self experiment, I'm 100 percent convinced that by doing my mental push ups every day, I can recognise the looping default mode thoughts in my head, get some distance, and intentionally re-direct my thinking. And, in the same way that I was taught as a child not to believe everything I first hear, I'm now learning not to believe everything I first think.
* Andrea’s name has been changed
One of the most frequently asked questions after people have seen my feature documentary My Year of Living Mindfully is:
How do I get started on my own mindful experiment?
Before you continue reading this guide though, the first thing I’d like to ask you in return is:
Do you actually want to start meditating regularly?
If your answer is no, then stop reading now and plan to spend your precious time on something that you would like to do for your health and wellbeing. If your answer is yes, read on.
The reason I ask this important question is because despite the fact that I’ve now been meditating for more than 1000 days (when I initially only committed to 365), I don’t think that everyone should meditate.
If you've seen My Year of Living Mindfully, you might remember that I included a study comparing an eight week mindfulness course to another health program which was similar, but didn’t involve formal mindfulness meditation. The outcomes showed that both groups improved their wellbeing.
If you’re suffering in some way with chronic pain or mental or physical health problems, it’s likely that a high-quality, evidence-based health program that is delivered by supportive, qualified experts will be good for you regardless of whether it specifically includes mindfulness. On the other hand, among other things, mindfulness-based programs have been shown to improve everything from relationships to greater stress resilience, and to help anxiety and depression, some addictions and chronic pain.
If you’re feeling motivated to try mindfulness training, this guide answers some of the most frequently asked questions I've received after people have seen the film. I am not a mindfulness teacher, a psychologist, a doctor or a scientist. But the guide is based on countless interviews, my deep-dive research, and my personal experiences.
For some, mindfulness is a life-saving psychological tool that pulled them out of the depths of depression, for others it’s a way to disentangle from the grip of addiction. Some use mindfulness to face chronic pain or stressful emotions, while others use it to achieve peak performance at work. No matter what you think mindfulness is or what it does, there’s no doubt that there’s a kaleidoscopic array of definitions, which are diverse and even divergent.
The most widely used definition comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn, the microbiologist-turned meditation teacher who designed Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the eight-week mindfulness course, which is favoured by scientists who are interested in studying the effects of meditation.
Just before I travelled to the US at the start of my project, Jon sent me a paper that he’d written in response to some of the recent mindfulness criticism. In it, he expanded on his now famous definition;
“Just so it is clear what I mean when I use the word ‘mindfulness,’ I am using it as a synonym for ‘awareness’ or ‘pure awareness.’ - Jon Kabat-Zinn
“Just so it is clear what I mean when I use the word ‘mindfulness,’ I am using it as a synonym for ‘awareness’ or ‘pure awareness.’ The operational definition that I offered around the work of MBSR and the intentional cultivation of mindfulness (or access to mindfulness) is that mindfulness is the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non- judgmentally,” he wrote.
Defining mindfulness, it seems, is a bit like defining complex ideas such as 'intelligence' and 'wisdom.' Jon’s operational definition clarifies why, in psychological science at least, mindfulness can be regarded as a state of mind, a personality trait, a meditation practice, and a mental health intervention. He intentionally allows for multifaceted complexity so that it can be picked apart and studied in differing combinations such as acceptance, attentiveness, awareness, focus, curiosity, or attitude.
When Jon is paraphrased in popular literature I’ve noticed that the 'awareness' part is often left off his definition. It took me an entire year to really understand why this is a misnomer. Mindfulness is verb, not a noun; an activity not a destination. Perhaps it’s not even an 'awareness practice,' but rather the practice of 'aware-ing'.
If all that is still too confusing, let me try another way of explaining it. Dan Harris, the ABC journalist-turned meditation entrepreneur told me that practicing mindfulness for him is like sitting behind a flowing waterfall, aware of the gushing water that are his thoughts and experiences.
I also like author Tim Ferriss’ description that being mindful is like sitting outside of a washing machine. When he’s caught up in his thoughts, he’s in the washing machine, but practicing mindfulness enables him to step outside and become aware of his tumbling experiences as they occur.
Cultivating the skill of learning to hear myself think. |
To be clear, I mean 'hear' in the sense that it is an activity that requires perceiving, paying attention to, and becoming aware of my inner thoughts, experiences, sensations and interpretations as a distinctly different activity from listening, which implies taking notice of something and then reacting in some way. This is something that scientific researchers might also describe as decentering – observing things that arise in my mind (such as thoughts, feelings and memories) from a healthy psychological stance, with greater-awareness and a new perspective.
Now that I view mindfulness in this way, it finally makes sense why so many health programs are being called 'Mindfulness-based' and how, with the help of good mindfulness teachers, depressed people can recognise that their despondency is something separate from themselves, addicts can develop distance between craving and behaviour, and chronic pain sufferers can disconnect their pain from its emotional overlay.
The practice of mindful 'aware-ing' also means that in the same way that school children can be taught not to believe everything they first hear, they can also learn to not to believe everything they first think and feel. Our workplaces too can be transformed by people who are cultivating an ability to respond rather than react.
As I concluded in the film, in an era of worldwide political volatility, environmental uncertainty, and technological disruption, I suspect the national and international political landscape would also look very different if it was populated by clear minded politicians with an ability to notice deeply and respond wisely.
I confess that when I first started on my mindful experiment, if not for the fact that I had a whole team of scientists tracking my every move, I probably wouldn’t have stuck with a daily practice. There are a million more pleasurable things that I can think of doing with my rare moments of spare time than sitting down to meditate.
Buddhists describe practicing meditation as like trying to tame a 'monkey mind,' but for me, it’s more like trying to wrestle with a bull elephant. No sooner do I direct my awareness to a point of focus (my breath, my body, or whatever else) than I find my mind is elsewhere. Thinking, planning, remembering… anything but where I’m intending it to be.
What really helped was doing a little digging into current neuroscientific thinking about how my mind works, and learning that my brain has something called Default Mode Network (DMN) which automatically switches on when I’m not doing anything in particular. The DFM’s job is to contemplate, understand, imagine, and make sense of all things related to ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I.’ It’s kind of like an automatic program that runs to force me to think about my place within the world.
According to cognitive scientist Matthew Lieberman from the University of California Los Angeles, in the same that way we have basic needs for food, water, and shelter, we also have a basic need for connectedness and being pre-programmed to spend our downtime processing and re-processing social information is Mother Nature’s way of ensuring that we work well with others for the good of the tribe and survival of our species.
Although having a DFM is helpful for telling me who I am each morning and taking mental time-out has been shown to facilitate creative insights, there’s a huge downside to having an inner social network. Like Mark Zuckerberg’s social media network, it’s notorious for taking me off task.
Whenever I replay conversations in my head, rewrite my verbal gaffes, or subject myself to an inner moral performance review, that’s my DFM coming online. Characteristics such as intense emotionality, excessive worry, rumination, self-criticism and loneliness are all hallmarks of my default network which is linked to a range of disorders from depression and anxiety to post-traumatic stress.
There’s still a lot more research to do on this but it seems the problem isn’t my DMN itself, the problem is the extent to which I get caught up in the drama of my life and take it personally when something happens to me, good or bad. From what we know about the DMN so far, it seems that the goldilocks principle might apply – not too little, not to much, just right.
There are currently no 'neural signatures' for what happens during mindfulness training, but researchers such as Associate Professor Amishi Jha from the University of Miami explained to me that the simple instruction to focus on something (breath, sound, sensation etc), then when I notice I’m distracted, to return to the point of focus, means that mindfulness is kind of like a cognitive-yoga or an inner mental workout, which likely strengthens my ability to toggle between brain networks.
All this came together for me when I sat down to practice and listened to the words of veteran mindfulness teacher, Sharon Salzberg, speaking in my headphones.
As my year of living mindfully progressed I started having more pleasant experiences while mediating that made me feel differently about sitting down each day. Eventually, my motivation came less from having the scientific experiment as my 'stick' and more from having the wellbeing benefits as my 'carrot.'
Anyone who’s ever attempted to start a new healthy habit or to break an unhealthy one will know there’s a big difference between understanding something in theory and actually putting it into practice. I knew I needed help. But where to start?
Meditation is now the fastest growing health trend in the US and has transformed from an ancient spiritual practice into a 1.1 billion dollar industry. Unlike other meditation techniques, such as Transcendental Meditation, mindfulness has never been trademarked and it’s therefore now widely available everywhere from classrooms to boardrooms, in studios and online. There are mindful books, apps, podcasts, gyms, busses and even mayonnaise.
With 100,000 products now capitalising on the word 'mindfulness' for sale on Amazon (including the Mindful Pets Tear Stain Remover Combs for Dogs and the Mindfull Products Space Saving Wine Bottle Rack), I’m not surprised that the mindfulness movement is copping a backlash.
After seeking advice from no less than 18 expert meditators and mindfulness scientists here’s how I decided to go about my own experiment. This is by no means the only or best way to go about your own mindful year, but happens to be how mine turned out.
Day 1 – 30
- 20 minutes a day guided meditations by Jospeh Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg
- Using the Ten Percent app, founded by Dan Harris.
Day 31 – 88
- 20 minutes a day guided meditation
- Using the Unwinding Anxiety app, developed by Judson Brewer MD, PhD.
Day 89 – 143
- 45 minutes a day guided practice
- Plus extra homework such as mindful eating and mindful conversations as part of my eight-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction Course (MBSR)
- Using the Openground app for home practice, produced by my MBSR teacher, Timothea Goddard.
Day 144 – 219
- 45 minutes a day guided practice
- Using a combination of apps, plus mindful dishwashing exercise every evening
-Homework set in preparation for my silent retreat by teacher Patrick Kearney
Day 220 – 228
- Silent retreat x 10 days
- Including sitting, walking and mindful eating (starting at 5:30 am – 9:00 pm)
- As led by teacher Patrick Kearney
Day 229 – 365
- Between 45 minutes and 2 hours a day
- Self-guided practice, using Insight Timer app
Day 365 – 1008 (and beyond)
- Aim for 45 minutes a day, plus attend at least one silent retreat annually
- Self-guided practice, using Insight Timer app
Not all apps work for everyone and there’s still a lot more research to do on what works for whom, when, where and why. One of the obstacles for many people is that some apps require a monthly subscription. Many apps offer special rates for teachers and healthcare professionals, and some will even provide their app for free if you write to them and explain your circumstances.
Although apps are helpful (and I still use one every day), I found there was a big difference between learning mindfulness from an app and learning from an experienced teacher. For me, it was a little like learning yoga or a new workout technique from an exercise video as opposed to learning from a yoga teacher or a personal trainer.
I tried many different apps throughout my own mindful experiment, depending on what I was looking for, including:
It became clear after a couple of months that an app could only take me so far and that in order to improve I would need guidance from a meditation teacher. I signed up to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the eight-week mindfulness course which is favoured by scientists who are interested in studying the effects of meditation on our health and happiness. The program was originally developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979 to offer hope to chronically ill people for whom conventional medicine had done all it could. MBSR underpins many of the mindfulness programs now being offered in schools, hospitals and universities alike.
A program called Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is also currently being looked at by scientists wanting to understand the ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘for whom’ of mindfulness and depression. MBCT combines elements of MBSR with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), which was developed by Aaron Beck in the 1960s and aims to help people change their distorted, damaging thinking and behaviour. A meta-analysis (a study of studies involving a total of 1258 participants) demonstrated that MBCT is as equally effective as anti-depressant medication for preventing relapsing depression.
These programs are widely offered globally, some included in my film include:
I would expect that any mindfulness teacher with integrity would not turn a student away because they couldn’t afford to pay full price. This is a philosophy embedded into mindfulness teaching pedagogy. One of my teachers, Patrick Kearney does not work for money at all. He is instead offered something called Dhana, which basically means 'pay what you can.'
Amit Bernstein at the University of Haifa in Israel is also working on program specifically designed to help the mental health of refugees. The program is called Mindfulness Based Trauma Recovery (MBTR-R) and the first safety and efficacy papers are being published in peer reviewed journals in coming months.
Associate Professor Kristin Neff from the University of Texas, who was featured in the film has developed Mindfulness Based Self-Compassion (MBSC) which combines mindfulness and self-compassion in order to provide emotional resilience skills. Greater self-compassion is associated with a range of healthy behaviours, including eating well and sticking to an intended diet, exercising regularly, quitting smoking, and following doctors orders.
Vidymala Burch, who is featured in the film as a case study, runs an organisation called Breathworks which offers mindfulness for chronic pain courses and retreats. The not-for-profit Breathworks Foundation enables people experiencing financial or personal hardship to participate.
I went on an Insight (Vipassana) Meditation retreat which was facilitated by the not-for-profit organisation, Melbourne Insight Meditation. They also offer free weekly meditation groups in Melbourne.
I know many teachers are taking their mindfulness training online. I have not yet personally done an online course, although many are being produced by highly experienced and qualified teachers. My one recommendation would be to look for a program that offers teacher-student interaction and one-on-one guidance so that you can get help when you need it.
I read widely throughout my mindful year, including books by scientists, teachers, journalists, sceptics, critics and comedians. I didn't like all of them but felt that diversity was the key to getting my head around the full breath of perspectives on mindfulness in contemporary life. Some of the books I read include:
Throughout my mindful experiment I came to understand that the word 'meditation' is a bit like the word 'exercise.' In the same way that swimming and running can both be good for me in similar and different ways, different mental training techniques have different purposes and different effects. But researchers are not yet able to recommend specific meditation techniques, in specific doses, to specific people for specific purposes so for that, and for now, we’ll have to rely on the guidance of qualified and experienced teachers.
Efforts to establish mindfulness meditation teaching standards have been under way for more than a decade around the world but exactly what those standards should be, how they should be quantified, and who should enforce them is up for debate.
Before I began my own year of living mindfully, I got in touch with Assistant Professor Willoughby Britton from Brown University Medical School, a leading advocate for rigorous criteria for registered teachers. After publishing her research demonstrating that meditation training can sometimes have adverse effects, Willoughby established a charitable organisation, Cheetah House which works with teacher organisations to create meditation safety plans and training programs.
“I think a lot of the quote unquote ‘adverse’ effects are really about mismatches between the practices and the teachers and the programs, and people’s goals,”
Willoughby’s advice to me? Make sure the meditation teachers I find have the same agenda as I do.
“I think a lot of the quote unquote ‘adverse’ effects are really about mismatches between the practices and the teachers and the programs, and people’s goals,” Willoughby told me. “People might not want to lose their sense of self, but that's what certain practices are designed to do. So don't do those practices. Do ones that cultivate positive emotions. Those are some of my favourites.”
One thing widely agreed upon is that helping people to train their mind takes a great personal experience and skilled wisdom, so here are some questions that might help.
FIVE QUESTIONS TO ASK A MEDITATION TEACHER1. Where did you learn meditation? (Or what is your meditation lineage?)The expert teachers I’ve met have usually been trained by someone, who trained with someone, who trained with someone else, going back hundreds if not thousands of years. This is sometimes called a meditation 'lineage'. Although some teachers might have their own unique style, there’s a great deal to be gained by being grounded in time-tested techniques. Look for teachers who have clearly done their own work too; those who have been meditating for decades, not months. I’ve been meditating every day for almost three years now and I still feel like a beginner. Also, as any upright professional in any industry admits, continuing education is really important. If you find a meditation teacher who still studies, who regularly attends long retreats and keeps skilling-up by doing new trainings, this is a good sign. 2. Where did you receive your teacher training?Although there’s not a universal mindfulness teacher 'qualification', this is a helpful question. In the same way that you wouldn’t want to learn yoga from someone who attended a few yoga classes, or to receive psychotherapy from someone who went to see a psychologist a few times for their own problems, it’s best to learn mindfulness from someone who has been trained to be a teacher by a well-regarded institution. A good follow up question to also ask is who encouraged them to become a mindfulness teacher? It might be a red flag if they can’t articulate a person or institution with a good-reputation. 3. Is your style about relaxation or acceptance?This simple question will tell you if they’re teaching mindfulness meditation. As I wrote in my blog The Mindful Myth: It’s Not Actually About Relaxation, even though mindfulness meditation can be relaxing, it is not the main game. The actual aim is to change the way we relate to our thoughts, feelings and experiences by cultivating non-judgemental awareness. If your teacher is not making that clear then they may not understand mindfulness themselves. 4. Do you think everyone should meditate?Although a good mindfulness teacher might say they wish everyone practiced, they will also be able to give you a nuanced, thoughtful response which touches on the fact that although mindfulness meditation can help many people in varying circumstances, it is certainly not for everyone. In fact, they may also say that there are some people who shouldn’t try mindfulness. 5. What is your motivation to teach?If your meditation teacher is the real-deal, they are likely to say they want to help people to understand the nature of their own minds better. They will likely want to hold the space and offer guidance to help others navigate the tricky waters of their own minds. They will encourage independent thinking and open inquiry in their students. Red flags here would be signs of pushiness, the requirement of blind obedience, or the expectation of adulation. |
By asking these questions, I knew I was in good hands with the teacher I found for my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. Timothea had been recommend to me by MBSR founder Jon Kabat-Zinn himself. She first started attending long mindfulness retreats when she was in her early 20s and is now also a clinical psychotherapist. She was one of the first MBSR teachers in Australia (there are now more than 1000 around the world) and in the last 16 years has personally taught more than 2000 students and trained more than 120 mindfulness teachers through the Mindfulness Training Institute – Australia and New Zealand.
Tim in turn recommended Patrick Kearney to me, who oversaw my ten-day silent retreat. There’s a good reason he has long wait lists. Patrick has been running long retreats for serious meditators for decades and has a particular interest in the original teachings of the Buddha (Buddhism as it was before is was a religion). He studies Pāli, the language of the earliest surviving Indian revision of the Buddha's teachings in order to make the ancient texts relevant for contemporary life.
Surprisingly the biggest problem with my mindful experiment was not convincing 18 world leading mindfulness experts to give me advice, or even lining up the team of Australian researchers to donate their time to study me for a year. My biggest problem was that I had no idea how I would find time.
I’m not alone. It’s currently the number one question I’m asked bu beginners and meditation teachers alike who have seen My Year of Living Mindfully.
“It is currently unclear what conditions are required to maintain the new behaviour and prevent relapse, or to re-establish the new behaviour after relapse.”
When I started the project, I looked into the research on how to make healthy lifestyle changes last and it didn’t look good. There was a 50–80 percent chance I would fail and despite the catchy click-bait headlines that are the sustenance of my social media feed, it turns out experts actually know stunningly little about the real keys to sustained behaviour change. One review, which took into account all of the top 100 behaviour theories being used in respected academic circles concluded, “It is currently unclear what conditions are required to maintain the new behaviour and prevent relapse, or to re-establish the new behaviour after relapse.”
Great. Thanks science. There is however some research that hints at a way forward. I spoke about this idea during one of the film Q and As that I did with a group of mindfulness teachers in Portugal during the COVID19 lockdowns.
When I was writing my book, The Whole Health Life, which is about how I use science to live better despite having a chronic illness, I interviewed behaviour change expert Peter Gollwitzer, a professor of psychology in the Psychology Department at New York University, who has developed a technique called the If-Then planning to help us overcome the gap between what we intend to do and what we actually do.
The idea is simple and involves three point planning. Essentially, it involves specifying;
The theory behind If-Then planning is to automate our healthy behaviours.
Here’s a clip from the podcast interview I did with Peter Gollwitzer, where he explains what the strategy is and why it’s much better than relying on willpower.
LISTEN TO THE FULL PODCAST WITH PETER GOLLWITZER
Over time my If-Then planning has evolved, but these days, it looks like this:
If I’d attempted to meditate at the exact same time each day at the outset of my experiment, I definitely would have failed because I don’t have a regular and scheduled life. These days about three out of seven days a week I manage to meditate first thing in the morning, about two days out of seven I meditate on my lunch break at work, and about two days a week I go all the way through to the end of the day before I can find the time.
Although having an If-Then planning strategy made all the difference in my success (I haven’t missed a day since) it’s not indestructible. Peter did a review of 94 studies looking at the effectiveness of If-Then planning and it was shown to help people achieve their health goals, but it’s way too simplistic to conclude that a little bit of planning is all I had to do in order to establish my regular meditation practice. Indeed, many studies demonstrating the effectiveness of Peter’s technique have been combined with other motivational strategies including boosting self-belief and having positive experiences. Recruiting the encouragement and support of people like Jules (my husband), Justine (my sister) and Liz (my best friend) really helped.
When I’m asked about how I found the motivation to keep meditating at the start when I was finding it so unpleasant, I often talk about the idea of making an Odysseys contract (or 'commitment contract'). I spoke about this idea during one of the film Q and As that I did during the COVID19 lockdowns.
Basically, because the version of 'me' who wanted to meditate every day for a year didn’t trust the version of 'me' in the future (who would rather watch Netflix than meditate), I dreamed up an elaborate way of holding myself to account. I enlisted the help of a team of scientists who tracked my every move. If I failed there wasn’t going to be anything interesting for the scientists to find and I may as well have flushed my $30,000 investment in research lab time down the toilet.
My experiment was elaborate I know, so it might be helpful to share my favourite (less full-on) but nevertheless effective example of an Odysseys contract which comes from a fellow self-experimentalist/ author, A.J Jacobs, who wanted to overcome his addiction to dried mango slices. He’d tried several strategies to kick the habit but nothing worked. In the end he wrote a $1000 cheque to the American Nazi Party and made his wife promise to mail it if he ate another dried mango slice. A.J recently told me that he’s hasn't touched the sugary treat since.
A happy accident led me to discover this life hack one morning when my alarm clock automatically defaulted to playing a recorded talk given by one of my favourite meditation teachers. The talk by Patrick Kearney was recorded while I was on my first silent retreat and is called 'Establishing Mindfulness.' I’ve never changed it since because the first words I hear every morning are, “So this morning I’ll be talking about mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness, and I’m starting at the very beginning.” As I transition from sleep to wakefulness every day I can’t help but be reminded of my own intentions to meditate.
“It’s like flossing. If you can commit to flossing one tooth, your dental health will improve. Why? Because nobody flosses one tooth.” – Associate Professor, Amishi Jha
Failing all that, I like to keep in mind the advice given to me at the start of my project by Associate Professor, Amishi Jha from the University of Miami, who’s a full-time working mother and a leading mindfulness neuroscientist.
“It’s like flossing. If you can commit to flossing one tooth, your dental health will improve. Why? Because nobody flosses one tooth. You’re there, you’re ready to go, you're going to do the full routine. I think that if you keep your bar very low, of just sitting on the cushion once a day, just taking the posture of practising, even if you get up after that, with that as your requirement for your day, I think that you're likely to have a lot of success with this in the next year.”
Before I began my Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course with Timothea Goddard I remember her saying that people often come to meditation because they’ve already tried everything else. And I remember sitting in my first class and thinking what an unlikely gathering we were; a motley crew of mothers and fathers, professionals, performers, entrepreneurs, bakers, nurses and counsellors. There was a 19-year-old motorcycle enthusiast with striking tattoos, a mother of two young kids who was mid-way through her second round of breast cancer treatment, and a Catholic nun who was about to have her 24th major surgery for a horrendous, incurable and painful autoimmune disease.
We had all turned to mindfulness for different reasons – for grief, for depression, for addiction, for post traumatic stress, for chronic pain, for uncertain futures, for financial hardship, and for difficult relationships. But looking back, despite our diversity, we were all unified by our hope to find a better way to cope with the suffering in our lives.
I can’t speak for the others in the group, but that’s certainly what I unexpectedly got from My Year of Living Mindfully. I thought I started the project looking for the brain's equivalent of a 30-minute jog around the block or the mind's daily serving of five fruit and vegetables, but I ended up with was so much more.
I was recently asked by Senior Sydney Morning Herald and The Age journalist Gary Maddox if I’m any happier as a result of my experiment and replied, “The surprising truth is that I don't think mindfulness makes me any happier. I know that's going to sound controversial to anyone who's ever read any bestselling mindfulness book. But, for me, mindfulness makes me more comfortable in life's inevitable discomfort.”
The word I use in the film to explain this is:
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If you've made it this far through my Beginner's Guide to Starting A Mindfulness Practice and you actually haven't seen my film, watch the trailer here or watch the first 15 minutes of My Year of Living Mindfully for free below.
When it came to my new documentary project, my commitment to evidence-based storytelling meant including the perspectives of scientists from all over the world who are at the frontier of mindfulness research. This meant interviewing some of the pioneers who first paved the way for mindfulness to be popularised in the West; scientists such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, the microbiologist-turned meditation teacher who developed Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the eight-week course which is now embedded into the fabric of many hospitals, schools and even parliaments; and Richard Davidson, who founded the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, and was one of the first to risk his reputation by daring to put meditation to the empirical test.
Although meeting people like Jon and Richie gave me a foundational perspective on mindfulness for my documentary experiment, I also learned a great deal from interviewing a new, less well-known generation of researchers, all of whom were inspired by their scientifically minded forerunners to start meditating. What surprised me most of all is that there is a great deal of updated thinking about what mindfulness is, how it works, why it has potential and also its possible pitfalls; and much of this knowledge is not yet widely known.
So, without further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce you to five new-generation mindfulness scientists, who are taking the research to the next crucial stage.
Despite tens of thousands of researchers dedicating tremendous time and energy to figuring out what our brains do and how they work; despite now having impressive technology that enables neuroscientists to peer inside our skulls; and despite having discovered more about the human brain in the last 20 years than in all prior human history, I was stunned to learn that something that is as real to me as my conscious awareness is still only theoretical.
It also turns out, the old “triune brain” model, which pits a primitive “lizard brain” against more recently evolved “mammal” and “executive” human parts of the brain, has been debunked for more than 20 years. And while it was once thought that brain functions could be pinned down to the isolated operations in single brain areas, despite what I was told by my high school math teacher (that I should stick to English because I’m a “right brained” creative thinker rather than a logical-driven “left brained” type) it turns out, activity is similar on both sides of my brain, regardless of my personality.
I interviewed Associate Professor Amishi Jah, the director of the Jha Lab at the University of Miami, when I was still setting up my mindful experiment. I guess I thought that it would be a matter of hopping into an MRI and putting on an EEG cap and the neuroscientists would be able to tell me if mindfulness “worked.” But Amishi explained that we’re no where near having a “brain signature” for mindfulness.
The weight of evidence now supports the view that my mental activity results from complicated, dynamic interactions of brain areas, that operate in large-scale networks. Basically, my brain’s 100 billion neurons work together to form a matrix of globalised, Internet-like complexity.
The work of Amishi and her like-minded colleagues is revealing that there are at least three major brain networks involved in mindfulness training; the salience network (SN), which is said to be a bit like an air traffic controller, filtering and sorting the bombardment of sensory input from the outside world, the central executive network (CEN) which is my “thinking hard” network, that handles higher-order cognition and probably comes online when I’m putting effort into focussing and sustaining my attention; and the default mode network (DMN), a really interesting network that neuroscientists can see when I’m not doing anything in particular.
Amishi's work is currently investigating if and how intentionally training these neural networks by doing mindful "mental push ups" that require us to "focus, notice and reengage," could boost resilience and prevent trauma-related mental illness for people in high-performance and high-demand jobs, such as medical and nursing professionals, active duty military personnel, firefighters, and police officers.
Judson (Jud) Brewer is a neuroscientist and the director of research and innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University. As a Yale-trained psychiatrist with an interest in finding treatments for addiction, Jud also wants to unlock the neural “how” of mindfulness. He's especially interested in the brain’s default mode network (DMN), which switches on automatically when I'm not doing a task and is involved in helping me to understand, imagine, and make sense of all things related to ‘me’, ‘myself’ and ‘I.’
The current thinking is that sub-systems within the DMN are important for creating everything from a static, ‘narrative self’ (…I am Shannon), to episodic memories (…I remember the day I lost my first tooth), to enabling me to embark on a journey of mental time travel (…I wish I didn’t say that). Although my DMN is helpful in letting me know who I am when I get out of bed each morning and it's probably good for the wellbeing of society at-large that my brain automatically defaults to worrying about what others think of my behaviour, we know that characteristics such as intense emotionality, excessive worry, rumination, self-criticism and loneliness, are all hallmarks of the default network.
This is where Jud’s mindfulness research gets really interesting. He’s found that DMN in the expert meditators is significantly less activated than beginners. Interestingly, meditators with the training equivalent of Olympic athletes also show less activated DMNs when they are not doing meditating, particularly in a DMN “hub” called the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), which is kind of like the Grand Central Station of the default network.
Given that abnormal default activity is linked to a range of mental disorders from depression and anxiety to post-traumatic stress, learning to tame an unruly DMN through mindfulness training (or devellping the ability to “decenter” as it’s known in the scientific literature) may prove to be a key in mental health treatments of the future.
Professor Willem Kuyken is far from being an “up and coming” scientist (he was recently listed among the who’s who of influential researchers because his papers investigating evidence-based approaches to depression have ranked him in the top one percent of researchers cited in his field), but as the Director of the University of Oxford Mindfulness Centre, Willem warrants a mention in my “future of mindfulness” list because of where his research is going next.
Willem is especially concerned by the fact that there is a 50 percent chance that if you’ve had depression once, you will get it again, and an 80 percent chance that if you’ve had depression twice, you will get it a third time. “If you think about depression as a recurrent problem, that means it’s a one-billion person problem; a billion people will suffer depression at some point in their lifetime,” he told me.
Willem wants to work out how we can prevent people from becoming depressed in the first place and knows that mental health problems most commonly start during adolescence. He’s currently undertaking the seven-year Mindfulness and Resilience in Adolescence (MYRIAD) Project, to investigate whether and how mindfulness training can be used to prevent depression and build resilience in teenagers. The theory is that if kids can be taught to activate mental control processes that support emotional problem solving, they may not develop depression later in life. The outcomes of this study being run in 84-schools across the UK may be a game-changer not only for the future of mindfulness but for the future of education.
Towards the end of my year-long self-experiment I unexpectedly travelled to the Middle East and saw for myself the scale of the current global humanitarian crisis, in which more people have been forcibly displaced by conflict than after World War II.
Although aid agencies and refugee organisations are contributing much needed food, water, housing, clothing, education and social programs, as a journalist on a mission to find answers to global mental health problems, the troubling reality that I traveled to the Middle East to confront is that most refugees who have been uprooted by war, famine and persecution; people in the worst of the worst of life circumstances, currently do not have, and never will have access to, any kind of mental health service, let alone interventions that are backed by evidence.
This is where Amit Bernstein and his team at the Observing Minds Lab at the University of Haifa entered the story. Amit’s team spent months scouring scientific journals looking for clues as to what makes an effective trauma intervention. Borrowing elements from programs such as Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), they adapted and developed a nine-week program which they’ve called Mindfulness Based Trauma Recovery for Refugees (MBTR-R) or Moments of Refuge.
Although it’s going to take a lot more than one, nine-week mindfulness program to address the unmet psychological needs of the world’s forcibly displaced people, my experience in Israel, where I met some of the refugees who have been part of Amit’s first randomised clinical trial (the gold-standard kind of science), left me convinced that Moments of Refuge is a promising start. “Some of the feedback from the participants so far has been pretty amazing,” he told me. “People, men and women, saying things like ‘I relate to my experience in a totally new way,’ and ‘I didn’t know I was on auto pilot.’ We had even one woman say that she used to struggle with anger and explosiveness at home and hit her children out of rage and in the middle of the intervention she just stopped. That’s it. And the preliminary data shows that compared to controls, we’re seeing an almost 50 percent drop in stress and trauma related symptoms after nine weeks of mindfulness,” he said.
Amit and his team still have a lot of work to do, and their hope is to now put Moments of Refuge to the test in all kinds of settings – from camps, to cities and post-resettlement communities in new host countries – but the first of many papers is about to be published in a peer-reviewed journal and it’s looking very very promising.
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Watch the trailer for my new film My Year of Living Mindfully. Sign up to my newsletter to be notified of the film's FREE online streaming release May 27 – June 03.
]]>The pink elephant is coming, but don’t worry.
Actually, there are a lot of pink elephants coming and they might be harmful!
Whatever you do, don’t think about and don’t panic about the deadly pink elephants which are coming RIGHT NOW (and hoarding all the toilet paper!!!)
Isn’t it interesting that once I’ve planted thoughts in your head, you can’t actually un-plant them? How thoughts can transfer from my head into yours, and you have no way to stop them? And how by telling you to not think about pink elephants, the pink elephants can become even stronger?
As you’ve probably guessed, this is not actually a story about pink elephants. I’ve adapted the pink elephant thought-experiment from work pioneered by the Daniel M. Wegner, a social psychologist who is most famous for his 1980s experiments in which people were unable to stop themselves from thinking about a white bear and I’m using the exercise to demonstrate just how quickly and easily thoughts, feelings and emotions can transfer from one person to another.
This is actually a story about stress contagion and how I’ve come to realise that although I’m currently following all the expert health recommendations for good physical hygiene during the worldwide COVID19 emergency, after recently completing My Year of Living Mindfully, and learning to better understand how my mind works, I’m also going to need to start implementing strict mental hygiene protocols as well.
At a time when anyone and everyone is a potentially undiagnosed spreader of COVID19, when only those who have travelled overseas or been in direct contact with a confirmed case of the illness are eligible for testing, and when there is up to a seven day lag between being tested and finding out the result, feelings of uncertainty, distrust, suspicion and confusion are putting many people over the edge. Panic buying is stripping supermarket shelves and fist fights are breaking out over toilet paper.
Is it just me, or does it seem like the stress response to the virus is spreading even faster than the virus itself?
The very real phenomenon of “stress contagion” is not news to social scientists. Researchers have shown they can raise levels of the stress hormone cortisol in people simply by having them observe others having to give an impromptu speech to a hostile audience. Far from being “all in our mind,” stress has been shown to be physiologically passed between lovers, between strangers, between parents and children, between teachers and students, and between caregivers and their patients.
One especially salient study done by academics from Cornell University in collaboration with Facebook found that if they filtered user’s news feeds (the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network) toward more positive or negative emotions, they were then able to influence the positive and negative emotional tone of user’s status updates. In other words, a more negative feed meant a more negative mood. The study concluded, “Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks."
From an evolutionary perspective, I can see that having an ability to “catch” another person’s emotions makes sense. In palaeolithic days, getting along with others would have been essential to my survival because living in social groups meant there were more people to help with the hunting and gathering of food, bringing up the kids, and fending off attackers. Emotional contagion is a relatively fast and effective way of understanding another person’s state of mind, which in turn, makes it easier to get along.
Unfortunately our ancient brains haven’t quite caught up with new technology and lately most of us have been experiencing an interminable flood of worrying emails, texts, chats, notifications, feeds, “optimised” search results and click-worthy headlines. This afternoon I found my heart racing and my muscles tensed in fight or flight mode, simply by watching a video of two people, who I didn’t know, coming to blows in a supermarket that I’d never visited. It was a full blown pink elephant stampede in my mind and body.
I’m aware that an appropriate level of worry is quite necessary in the coming days, weeks and months as I navigate uncharted waters and do my part to slow the spread of COVID19. I don't yet know if I or anyone in my family will get sick. But one thing is clear; the mental health implications of long term stress contagion are very real and very serious. So, with this in mind, I’ve taken the five common physical health recommendations and partnered them with their mental health equivalents.
As Lenore Taylor recently wrote,“The news rolls in like waves. One unfathomably huge development crashing on another.” I’m checking in on the news headlines once in the morning and once in the evening and turning to trustworthy sources that hold firm against the conspiracy theories, click bait, advertorial, and misinformation. I’m also making sure to take in a daily dose of positivity. The Guardian’s laugh thread is a one place to start.
We’ve just installed a web camera in our living room and this afternoon ran a successful experiment between my six-year-old-son and his 92-year-old great-grandmother, who forged ahead with their weekly poetry lesson over Skype. I’m hoping old-school imagination combined with modern technology will see us through social distancing policies which are now expected to last for months not weeks. I’m also hugging my kids and husband a lot. See my piece The Proven Healing Power of Touch for more.
I've been finding that it’s really easy to get lost in a me me me narrative at the moment. How and I going to cope if I can’t buy hand sanitizer? How am I going to get any work done now that the schools are closed? How am I going to feel if they won't let me take the kids to the beach? To get out of my own head, I've tried to do something every day to put things back into perspective. See my piece The Power of Purpose and Passion In Dark Times for more.
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*** For more information about my new film and screenings go to www.myyearoflivingmindfully.com
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In hindsight, I should have known that the discussion would take surprising turns.
I had expected that Michael Mosely would reiterate the importance of diet and exercise for good mental and physical health. After all, his recovery from Type 2 diabetes and advocacy for a diet involving meal fasting and time-restricted eating alongside high intensity exercise has earned him the kind of fame that saw him mobbed by fans after the event. Instead, he revealed that he’s recently taken up dancing lessons with his wife, both for the mental challenge of co-ordinating his two left feet and for the shared experience with his wife, who he considers to be the biggest influence on his health.
As a psychologist and researcher, who I met recently in the Middle East while shooting my new documentary about mindfulness, I had expected that Amit Bernstein would talk about the mechanisms underpinning the effects of meditation on traumatised refugees. Instead, he revealed that cutting out FODMAPS (Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides and Polyols) from his diet had been life changing for him personally and emphasised the many different ways that we can integrate our mind and body for good health, including by eating well, nurturing our relationships, exercising regularly, and finding meaning and purpose.
Likewise, John Maddocks, who has an inspiring tale of resilience after his shocking encounter with a tsunami, could have spoken about the role of meditation in his trauma recovery, but unexpectedly he revealed that as a committed Buddhist he’s concerned that mindfulness has gone the way of reductionist medicine and been taken out of context instead of being included as just one element of an eight-part definition of what it means to be a healthy, whole human being.
Finally, I expected that Elissa Epel, who studies the link between chronic stress and cellular ageing in our body, would emphasise the importance of mental rest and relaxation if we want to lead long and healthy lives. Instead she explained that although stress and health are inextricably linked, the concept of the “mind” as something that exists entirely in our head is a misnomer and that she believes the solution to the chronic health epidemic will rely on understanding how our emotions and experience of the world are constructed from both our internal and external environments.
In the days following the panel discussion I’ve been thinking about the take-home message that brings all these surprising perspectives on the mind-body-health connection together. From the celebrity doctor who advocated the importance of relationships, to the scientist who emphasised the interconnectivity of all-things; despite the fact that the panelists had very singular perspectives in their professional lives, they were in total agreement about taking a whole-person, whole-world, whole-life approach to health and wellbeing.
It’s been five years since I released my documentary The Connection, which explores the science underpinning the mind-body-health connection and in hindsight, the direction of the discussion was actually unsurprising.
Regular readers will know that taking this approach has been instrumental in my ongoing recovery from a chronic illness and that after pouring through thousands of scientific studies and interviewing dozens of health researchers I realised I needed to stop looking for the one thing that was causing my illness and start looking at all the areas in my life that needed attention. Pretty soon what followed was the very essence of health that, as the World Health Organisation so eloquently defines, as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
* Images courtesy of Happiness and Its Causes
]]>A recent study of 1200 people in Denmark found that 12 percent of people who’d done all the hard work establishing a gym-going routine throughout the year, fell off the wagon never to return, simply because of an Easter break in which the whole country takes five days off.
I can completely relate to the Danish not-so-gym-junkies. My recent Easter break, which involved spontaneous weekends away, family celebrations and free-spirited holiday adventures with my kids meant all my whole-food ambitions went down the bunny hole. My newly minted, colour coded recipe folders stood no chance against the multi-generational rituals of over-indulgence that once marked the end of a 40-day fast but now only signify the beginning of the end of almost every new year resolution, everywhere.
Fortunately, while it’s likely that our unconscious instincts, patterns, and behaviours account for 50 percent of what we do, this means the remaining 50 percent must come from our conscious, rational, and intentional goal-directed side.
I’ll spend the next week or so getting my healthy eating habits back online and picking up where I left off. Hopefully I’ll soon feel more optimistic about achieving my whole-food goal by year end. Although, based on the current state of my herb-garden start-up, I have a long road ahead.
But researchers are increasingly raising concerns about the chemical integrity of Omega 3 products readily available on store shelves. The oils are highly vulnerable to breakdown during manufacturing and become rancid during transportation and storage. In Canada researchers found that 50 percent of Omega 3 supplements available over the counter exceeded oxidisation safety recommendations. Alarmingly, the products marketed for children with flavoured additives had the highest levels of oxidisation. It’s a similar story in studies that have been conducted in the in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
I wish this scenario was limited to Omega 3s. As I’ve written about before, there are also quality concerns with probiotics. As for the ubiquitous multivitamin, studies have consistently found that they provide no clear health benefit. The reality is, we still don’t fully understand the nuances of what vitamins and supplements do in our bodies, how they do it, or what their long-term effects may be. They may actually do more harm than good.
I write these words, not with intention of a making a blanket argument against dietary supplements. I know there’s a good reason they’re called “vitamins” and that “vita” comes from the latin word meaning “life.” In the case of deficiency – think scurvy for lack of vitamin C or thyroid goiters for lack of iodine – they really are vital to human health.
I also know that we live in an imperfect, time-poor world, in which everything from the expense of whole foods, to soil depletion, genetic disposition, gut conditions and chronic stress can cause deficiencies beyond our control. Considering all that we’re up against in modern life, taking a tablet can seem much easier than overhauling other aspects of our diet and lifestyle.
But my point is that a thriving dietary supplement industry has made us think that an isolated single nutrient has the same health effect delivered in a pill as it does when eaten in context of the whole food from which it originated. It conveniently ignores the concept of food synergy, which demonstrates that it’s the whole food, in all its glorious complex composition, that packs the nutritional power punch, rather than single micro food components.
These days I get my anti-inflammatory omega 3 by eating seafood two or three times a week. As for iron, although the supplements have made an enormous difference to my energy levels and a recent blood test showed that my levels are creeping back up, they're also wreaking havoc on my gut and there’s evidence that they may be a quick-fix with long term consequences. Over the next few months I’ll continue taking the supplements while I systematically work with my GP to get to the bottom of my iron deficiency. I’ll also be eating my way to good health by experimenting with my diet until we get things back in balance.
Kabat-Zinn’s “operational definition" clarifies why, in psychological science at least, mindfulness can be regarded as a state of mind, a personality trait, a meditation practice, and a mental health intervention. He intentionally allows for multifaceted complexity so that it can be picked apart and studied in differing combinations such as acceptance, attentiveness, awareness, focus, curiosity, or attitude.
As to how all this played out in my real-life year of living mindfully, regular readers will know that there’s a big difference between understanding mindfulness in theory, and actually putting it into practice and it’s not surprising that I got stumped pretty early on. In my efforts to “be in the moment” I couldn’t work out exactly what moment I was supposed to be in.
This is how I learned that the popularised “present moment” interpretation of mindfulness is a misnomer. Indeed, despite the titles of best selling books such as Be Here Now and The Power of Now, scientists believe that being in “the moment” is probably impossible thanks to the hard-wired ways our brains process thinking and decision-making. At any given time there are an infinite choice of things we can pay attention to; sounds, smells, sensations, even our thoughts and feelings all happen in the “moment.”
This is where I found Daniel Siegel’s “Wheel of Awareness” metaphor for mindfulness to be helpful. Siegel, who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine as well as a leading mindfulness advocate, has us think of our awareness as lying at the centre of a circle (the “hub”) from which, at any given time, we can focus on any amount of thoughts, feelings, and sensations circling us on the “rim.” Everything that we could be aware of is represented on the outer rim and the experience of being aware is represented in the hub. Mindfulness training is about intentionally connecting the hub and rim via a “spoke” of attention, which can be directed to focus on one point or another on the rim.
Framed in this way, mindfulness training can be thought of as intentionally calling on our awareness instead of being lost in thought out on the rim. This is why a variety of meditation techniques can be used to practice the skill, whether it’s a body scan, breath awareness, open awareness, or an infinite number of other non-judgmental awareness techniques. The point is to practice intentionally directing our attention and to become more connected with our awareness.
It’s interesting that just before I travelled to the U.S. at the start of my project, Jon Kabat-Zinn sent me a paper he’d written in response to some of the recent mindfulness criticism. In it, he expanded on his now famous definition;
It’s the “awareness” part of his now famous definition that is often left off when he’s paraphrased. As a journalist who’s written a lot about mindfulness, I’m guilty of it myself and it’s taken me until now to really understand what he was getting at here.
Although I started my quest searching for “one true definition” of mindfulness to rule them all, I’ve stopped thinking about mindfulness as a “thing” that needs to be defined. Mindfulness is verb, not a noun; an activity not a destination. Perhaps it’s not even an “awareness practice,” but rather the practice of “aware-ing.”
Others have articulated this far better than I can. Dan Harris, the ABC journalist-turned meditation entrepreneur told me that practising mindfulness for him is like sitting behind a flowing waterfall, aware of the gushing water that are his thoughts and experiences. I also like entrepreneur Tim Ferriss’ analogy that being mindful is like sitting outside of a washing machine. When he’s caught up in his thoughts, he’s in the washing machine, but by being mindful, he’s able to step outside and be aware of his tumbling experiences as they occur.
After 542 days into what was supposed to be a year-long self-experiment, it finally makes sense to me as to why mindful awareness training has earned its multi-decade record in modern medicine and healthcare, and why it’s now finding its way into education, business, social justice, and politics, despite the breath of definitions, interpretations, and techniques.
With the help of good mindfulness teachers, depressed people can recognise that their despondency is something separate from themselves, addicts can develop distance between craving and behaviour, and chronic pain sufferers can disconnect their pain from its emotional overlay.
The practice of mindful aware-ing also means that in the same way that school children can be taught not to believe everything they first hear, they can also learn to not to believe everything they first think and feel. Our workplaces too can be transformed by employers, employees and colleagues with an ability to respond rather than react.
In an era of worldwide political volatility, environmental uncertainty, and technological disruption, when the World Health Organisation has warned that mental ill-health will be the biggest global burden of disease by 2030, I suspect the national and international political landscape would also look very different if it was populated by clear minded politicians with an ability to notice deeply and respond wisely.
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I don't write all this in an attempt to sound "holier than thou" and to make people who are unwell feel as though there's yet another unachievable thing to put on their "Supposed To Do" list. As I’ve written about before, knowing that I should exercise daily and actually doing it are two different things. I’ve interviewed leading exercise experts, written a ton of blogs, and devoted a whole chapter in my book to the importance of moving more and sitting less, and I still have trouble staying on track.
As I wrote in my blog, The Fascinating Theory About Why You Hate Exercise (And What To Do About It), at least part of the problem is that nature programmed us to loathe exercise and I’ve had to employ a number of sneaky strategies to overcome this including making it easy and enjoyable to get up and go.
I also want to highlight that the authors of the papers I've mentioned stress that exercise should be attempted only when we’re medically stable and our symptoms are under control. They’re still drilling down the finer mechanisms that explain when, where, why and how exercise is beneficial. I’m not for a second suggesting that you should run a mile if you’re aching all over or feel flat with fatigue.
As for my own approach, I still have good days and bad days, but I consider exercise to be my medicine. My attitude is to follow the lead of Theodore Roosevelt who in his autobiography quoted his friend William “Squire Bill” Widener’s advice: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”
]]>I was taken back in time almost 14 years ago when I was told by a specialist doctor that I have an incurable, life-long disease. Over the years different doctors have given my illness different labels, such as Lupus, Sjögren’s syndrome, fibromyalgia, or simply “connective tissue disorder,” but none have been able to give me a cause or a cure.
Like so many others before me, when conventional medication did little more than cause weight gain or fog up my head, I turned to alternative therapy. I paid extraordinary sums of money for newfangled tests, tried all the fad-diets, bought supplements, and visited “intuitive” healers. I handed over my money to anyone and everyone who promised a cure. But I was still sick.
Looking back on my health crisis, I now understand that I was unwell because of a perfect storm. I had a genetic predisposition to autoimmune disease and my life in the fast lane was causing a runaway train of inflammation leaving me painfully arthritic, lethargic and emotionally wrecked.
It wasn’t until I stopped looking for a magic pill or a single treatment and started looking at all the areas in my life that needed attention, that my health started turning around. Regular readers will know that I turned to scientific evidence and the latest health research to finally understand that the path I needed to follow was maddeningly, ridiculously… simple.
It turned out that I needed to take a whole-health, whole-life approach. This included not only taking my medicine when necessary, but also eating more whole foods and cutting the crap, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep. It also meant addressing my chronic stress levels, my anxiety-driven insomnia, and emotional wellbeing. I also worked on nurturing healthy relationships and finding meaning and purpose that would motivate me and help to keep me on track.
All this might sound as though I’m saying that having good health is simply a matter of taking personal responsibility; after all, what we do (or fail to do) plays such a central role in chronic disease. But while I’ve said that the changes I’ve made in order to live well despite my illness have been simple, they’ve also been maddeningly, ridiculously… difficult.
I have every reason in the world to take care of my health – I have two gorgeous kids in need of my love and care for many years to come, I have meaningful work that I’m deeply committed to, and I live in a prosperous, stable country that provides ample opportunity for personal development. On top of all this, I’m a health journalist, who’s job is to stay on top of the latest health advice. And yet, despite all this, as I’ve confessed many times before, I’m constantly falling off the well wagon.
This is an age where junk food manufacturers are at the top of food chain and when the concept of “moderation” is marketed as eating a block of chocolate after a hard day of work. This is a time when overwork has become the norm – both admired and expected, and when an unregulated, multi-billion dollar “wellness” industry blurs the lines between expert advice and quackery. As I wrote in my piece Will Vs Skill: Making Healthy Changes Last, in the face of all that is against us, the evidence shows that self-control alone isn't enough.
As Associate Professor Harald Schmidt from the University of Pennsylvania wrote in this paper about the chronic disease epidemic in the U.S., if I can’t stay on track, then what chance does, say, a child have if they're living in an inner-city borough and being raised in a low-income family, with obese and smoking parents? Schmidt explains that tackling the chronic disease epidemic by making it a matter of “lifestyle” is monumentally problematic because “It can suggest that people choose, for example, smoking or heavy drinking as others might decide between taking up golf or tennis as a hobby.”
All this was playing on my mind at the Press Club lunch when I was handed the microphone to ask Catherine King a question. (You can see the event's broadcast on ABC TV’s iview here. My question is at time code 45:10) Here's an excerpt.
Don't get me wrong; if I were in a serious car accident, had a heart attack, a major wound or infection, I would want to be treated by the best conventionally-trained medical expert I could find. Conventional medicine works wonders when it comes to acute care and life-saving emergency responses. Where it’s falling short is in dealing with ongoing chronic health issues that don't heal quickly and can worsen over time.
If we want to really make a big difference the disease epidemic, in which two in three people will be diagnosed with a long-term illness, we need big changes.
By this I don’t mean another gazillion dollar public education campaign. As Pro Vice-Chancellor Sandra Jones, from the Australian Catholic University recently highlighted in The Conversation, most media campaigns like this don’t work. All the evidence shows that knowing we should look after our health and actually doing it are two different things.
Personally, I would like Ms King to outline a vision for a food labelling system that makes it really easy for me to know what’s healthy and what’s not without having to squint at an obscure chart on the back of packaging. Better yet, how about plain packaging for fake foods that have zero nutritional value? Or perhaps an immediate ban on junk-food advertising to children?
I would have also liked to hear that Ms King will boost funding for the extraordinary Australian researchers who are drilling into the “how” of health, the “why” we’re getting sick, and “what” we can do about it, beyond developing new drugs and surgical techniques.
While the above would make a huge difference in helping me to live better in this over-stressed, topsy-turvy modern world, of all the things I wish the (likely) future health minister of Australia would do, it would be to invest significant money and resources into developing and supporting disease-specific, evidence-based, long-term, ongoing health programs that are designed to help people turn their lives around in the same way that I have.
Most people who are sick are not investigative health journalists like me. They don't have the time and resources to do it on their own. They need experts and support to show them the way.
We have a good starting point for this. For example, the experts that I featured in my documentary The Connection are demonstrating in published, peer-reviewed research that their programs can significantly help people with chronic disease. Here in Australia, Professor George Jelinek’s program for Overcoming Multiple Sclerosis is a shining example. It’s interesting that all these programs have a core set of commonalities including:
In other words, the foundation to the programs that are making a meaningful difference in the lives of people with chronic disease is taking a whole health, whole life approach to getting better.
I don’t think I can be much clearer in my case for a significant national investment in evidence-based programs that make it easier for people to recover from chronic disease, so I’ll simply end with the recent words of Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghbreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organisation, which are far more eloquent then mine –
“The world is full of frameworks, roadmaps and action plans that sit on shelves collecting dust, and never make a difference to people. I urge you, starting now, to translate your good intentions into concrete actions that transform the health of your people.”
I had writers block; the mental equivalent of the SWOD (Spinning Wheel of Death) that accompanies a computer operating system in need of an upgrade. I was hurtling towards a grant deadline and every word I’d composed felt trite, vacuous and a long way off encapsulating the depth of the film that I was hoping the grant would allow me to release.
I’m far from being the only person to experience a mental traffic jam from time to time. The Pew Research Center in the U.S. published a survey of 1520 adults which found that all their tweeting, texting, checking, chatting, inboxing and outboxing left around 20 percent of them feeling overloaded like me.
At a time when some estimates suggest that information overload costs $650 billion worldwide each year, it turns out “techno stress” is considered to be a diagnosable clinical condition. One research group has even declared October 23rd Information Overload Day.
So what should I do? Was it even possible clear my writer’s road block in a world of too much traffic?
As an evidence-based health journalist, when I have a problem of this kind I usually turn to peer-reviewed academic literature for answers. Although I’ve now read all about how people with chronic diseases can become immobilised because they’re overwhelmed by too much health information and how social media can be terrible for the mental health of teenagers, I was surprised to learn that despite the prevalence of muddy mindedness, it’s not actually well-studied in the scientific literature. Even less-studied is what to do about it.
So with very little guidance from science, I turned to the next best thing – the wisdom of the ages and the ancient practice of mindfulness.
For the last 18-months I’ve been working on a new film project which has involved my committing to meditating every day for a year and enlisting a team of scientists to track what happens. Although the experiment is technically over, I’m still meditating daily and it’s interesting that my writer’s block coincided with a run of especially busy days in which I’d only found about 15 minutes to meditate.
Truthfully, the last thing I felt like doing after a day spent banging my head against the keyboard was to sit and observe the unpleasantness of my inner mental experience. It would have been far more enjoyable to binge-watch Netflix. But nevertheless, with the grant deadline looming large, I meditated for a full hour before going to bed.
This involved non-judgementally observing all the thoughts drifting through my mind – from the practical (How long should I soak the cashews in order to make that dairy-free sauce tomorrow?), to the worthy (What were the conclusions of the stress-immune review paper?), to the completely useless (Why is Megan Markel’s dysfunctional family so newsworthy?) As one of my teachers says, I allowed all these thoughts to simply bubble up and float down stream.
That night I slept wonderfully and as I went about my morning activities the following day, bustling the kids off to school and preparing for work in the usual way, I also made a conscious choice to block extraneous forms of stimulation – no radio, no podcasts, no headlines, no email, no group chats, no texts.
When I hit my desk at 9am, the state of my mind could not have felt more different to the day before. It felt as if all the mud in my bucket had settled to the bottom and left only clear thinking behind.
I can’t find any scientific literature to explain this mud-in-the-bucket clearing effects I’ve experienced through my mindfulness training. The closest I’ve found in the neuro-biological literature is sleep research done on mice which showed that brains have a glymphatic system which clears protein build up from our brain while we sleep. But I fully accept that it’s a long stretch to equate the two.
A few years later, when I was buried in the wretchedness of my thesis for my post-graduate journalism studies, I had another Post-It note on my computer screen which read “ABC.” I would be happy when I landed my dream job in broadcast TV.
Over the years my happiness goal posts have continued to move. I’ll be happy when I get a promotion… I’ll be happy when I’ve saved a deposit for a house… I’ll be happy when I’m married… when I’m a mother… when I’ve made my film… written my book….
Of course I’m oversimplifying things, but you’re probably getting the gist that I’ve woken up to an internal mantra that plays during times of discontent; “I’ll be happy when…” and it’s become apparent that my quest for “happiness” is unreachable; at least, the modern-day version of happiness is; the one that is sold to me on the back busses as an ever-lasting feeling of “good” that is embodied in a yellow smiley face emoji.
This insight; that I’m destined to be forever chasing happiness rainbows, came while I was reading a book by evolutionary psychologist, Robert Wright in which he makes the case that I will never achieve long lasting happiness because Mother Nature doesn’t want me to. (You can read my book review here.) Simply explained, Wright argues that gratification was designed to evaporate leaving dissatisfaction in its place as a kind of self-care, survival-of-the-species motivational force.
Think about it this way, if my African-savannah roaming ancestors were enduringly satisfied after eating a meal, they would have soon died in a state of contented starvation. This may have been nice for them, but not so helpful for the higher objective of procreation, raising young and successfully passing on genes to the next generation. So instead of granting enduring satiation, evolutionary forces gave my forerunners a kind of tug-of-war relationship to food. They ate, felt good, and then after a while, felt hungry and discontented, which motivated them to find food, and so on and so on.
I guess the Rolling Stones really were onto something when they sang “I can’t get no satisfaction.”
Wright’s happiness take-down ties in with a concept in social psychology called the “Hedonic Treadmill.” Like all social science, there’s nuance in the research, but generally, the concept suggests that despite the highs and lows we may experience in our lives, most of us have a happiness baseline to which we are destined to return. This is why the poor buggers who win the lottery ultimately end up no happier than if they hadn’t been blessed by their financial stroke of luck.
I know all this sounds rather dismal. Indeed, some argue that the pursuit of greater happiness is entirely futile and I confess that when I was first mulling it through, a deep sense of melancholy came over me. I started to wonder what – if lasting happiness is unattainable – was the point of… well… it all?
But as I contemplated the slipperiness of my happiness, I also began paying attention the bi-products of my search for it. My quest led me to do just one more practice essay at school, to volunteer for just one more internship at university, to dig just a little deeper when I was a news reporter and to take the frightening leap of leaving mainstream journalism to become an independent filmmaker. My search also led me to marry the most wonderful man in the world and to experience the bone-deep terror, exhaustion, joy and delight of raising a family.
In my almost 38-years on this planet, the bi-product of my ceaseless pursuit of happiness so far – the good, the bad and the gut-wrenching – has all been rather fantastic and I wouldn’t change it for anything.
So I’m now thinking perhaps that it’s not so much happiness I should be pursuing, but rather the pursuit of the pursuit of happiness – or the happiness of pursuit. I suspect therein lies the meaning and purpose of it all. Maybe that would make a nice Post-It note on my desktop.
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I have many good reasons to want to achieve these worthy goals. Mainly, I'm motivated by a desire to keep feeling well despite living with an autoimmune disease which flares up during times of high stress. But, as regular readers of this blog will tell you, wanting and actually doing are two different things and I'm all-too aware that I can't rely on willpower and good intentions alone. So, in order to finally make it to a yoga class, I’ve formulated an If-Then plan. (Check out my piece How To Find Time To Meditate if you’d like more on behaviour change expert Peter Gollwitzer’s highly effective technique.)
Making meals from scratch is a much bigger project, but I'm determined that my woeful culinary skills and lack of know-how won't hold me back. I made a start by signing up to learn from a wonderfully talented whole-foods, plant-based chef and over the last month I’ve also been compiling all my favourite recipes into one easy place.
As for my third ambition, unfortunately this is not the part where I tell you that I’ve discovered the super simple secret solution to quitting junk food. The truth is, giving up the “good” stuff is proving to be the most difficult of my resolutions. After all, I’m up against deeply embodied, long-established, often-unconscious habits. I’m also battling the cultural normalisation of eating foods such as “party” pies and “comfort” cookies, as well as the multi-billion dollar advertising budget of manufactures that dominate the food supply with spectacularly delicious, readily available, energy-dense, but nutrient-poor foods.
I was fascinated to come across research this week demonstrating that people attempting to cut down on eating highly processed foods experience withdrawal symptoms such as mood swings, cravings, anxiety, headaches and poor sleep in a similar way to people quitting smoking cigarettes or using marijuana. Other research shows that by merely setting the intention to quit junk food, I may have made it even harder to avoid because thinking about food can actually make it more likely that I’ll notice it.
This is all further complicated by the fact that I’m not even sure what the definition of junk food even is. My son wasn’t allowed to eat his home-made, wholemeal, vegan, sugar-free apple and banana muffin the other day because his school has a “no-treats” policy.
Sigh.
But all this is not to say that my quest is hopeless. Here are five things I’m doing in order to achieve my junk-free goal.
1. Junk-Free House
I started this concept after I interviewed a food-behaviour researcher for my podcast, who made the point that willpower is useless if junk-food is readily available. Unfortunately, I fell off the wagon over the Christmas period after well-meaning people gifted me a ton of candy and sweets – much of which had a “health halo,” which is a particular weakness of mine.
Essentially, the junk-free house concept involves not ordering any “discretionary” food in my weekly online shopping and having a strict no-candy aisle at the supermarket rule. It’s just too tempting.
If sweety treats still manage to find a way into my house (and they do, quite often) then the ones that cannot be thrown in the trash because they’re just too special, are squirrelled away in a cupboard in my laundry to be brought out at the right time.
2. Whole-Food Pantry
In January, I cleared out my pantry and it wasn’t pretty. I confess to finding bi-carbonate soda with a used-by date of 2014. The cupboard now basically only contains grains, nuts, beans, seeds, flours, tinned whole-foods and natural flavourings and spices. (We’ll see how long all my nice-neat organising and labelling lasts, but I’m going with a “begin as you mean to proceed” strategy here.)
The happy side-effect of this is that by buying in bulk, I’m hoping I’ll be saving money on groceries.
3. C.A.N (Convenient, Attractive, Normal)
I’ve deliberately engineered my environment so that I mindlessly eat well. Natural teas are prettily displayed to invite me to drink them, colourful fruit and vegetables are presented in baskets to invite me to eat them, and I pre-wash refrigerated fresh fruit such as grapes and blueberries so I can snack on them.
I based this idea on a 2015 analysis of 112 studies that collected information about healthy eating behaviours and found that there were three simple reasons most healthy eaters made healthy choices. Foods such as fruits and vegetables were:
4. Planning
By far my single biggest enemy to quitting junk food is not having enough time to prepare healthy alternatives. I’ve now relinquished an hour of my precious Saturday mornings to overcome this problem. I’m meal planning with lunchtime-leftovers in mind and ordering exactly what I need online. This way, when it’s 6:00pm after a long day at work and the thought, “What am I going to cook for dinner tonight?” pops into my head, the answer is sitting on a note on my refrigerator. So far, it’s proving to be a time-saver because I’m not having to zip to the supermarket as often. There’s also not as much food waste at the end of the week.
5. Attitude Change
I’ve changed my mental self-talk from “I have to quit junk-food” to “I want to quit junk food.” This is inspired by research which shows that self-control is harder when people are motivated by the feeling that they “have to” behave in a certain way. On the other hand, people who “want to” reach their goal experience fewer goal-disrupting temptations and don’t need to exert as much self-control. A “want to” goal is one that we feel internally motivated to accomplish for ourselves. For example, I want to quit junk-food so I can nurture a healthy gut microbiome and feel good.
I’ll keep you posted on my progress throughout the year, but if you have additional tips you can share, I’d love to read them in the comments below.