A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Changing Your Brain ft. Dr. Richard Davidson | The Happiness Lab Podcast

Key Takeaway

Build a conscious habit by attaching one minute of attention to something you already do every day. Before a meal, pause to notice the people and systems that brought the food to you; before a meeting, bring one positive quality of each person to mind; while walking, feel your body move. Dr. Richie Davidson’s research suggests that consistent, brief practices—even about five minutes daily—can strengthen well-being without adding another item to your schedule.

Episode Overview

Dr. Laurie Santos speaks with neuroscientist Dr. Richard “Richie” Davidson about neuroplasticity: the brain’s capacity to be shaped by repeated experience. Drawing from his book, Born to Flourish, Davidson explains four trainable qualities—awareness, connection, insight, and purpose—and shows how brief daily practices can cultivate them.

Full Transcript

Transcript of A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Changing Your Brain ft. Dr. Richard Davidson | The Happiness Lab Podcast from The Happiness Lab. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

This is an iHeart podcast, guaranteed human. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. When the internet arrived, most people used it to look things up. Others saw what it could really do. The same is true with ChatGPT. ChatGPT work goes beyond answering questions. Give it a goal, plus things like notes, files, feedback, data, or project plans, and it can help create a brief analysis, deck outline, tracker, or workflow. You stay in control, reviewing the work and choosing the final result. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects.

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When I was in college, which I feel compelled to add does not feel that long ago, we were taught that people were pretty much born with all the brain cells they would ever have. Back then, it was assumed that you start life with a certain number of neurons and that's pretty much it. The brain cells you were born with get shaped as you develop and neurons that you don't use just die off. Under this old view, once you reach adulthood, the architecture of your brain is largely fixed.

The door to your identity is locked, so to speak. But just around the start of the current century, scientists discovered something astounding. Our brains actually generate new cells all the time. I was in graduate school when this new research was coming out, and I can't emphasize enough just how much of a neuroscientific game changer this was. Many of the limitations we had placed on the adult brain were simply out the window. Brain development was just way more dynamic than scientists originally realized. This remarkable capacity for change is what scientists refer to as neuroplasticity.

One of the things that I often say is that neuroplasticity happens wittingly or unwittingly. This is University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist Dr. Richie Davidson. And most of the time neuroplasticity happens unwittingly. Most of the time we're thoroughly unaware of the forces around us that are shaping our brain. Tell me about the London cab driver study, because I think this one's just so telling of what experience can do to shape the brain. I mean, this was in the days before GPS, so I know for some viewers it's difficult to imagine, but there was a time when we didn't have these maps on our phones that enabled us to figure out where to go, and for those of you who've been to London, it's a complicated city, and cab drivers prior to GPS had to learn the map of London to do their job, and there was actually an exam that these drivers took.

And so there have been a number of famous studies in this genre, but the first one demonstrated that cab drivers in London who successfully completed their qualifying exam actually had structural differences in their hippocampus. The hippocampus is an important brain region for memory, for navigation, and the size of their hippocampus was actually larger in certain regions, and so this was a very powerful demonstration that the brain is indeed plastic and showed this at the human level. You know, it takes a long time to learn the streets of London, but there have been studies of very short-term training.

For example, scientists have found structural differences in the brain due to learning to juggle, and so this is just indicative that the brain is highly sensitive to this kind of training and will show physical signs of plasticity very quickly. And so that's all great when we're learning to juggle and learning, you know, the streets of London. It might not be so great given all the negative training forces that are around us all the time. Right. I frequently say that we're all part of a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent, and that, of course, is exposure to the internet, exposure to social media, to media in general, and that is very difficult to buffer ourselves from.

We're barraged by that kind of input, and that is really shaping our brain. And so it's important to recognize that neuroplasticity is neutral with respect to its potential impact. If we are exposed to toxic influences, the presence of neuroplasticity will actually make things worse because we're going to be shaping our brains with all of this negative input. And this is an invitation to take more responsibility for shaping our own brains in ways that promote wholesome qualities. Everything your brain encounters affects it. Tiny moments from your everyday life will change your mind in the most literal sense.

So how can you take advantage of your brain's plastic nature to become the person you want to be? Well, Richie breaks all of this down in his incredible new book, Born to Flourish, which he co-authored with fellow neuroscientist Cortland Dahl. And in this episode of our Back to School series, Richie will break down all the basic steps so that we can learn how to harness our brain's capacity for change and start shaping it for greater resilience, focus and well-being. Stay tuned. Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong?

What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. I was extremely nervous. I was told to sit to wait and I began to really just tremble. In the early 1990s, Richie had an encounter that not only changed his life, but also helped to reshape the scientific study of well-being as a whole.

You know, I would regard myself as someone very average in terms of anxiety, sort of in the middle of the bell curve. But for the first time in my life and the only time in my life, I nearly had a panic attack. You see, for the entirety of his career, Richie's work has focused on one singular question. Why is it that some people are more vulnerable to life's slings and arrows and why are others more resilient? And his approach to that research looked a lot like the cutting edge neuroscience of the time.

I focused a lot on the adversity side of the equation and studied the brain mechanisms that were associated with vulnerability to anxiety and depression and stress-related disorders. That is, until his research attracted the attention of someone pretty unexpected. Everything changed in 1992, which was when I first met the Dalai Lama. That's right. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, had heard of Richie's work and requested that they meet. And Richie was, to put it lightly, a complete nervous wreck. But then once I was with him in the first 15 seconds of that encounter, all my anxiety was completely dissipated and I felt very much at home.

Turns out the Dalai Lama, big neuroscience nerd. But he had a question about what researchers at the time were choosing to study. He asked me very innocently, why can't we use the same tools of modern science that we were using to study depression and stress and anxiety and apply those tools to the study of qualities like kindness and like compassion? He was interested in encouraging research on meditation and the qualities that were said to result from these practices. And that was a wake-up call for me.

You know, when I went to school, I was trained to look at people and try to figure out what's wrong with them. And this was an invitation to look at people and try to figure out what's right with them. Very different orientation. That conversation set Richie on a new path, using cutting edge neuroscientific tools to study the effects of mindfulness and meditation on the human brain. In your early work, you set about to test this with the London cab drivers of contemplative practice, the expert monk meditators.

How did you get connected with this population and what did you notice when you started to work with them? Well, I got connected with this population really through the Dalai Lama. He was really urging us to take this seriously and to start this research. And he had the early intuition, given that science was an important currency in the West, that if we began to study this scientifically and if we found that it was beneficial from the scientific findings, that would actually help people to take this kind of practice more seriously.

And at that meeting was a French Buddhist monk by the name of Mathieu Ricard. But Mathieu also has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from the Pasteur Institute, where he worked with Francois Jacob, the Nobel laureate. And Mathieu raised his hand and said, I'll be the first guinea pig. He had been meditating for years in the Himalayan regions. He was our first long term practitioner. We began that study in 2001, and the very first paper on that work was published in 2004. And if you look at the number of neuroscientific publications on meditation, you see an inflection point right around 2004 and 2005.

And at least in part, I would like to believe that that early work that we did helped to stimulate this field and show that there was really a there there. And so what did you find when you looked at their brains? Well, we looked with both brain electrical measures as well as with MRI, and we found several things. First, with the brain electrical activity, we saw very high amplitude gamma oscillations. Gamma is a brain oscillation that is seen in ordinary people like you and I. But when it's seen in ordinary people, it's typically seen for really brief periods of time, typically less than one second.

And it's seen during moments of insight where you have a flash of, for example, a solution to a problem. If you're doing a crossword puzzle and you suddenly recognize the right word that fits within a certain column or row, there's a moment of insight. It's very brief. It's very fleeting. And in those moments, you typically see this burst of gamma oscillations. What we saw in these long term meditators is gamma oscillations that were present for very long periods of time for the entire duration of the meditation period.

And in fact, we saw that there was significantly higher prevalence of gamma during the resting baseline when they weren't meditating. So what does that mean? I mean, their brains are completely different than what we're seeing in normals. Like, how did you interpret that? Well, it was exciting to us because we saw that there were indeed these dramatic differences. In many cases, we found associations between their lifetime duration of practice and the magnitude of effect in these different brain metrics. And by the way, for this first study with long term practitioners, the average lifetime hours of practice in this group was thirty four thousand hours.

And viewers can go do the arithmetic at home, but thirty four thousand hours is a huge number. They spent a lot of time in formal meditation. So if you're a Buddhist monk and an expert meditator, this sort of practice can change your brain in a way that gives you an extended state of insight. But what about the rest of us who don't have thirty four thousand hours to devote to this sort of thing? Those of us who spend most of our days amidst the chaos of work life and home life rather than the Zen life of a monastery?

That's the focus of Richie's new book, Born to Flourish, which explores what it really takes for everyday people to rewrite their brains in order to thrive in the midst of life's challenges. We'll explore what Richie's book says when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work.

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We'll never know. Ford didn't have chat GPT. You do. Put chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro plans. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. For me, the Quince piece that I reach for over and over again is their washable stretch silk tiered maxi dress.

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It's the way insurance should be. Amika. We're your priority number one. Visit amika.com and get a quote today. This year I'm on sabbatical, which means my husband and I will soon be moving into our new sabbatical place. It's the perfect new home, but some of the decor just doesn't feel like us. That's why I've been turning to Wayfair. Wayfair makes it easy to make your spaces feel like you. My first Wayfair upgrade for that new space involved a set of cool new ribbed ceramic pot planters.

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The fourth is having a sense of purpose, really being motivated. When all four are operating, that's when we're flourishing. Flourishing is not happiness. I think it's important to say on this podcast because we can flourish when we're sad. There's a story told in the book about a very dear friend of mine, a very famous sociologist who was dying. I was with him the day before he was dying and he wasn't happy, but he was flourishing. We're also starting to see that we can build some of these skills with way less hours a day.

Give me an example of what some of the research is showing for these shorter term contemplative practices. Yeah. That's one of the things that we talk a lot about in this new book and what is so exciting to us. One of my passions these days, in fact, it's really my central passion, is to figure out how to scale human flourishing. I think most viewers would agree that the world is really in desperate need of increased flourishing and the skills that we associate with flourishing. How can we increase these qualities, even among people who are never going to spend a lot of time meditating, ordinary people who are totally stressed in their work?

One of the groups that we've explored are school teachers, public school teachers who are reporting very high levels of stress. They're abandoning their profession at higher rates than people are entering it. That's really a crisis in the U.S. right now. That's one group we've worked with. We have deployed digital strategies so that we can really scale this. One of the things we found when we did this, which initially was incredibly disappointing to us, is we found that they were practicing around five minutes a day. We wanted them to practice more.

We offered them the opportunity to practice more, but on average, they were practicing about five minutes a day. Then we actually looked at the data to see if this made any difference. It turns out if you do it every day, five minutes a day actually produces real change. It produces change in our experience, and it even produces change in our biology. One of the important messages here is that consistency is really important. You defined flourishing for us earlier with having these four pillars, and so now I want to dive into each of the pillars, first starting with this idea of awareness.

How do you define awareness? Awareness is the faculty of knowing, being fully present. There are different components of awareness. One component is self-awareness. That would be awareness of sensations in our body, awareness of our thoughts and emotions, in our mind, and it really is the sense of being present. I think all of us have experience particularly with its opposite. How many listeners have had the experience of reading a book where they might be reading each word on the page, and after a few minutes, they have no idea what they've just read.

Their mind is somewhere else. That's an experience of not knowing what our mind is doing. Data awareness, which is knowing that we're knowing, is really important. If we don't know what's happening in our own mind, it's very difficult to change it. This is really a quality that we think is necessary for all other forms of human transformation. If there's one thing we've learned from the scientific literature on meditation, it's that this is something that really can be strengthened. One of the things I was struck by is when what we're aware of is something that's pretty bad.

For example, our own experience of bodily pain. What did you find when people were experiencing pain but attending to that pain using awareness? This is really one of the areas where there's, I think, real practical import of these practices and clinical relevance. We've studied pain extensively in the scanner. What we find is this. When a person is experiencing pain, there's a network in the brain that's activated directly by the pain itself, but then we also have emotional reactions to the pain. Yeah. We're thinking, this sucks.

I can't handle this. I want this to stop. I hate this. Exactly. That secondary emotional reaction, which is associated with a very distinct brain network, this is something that's been studied extensively by neuroscientists. We found that that network in particular can be altered by training in these simple awareness meditation practices, and when you decrease the activation in that emotion-related network, you significantly decrease the distress that we experience in response to physical pain. We still know that there's something painful happening, but it just doesn't bother us as much and we're able to cope with it much more effectively.

I mean, there seems to be this interesting paradox of awareness, right? Which is this idea that challenging situations become less challenging when we sit with them, when we're aware of them, when we're present in the horrible experience. That seems to be a very strange thing about brains, but a really powerful thing that contemplative practices can help us with. That's absolutely true. There's a lot of emotional energy, if you will, that's put into pushing these negative experiences away, and that turns out to be a significant source of distress.

And so when we're able to accept them, when we're able to look at them for what they are, it turns out that they're much more porous, and that really is extremely helpful. For example, is there any part of me that's not in pain, any little morsel of me? Is there any place in my body that I can become aware of that's not experiencing pain? And that kind of opening really is helpful in allowing us to sit with it and see its differentiated nature. We can also engage in these awareness practices formally, like kind of sitting down to do meditation.

But you in the book talk about all these times when you engage in awareness practices in your own life during these almost informal, maybe more mundane ways. Tell me some examples where you've tried to become more aware in your own life. I'm doing it right now. I could tell, you're very chill at the podcast interview. You can do it anywhere, anytime, or another way to say it is you can do it everywhere all the time. It's really a matter of how we intentionally deploy our mind.

And in fact, one of the really cool things is in this app that we have developed called the Healthy Minds Program, we give people the option of doing these practices as formal meditation practices or doing it actively while you're engaged in other activities of daily living. For example, commuting or doing your laundry, washing the dishes, doing physical exercise. We actually have collected data on this and it turns out that the benefit of these practices is equal. There's no significant difference in the benefit when it's done as a formal meditation or as an active practice as you're engaged in other activities of daily living.

So that's really great news and we can honestly say you don't have to take any extra time out of your day. You can do it as you're doing other things. I love this finding because often when I talk to people about the benefits of meditation, I'm thinking specifically of my Yale students, they'll kind of sigh and be like, oh my gosh, I have so much on my plate. I don't have another 20 minutes a day that I'm going to not sleep or not do my homework to do meditation.

But it's like, wait, you can meditate while you're doing your homework or you can engage in an awareness practice when you're doing your homework. You can engage in an awareness practice when you're doing your laundry, walking to class and so on. And so I think that's really freeing because sometimes when people hear about these practices, I think we mistakenly assume that we have to go hardcore monk style to engage in them. Right. Not at all. I want to emphasize this point because I find it so powerful.

You don't have to do any sort of formal meditation in order to experience the benefits of an awareness practice. You can get similar results by just being a little more mindful when you're running errands or doing your housework. Instead of doing your chores on autopilot, try to consciously pay attention to the sounds around you and the feelings in your body. Regularly shifting your attention during these everyday moments can help you train your brain to better manage thoughts and emotions when bigger challenges arise. Okay. So that's awareness.

Ritchie's first pillar of flourishing, but we still have three more to go. We'll tackle those when the Happiness Lab returns from the break. This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now imagine having chat GPT work. Chat GPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal, along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans.

It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control. You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with chat GPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have chat GPT. You do. Put chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting work mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. For me, the Quince piece that I reach for over and over again is their washable stretch silk-tiered maxi dress. I originally bought it for $15. bought it in black because it was something I could wear to dinner, layered up with a nice sweater. But I loved it so much that I ended up buying it in two more colors.

That quince dress is exactly what I love in my fall wardrobe. It's comfortable, versatile, and it looks effortlessly put together. And quince makes lots of elevated everyday essentials just like this dress. They use premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and washable silk. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen, so you're paying for quality, not brand markup. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com slash happiness. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.

Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's quince.com slash happiness. The Happiness Lab is proudly sponsored by Amika Insurance. You know what they say, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. So go with Amika and get coverage from a mutual insurer that's built for their customers. One that looks after what's important to you together. Auto, home, life, and more. Amika helps you protect what matters most. Visit amika.com and get a quote today. Have you ever considered how the smallest details can create real emotion?

Lexus does, like the feeling associated with the sound of a turn signal or the touch of a button as it's pressed. At Lexus, master craftsmen called takumi are involved not just in physical craftsmanship, but in sensory details. These masters evaluate things like how a door closes, the click of a switch, the acoustic feedback of controls. Because a car that doesn't make you feel something is a car that stops short of amazing. Experience amazing at your Lexus dealer. I'm speaking with neuroscientist Dr. Richie Davidson about his new book, Born to Flourish, which explores four foundational skills that humans need to thrive.

Before the break, Richie and I touched on the practice of awareness, but the second pillar he and his co-authors emphasize is connection. I asked Richie to define this idea for me, since connection is something we hear about a lot these days, especially in light of the loneliness epidemic. It's really a sense of being connected to others. It's not the physical presence of others necessarily. It's really about qualities that are important for healthy social relationships, qualities like appreciation and gratitude and kindness and compassion. It's a subjective sense, and it doesn't necessarily require that we have this large circle of friends.

One of the ways that we find it very accessible is to reflect on appreciation. Think of a person in your life who has been helpful to you in whatever way, and just allow this natural sense of appreciation to arise. That's something that you also can do anywhere, anytime. It really changes the coloring of how you see the world. You talked about a practice that you do before a particularly busy day. As someone who has busy days a lot, this is something that I could resonate with, where you use the power of connection to get more grounded and feel more appreciative of the people who are making up your busy day.

Tell me more about what you did there. I meditate every morning, and after I meditate on weekdays, I take out my calendar. I did it this morning, and you were in my practice, Laurie. It takes me about 60 seconds. I just scan my day, see what meetings I have, and I bring the people I'm going to be meeting with into my mind and my heart. I just reflect on something positive about them, even if I don't know them. It doesn't take much, and it really just helps me develop this kind of vitality for the day.

I can have a day where I have 10 hours of back-to-back meetings, and come out the other side and feel totally refreshed. I really attribute, at least in part, the vitality to this simple practice. This was the kind of thing that you tested in teachers during a really difficult time during the COVID-19 pandemic. What kinds of benefits from these types of connection practices did you find with your teachers? We've been doing a bunch of work with public school teachers in the U.S., as well as in other countries, but primarily in the U.S.

We found that these practices, and again, on average, about five minutes a day, are just enormously beneficial. If a teacher shows up in his or her classroom and is really present and is connected to the kids, this really can be so powerful. One of the things that we found that we attribute to connection practices, in particular, is we found reductions in measures of implicit bias, implicit racial bias. We found that teachers who are randomly assigned to a group that received this training showed significant reductions on this behavioral measure of implicit bias, and that reduction in bias persisted at the six-month follow-up period.

There are real consequences to doing this that we think are enormously beneficial. That's the connection practice. Now I want to jump to insight, starting with an interesting thing about the human mind, which is that we constantly get caught up in our own narratives. Give me a sense of what it looks like to be kind of stuck with a lack of insight, stuck with our own inner narratives. Insight is having a deep understanding of how our thoughts and beliefs and expectations shape our experience of the world.

There are folks who have very negative narratives. They have low expectations of themselves. They may have negative beliefs about themselves. Of course, that is a prescription for depression. What's really important for well-being, we think, is not so much changing the narrative, at least initially, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative so that we see the narrative for what it is, which is simply a constellation of beliefs and thoughts and expectations. If we can see that, it gives us some distance from them. It really helps for us not to be completely fused with these beliefs and expectations.

Many people are not even aware that they have a narrative, let alone what the narrative might be. They just operate so automatically. One simple practice that we do to help people become aware of this is, if you're having some challenge in your life, just imagine what another person who comes from a different perspective, how they might view the situation, to see if they might view it any differently than you. That can really help loosen the grip of this kind of narrative. It seems like this idea that you're talking about with insight, it's really just all about getting curious about our inner narrative, and just bringing that curiosity seems to have a whole host of benefits.

Exactly. Curiosity is really key, and activating that curiosity to really try to work with your own mind is extremely helpful. Another thing we do when we loosen the grip of the narrative, as you talk about in your book, is that we can start to use the bad stuff, maybe our inner demons, as teachers. How does insight help us do that? Insight helps us to recognize that, first of all, some of the bad stuff that we do is motivated by qualities that are actually good qualities. For example, addiction is one case.

We might become addicted to looking at the news, or we might become addicted to exercise in a way that becomes maladaptive. The initial motivation, the initial spark for our interest in a particular activity may be wholesome. We may want to know what's going on in the world to be a better informed citizen. We do exercise because we recognize that it's good for our health, but then it takes on a kind of pathological extreme. But when we have insight, we can recognize that the initial seed might actually be a wholesome seed, and we can honor that.

That helps us to begin to make these changes. That was pillar number three, insight. Now we turn to the final pillar that we need to flourish, which is purpose. How do you personally define purpose? When we use purpose, we're not thinking about trying to find something big and grand and more purposeful for you to do with your life. But how can we find meaning and purpose in our everyday activities, even in the pedestrian activities that we do in our life? Can taking out the garbage be connected to our sense of purpose?

Of course, it could be. It just requires a little bit of reframing, a little mindset shift. If we can connect our activities with core values that are important for us, then it just opens up a whole range of possibility. If one of our core values, for example, is being kind to our families, to the people we live with, taking out the garbage is not just taking out the garbage, but it's actually an act of generosity. We can reframe simple activities of that sort. In that way, we really can change our experience.

In the work we did with schoolteachers, purpose turned out to be one of the most important pillars. We did a simple practice where we invited them to reflect on their sense of purpose in becoming a schoolteacher. This was just like an elixir for their soul. Many reported that it reminded them of why they became a teacher in the first place. That was really beneficial. That's purpose in the small things in life. You've also talked about how we can use this pillar of purpose when big, even more challenging things come up.

I know in your book, you talked about your experience of shepherding your son through a difficult situation. If you're comfortable with it, I'd love if you could share the lesson that you learned while doing that about purpose. He had a very challenging adolescence at a certain point in time when he was 16. We never thought he would go to college. We gave up many of our expectations for him. We were just trying to keep him alive and healthy. That sense of purpose really became a defining value for us at that time.

It really just helped us focus and refocus and recalibrate and really helped us through this very challenging period. He's now in his 30s. He's an amazing father. He's become a school psychologist and helping kids very much like him. I often think of him as a poster child for plasticity. We've heard about all of these different pillars. We need these practices to get there. Any specific practices you want to leave our listeners with that they should be thinking about if they want to build these things up?

Well, Laurie, an important question which I really haven't answered yet. Even if it's just five minutes a day, how do we actually do that? How do we remember to do that? One of the things that we talk about in the book is how to build a conscious habit, which in many ways is an oxymoron because often habits are thought of as unconscious. We do them quite automatically, but what we're talking about is really building a conscious habit. What we invite readers to contemplate is to piggyback this on to activities of daily living that are regular activities.

One of the things that humans do every day is we eat. That's a great opportunity. If we take even just one minute before we eat, we can even do this as we're eating so it doesn't take any extra time, but just to reflect on all the people it took to bring food on your plate, when you think about it, there really is an enormous number of people that were required. It gives you, first of all, an understanding of interdependence. We're not isolated creatures, but rather we critically depend on this interconnected web for survival.

Secondly, it allows a sense of appreciation. So you can do these simple practices around these regular activities of daily living. Before you go into any important meeting, you can reflect on the people you're meeting with and think of something positive about them. When you're walking outside, that's an opportunity for an awareness practice. Just bring your awareness to your body. See how it feels to walk. Again, there's nothing to change, nothing to fix, and in many ways, it's shifting from a mode of doing to a mode of simply being.

Our lives are just replete with opportunities if we just harness these situations. I love this insight, and it's given me such a shift in how I relate to these mundane different tasks. A big one for me was your inspiration of your schedule. Normally, I would pull out my schedule and look at it and be like, oh gosh, the day. I was like, wait, four pillars. Connection. I'm having these meetings with interesting people like you, Richie, who I get to talk to and it's so fun, or I get a sense of purpose from what I'm doing.

It's also been this moment of kind of just awareness of noticing of like, oh, that's a sense of overwhelm. Maybe tomorrow I shouldn't have as many meetings in my schedule. That's just like a two-minute period, but I'm bringing in so many of these different pillars to notice what's going on, and I really think it's having just a big effect on how I treat the day and how I feel during the day. That's great. I love that. Thank you for all you're doing, Laurie, to bring these ideas to the world.

If you're interested in learning more about how to cultivate awareness, connection, insight, and purpose, then be sure to check out Richie's new book, Born to Flourish, which is available now. And if you want even more practical tips for putting these ideas into practice, you can also download Richie's freely available award-winning app, Health Minds program. Next week we'll continue our fall book series with a conversation with podcaster Eric Zimmer. We'll hear what his battle with heroin addiction taught him about personal transformation and building wiser habits. All ideas that he explores in his new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot.

If I handed you a trombone and you picked it up and started playing, it would sound terrible. We wouldn't conclude that you were a bad person. We just conclude you don't know how to play the trombone. But when it comes to our own behaviors and our own emotions, we take it very personal. And we think it tells a story about us. And I think it's incredibly important that we flip that story and we say, okay, we can learn to change. All that's next week on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr.

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