The Neuroscientists Who Proved Resilience Is a Trainable Skill | Richard Davidson & Cortland Dahl

Key Takeaway

Flourishing isn't about being happy all the time—it's about being fundamentally okay, even when difficult emotions arise. According to neuroscientist Richie Davidson, you can cultivate this through four trainable pillars: Awareness (being fully present), Connection (feeling linked to others), Insight (understanding your mind's dynamics), and Purpose (living aligned with your values). The most powerful takeaway: just 5 minutes of daily practice—like noticing the natural pause between breaths—can produce measurable changes in your brain, behavior, and well-being within a month. As Davidson and co-author Courtland Dahl emphasize: it's easier than you think, and you don't need formal meditation—everyday moments like eating or brushing your teeth can become practice opportunities.

Episode Overview

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson and clinical psychologist Courtland Dahl introduce their 'Healthy Minds Framework,' a science-backed approach to flourishing based on four trainable pillars: Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose. They challenge common assumptions about meditation and mental well-being, arguing that fundamental 'okayness'—not constant happiness—is the true marker of flourishing. The conversation explores practical, accessible techniques that require as little as 5 minutes daily, with research showing measurable brain changes within a month. Key themes include reframing 'negative' emotions as contextually appropriate, recognizing loneliness as a health risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes daily, and integrating micro-practices throughout daily life rather than requiring formal meditation sessions.

Full Transcript

Transcript of The Neuroscientists Who Proved Resilience Is a Trainable Skill | Richard Davidson & Cortland Dahl from 10% Happier. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Richie Davidson, Courtland Doll, welcome back to the show. Well, in Richie's case, welcome back. Court, welcome. Wonderful to be here. Thanks for having us, Dan. It's a pleasure. Uh, well, Richie, let me start with you. Uh, what is flourishing? That seems to be a central concept in this new book. What do you mean by flourishing? Well, what we mean by flourishing is when a person is fully present, is connected to the people and the place around them, has insight into their thoughts and beliefs and expectations and uh understands how they are shaping their perception of the world and has a strong sense of purpose.

Okay. So, you just named four things uh that I want to talk a lot about in the course of this interview, and they really are part of your healthy minds framework. That that is the entirety of the framework, but I'm going to press you, not in an attempt to be obnoxious, although that's definitely in my wheelhouse. Um, but just to make make it really concrete for people, you know, if you if you pass if you were on the elevator with somebody and had a couple seconds to explain, you know, or to inquire as to whether somebody is flourishing, flourishing, flourishing, um, how would you make it simple?

That everything is fundamentally okay. Uh, that anything can come down the pike and it's really going to be okay. So interesting you say that because I have not had many, you know, meditative breakthroughs in my life. A few, you know, big or big to me moments on meditation retreats. And the common denominator among the maybe three times where I've had, you know, notable moments in my meditation practice, the common denominator is a feeling of everything's okay. everything's okay. everything's okay. That's great. That's great. That's great.

There's something. It's counterintuitive because we look at the world, we look at the news, we look at the problems in our own lives, and fundamental okayness can feel either delusional or dangerous and yet somehow actually somehow it's it's kind of the truth. Yeah, exactly. I think it's kind of a radical stance, if you will. uh uh and uh it's not denying all of the adversity and challenges and challenges and challenges uh and it's also not saying that you're going to be happy all the time. Um it uh but that you'll be okay.

Um uh it's really quite different than that. So uh uh it's uh it's a nuanced kind of okayessedness if you will. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems important to you, and I'm basing this on our past conversations, it seems important to you to not get happiness and flourishing confused. confused. confused. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So, you know, it would be if someone lost a loved one, particularly if they lost them unexpectedly, them unexpectedly, them unexpectedly, a natural response would be grief. Um, and that would be very appropriate.

It would really be bizarre. and um even maladaptive in some sense for someone to be happy uh in response to that. So, and you know, Dan, you and I have both seen the Daly Lama uh on a number of occasions and I he's not happy all the time. Uh but I would say he's fundamentally okay all the time. Yes, he strikes me as somebody who is responding appropriately responding appropriately responding appropriately and spontaneously to what's happening at any given moment. Exactly. Court, sorry to neglect you in these opening moments.

Anything to add on this notion of flourishing? What what are we missing? Well, I think in very ordinary language, you can just simply think of it as being at your best across a range of contexts. And I think that's the key thing we're hitting on here is that when you're at work, it looks like focus. It looks like creativity. When you're hanging out with friends, especially if somebody's suffering, it looks like empathy and care. If you're at a peak moment of life, you know, when your child is being born or you're graduating, then of course it might be joy or elation or awe out in nature.

And I think that's one of the things that that Richie and I talk about a lot, we touch upon in the book is getting away from the idea of positive and negative emotions, positive and negative experiences, and just thinking about everything as contextual. Everything is healthy, unhealthy, adaptive, maladaptive, really just based on the where you are, who you're with, what you're doing. And that's that's a key feature. The other thing that we've already talked about is viewing this not from the point of view of like we're like some massive self-improvement program where we're endlessly trying to fix ourselves, fix our relationships, fix the world, but actually we're trying to get in touch with the parts of ourselves that were never broken and that actually it's easier to do that than we think.

But a lot of it is is kind of a mindset shift. It's just getting out of the problem solution mentality into like, okay, what's already going on here? And that just goes back to this this idea of being fundamentally okay, which sounds totally unrealistic when you first hear it. But there's something quite important and powerful about it from the point of view of mental health and flourishing. Well, you don't you don't want to talk about positive or negative emotions and that that I I I think I can get behind that, but I want to make sure I understand it because So, how can you be fundamentally okay, as Richie said, the Daly Lama is when you're when you're when you're uh experiencing, let's say, a difficult emotion.

We won't label it label it good or bad, but a difficult emotion like fear or grief. Yeah. Richie, actually Richie and I just had a a great conversation yesterday about anxiety and I struggled a lot with anxiety. In fact, what got me started on the path of meditation, very similar to your your story, Dan, when I was a college student, you know, back in the early '9s, I had a genuine phobia of public speaking to the degree that I fainted on stage in front of my entire high school.

That is a true story. In front of all my friends. Not only that, my mom leapt onto stage onto the stage to take care of me. It was perhaps the most uncool thing that could ever happen to a teenage boy. So anyways, I was very anxious. So I know a lot about anxiety. And you might think that there's nothing redeeming about anxiety when you're experiencing it. It's just toxic. It feels horrible. It has such negative repercussions for one's life. But from another point of view, what's really going on with anxiety is it's a protective mechanism.

And in certain circumstances, circumstances, circumstances, it's exactly what you need. you you need to sort of mentally rehearse a threatening situation so that when you're in that situation you'll respond appropriately. The problem is our biology just you know switches the anxiety uh you know reaction on perhaps abundantly way more than it needs to. You know it's like we have this big bodyguard that we need sometimes but the bodyguard is you know accompanying us you know when we just want to go to sleep or when we just want to have a relaxing moment still that protective mechanism is kicking into gear.

So it's a it's a actually it's a very wholesome thing and in certain contexts it's exactly the right thing. It's just that that switch is being flipped way more than it needs to be. So a lot of it is again just switching the view on it. Well, I can totally get down with the with the switching the view as you as you say on anxiety. It is as our mutual friend Jack Kornfield says, it is the the organism trying to protect itself. And so I like that.

And I I'd just be curious to go a click deeper on what it would look like to execute on the simultaneity of anxiety and fundamental okayness. okayness. okayness. That's a great question. I'm sure Richie you have a lot to say on this too. I think a lot of it is just the switching how we relate to it and the four strategies that Richie mentioned are four different ways we can do it. But Richie, I'd be curious to hear what you would say about that. Yeah, I mean I think that um when we express anxiety in the presence of fundamental okayness or for that matter other um difficult emotions, uh there are certain characteristics that are associated with them and I would say one of the hallmark features is that the emotions don't they're not sticky, they're context appropriate.

uh and um uh even an emotion like anger, you know, I've seen the Daly Lama be angry. Uh but the next moment just like that, he starts laughing at something funny. Uh and there's a kind of fluidity, a flexibility uh and not a proveration. And so when difficult emotions occur in the context of a fundamental okayness, they don't stick. They are serving a function in the context, but then they go away. It's like clouds in the sky. Richie, I'm going to ask a self-centered question, abusing my privilege as the host of the show, but I'm ju I'm really just trying to I'm doing this hopefully in the service of the listener because I'm trying to understand it.

So I think of myself as largely okay and yet there are moments especially with anxiety um where I lose it. You know I lose the fundamental okayess um like I you know I'm in the city today in New York City instead of recording this from my home. I'm have having to take a lot of elevators today and it's making me nervous and mostly I can just be with the anxiety and it's not a big deal but you know I've had a few moments of like not wanting to get on the elevator just by way of an example.

So, can we think about fundamental okayness as um as a spectrum where I h I I I feel like I have a much higher level of fundamental okayness than I did say 15 years ago, but it's not perpetual. Am I hunting in the right direction with this line of questioning? Yeah, absolutely. So I think it is definitely on a continuum and uh this is really um I think what uh can change as we train our mind and cultivate uh these qualities of flourishing uh and all of us are on a continuum uh and so uh you know I think it's only the kind of really rare examples like the Daly Lama who may be um uh sort of displaying this kind of fundamental okayness continuously.

okayness continuously. okayness continuously. But um you know I see those people as an inspiring example of what may be possible but for the rest of us you know we're on we're on a continuum uh and uh uh I think that that's absolutely normative normative normative and even from a from the point of view of just a snapshot an experience or even a day like you're saying Dan we're always we're moving back and forth between different experiences and I think you can think of almost three stops along the way of inner experience when it comes to relating to anxiety or really any difficult experience.

The first one which we all know well is we're just lost in it. If we're angry, we are the anger. If we're anxious, we are the anxiety. It's our our field of perception is narrowed to the degree that the anxiety or any emotion, it just colors the whole field of conscious experience. It's just coloring everything. And and just to interject, we've used a term that we call experiential fusion to describe what court is is saying. I like that term. Exactly. It's just like you become one with it.

And this is most of what's happening in our lives until we start meditating. And then there's this magical shift which basic mindfulness practices are brilliant at helping us uh navigate, which is we we we uncouple. That fusion kind of gets teased apart and usually is what it what it starts as. You can just be aware of the experience. So you like for me as a an anxious college student, I was doing this practice all the time. I would bring my awareness into my body and just notice what does anxiety actually feel like and just rest like with curiosity with openness.

So that's a huge that's a that's a inner revolution just that alone. There's something else that deepens from there which is we start to shift into the field of awareness itself. So it's not so much what we are aware of, but into this just open space of being itself. And that probably sounds hopelessly abstract and esoteric if you haven't practiced this, but it's a it's a profound shift. In a word, it's the shift from doing to being. And in that space of being, there's all sorts of things that we discover about ourselves that we're we're blind to when we're contracted into the emotional reaction.

And that's I think the the true fundamental okayness is in that space where we see oh there's this part of me of that's available in any moment that I can drop into and grow familiar with and there's no problem like everything else seems inconsequential from the point of view of that that that space of being. Again it's abstract but it's incredibly powerful as a practice. Well how accessible is that though? because I started this conversation by saying I've had three moments in my uh 16-year meditation career, which I know compared to you guys is nothing, but you know, it it's it's it's non-trivial for your average person.

Um I've had three moments usually on day six or seven of a meditation retreat where I've really dropped into that sense of fundamental okayness. So this abstract abstruse experience that you're describing court uh how accessible is that to our average listener? listener? listener? I think it's much more accessible than we often think and there are simply different traditions and different forms of practice and training that that tend to focus on different things. So there are some and the the ones that Richie and I are most deeply trained in really focus a lot on effortless presence and so you you get a a pretty heavy dose of that the quality of being.

How do you access that? How do you get in touch with that? How do you grow familiar with it so you don't lose touch with it? You actually get that on day one. I mean you've you've had Minga Renee on the podcast. He teaches that. That's like literally the first thing he teaches and it's always paired with other things cuz it's hard to stay with that. There's other practices where you don't get to that until much more advanced stages, but you get other things that are different than that.

Like you get deep insight into just the the workings of the mind, the causes and conditions that shape experience. So all the traditions have their own beauty and their own kind of secret sauce. But for the ones that focus on that, I would say you can actually get in touch with that pretty easily. And it just kind of depends on where you're what you're working with in terms of practice. But our mantra, you know, Richie, I'm sure we'll hear it out of Richie's mouth a few times in this is that it's easier than you think and that the science really backs that up.

Actually, it's pretty small doses will get you there pretty quick. It's just sustaining it is the real practice. So, let me So, you mentioned Mangor Rimpache, who's an eminent um uh Tibetan Buddhist uh teacher. Um, and he's been on the show several times. I will drop uh some links to his uh appearances in the show notes if anybody wants to check him out. Um, but he's not here. So, Court or Rich, whoever wants to do it. You said it's easier than you think and it's, you know, you do it on day one.

Can you just describe to the listener so that they um don't have to take your word for it. They can uh they can check it out in their own minds. Well, should we do it or you should you should Let's do it. Yeah. Let me let me just guide a super a super brief kind of micro practice as we like to say and you know just as a little taste of this. So just, you know, for us and for anybody who's listening, tune into your breath.

You don't even have to change your posture. Just imagine you're going about your day. You just notice your breath. We've all, most of us have probably done mindful breathing. So just feel the breath. Maybe breathe a little deeper. Really feel it coming in and out. And this is safe to do while driving just to say cuz many people are driving. Absolutely. You can you can you can the thing that this is not a concentrated practice. So keep an open spacious awareness. You're still tuned into your environment.

You're just breathing. It's not a lot of efforting in the mind. You're just noticing what's going on and you're including your breathing in that, right? You're just noticing that perhaps a little little deeper than normal. So, as you do this, start to notice what happens very naturally and spontaneously on the exhalation. What you'll feel is just a little subtle opening, a subtle relaxation, just like a little loosening that that happens naturally every time you exhale. It especially happens when you start noticing that. So just feel that this is just easing into being.

And next, notice how at the end of each exhalation, exhalation, exhalation, there's just a little gap, a little pause before you breathe in again. It's just a like a little natural rest stop between each cycle of breathing. And what you can do is just imagine yourself, you're just kind of like relaxing into that space and just resting there just for a few seconds. You're not holding your breath. It's not anything that's super intense. And what you'll see is that it's the most ordinary thing in the world.

There's no special state of mind that is happening or needs to happen. It's just a little taste of being very ordinary in a sense. But you can learn to tap into that and you just rest with that. And then slowly as you grow more familiar with that, that quality of openness, this effortless presence, you can just stay with that even even when the next breath happens. So just try that for a moment. You just relax with the outreath. you rest there and almost imagine that next inb breath is just happening within that space.

There's no effort required. You're not even really meditating in any any kind of effortful way. So there's a million ways to do this. It's just getting used to what it feels like to be. And you can do this 100 times throughout your day and you have a little 100 mini retreats throughout your day. Eventually this becomes like a home and that's the fundamental okayessedness because your home is now the open space of awareness. that's always there for you and then anything else that happens is it's just on the surface.

Richie, I've been picking on court for a while. Anything you want to jump in and add? add? add? Well, I think that um you know the the slogan which we're using a lot these days, it's easier than you think is not just uh a kind of um ideological claim, but it's actually based on a whole lot of evidence. of evidence. of evidence. uh uh and so we've done a number of serious randomized control trials, the kind of gold standard of uh clinical research uh over the last few years showing that five minutes a day of practice like this is sufficient to produce measurable changes in our experience, in our behavior, and in our biology.

And it's kind of remarkable. uh 5 minutes a day over the course of one month. Now this is not to claim that these changes are going to be enduring if we stop practicing. Our aspiration of course is that when people taste this uh they will be motivated to keep doing this and it's like brushing your teeth. You don't brush your teeth for a month and then stop. Um this is going to be a lifelong practice. Uh and so uh but the data really show that it's doesn't take much to get these circuits in our mind and our brain going.

And we think it's because we're born to flourish that that we actually this is part of who we are as humans. We're we're actually predisposed to rest in this kind of way. This is our nature. And when we meditate, we're not doing anything doing anything doing anything sort of weird with our mind. What we're doing is we are getting in touch with our fundamental nature, becoming more familiar with it. My 11-year-old son, I think, would argue, you know, pound the table and argue that you can brush your teeth for a month and stop.

Um but having said that that that draw a link if you will Richie between the exercise that court and thank you court for uh guided us through and handling our everyday vexations. Yes, I noticed. Oh, yeah. It's it's a it's a I felt calm and awake and aware when he directed me to notice uh that space between the breaths, the inb breath and the outreath and then to subsequently stay with the next inb breath. Draw the link for those who might not understand it to between that experience and doing life better.

Yeah. So, you know, eventually one of the things we talk about in in our book are things that happen every day in life uh to to virtually all of us. So, for example, humans eat. Um we we need to eat to live. So, um eating is a is a regular part of most people's lives. Uh we can use these activities of daily living as reminders uh to um uh to to do these we we call them micro supports or micro practices that you can sprinkle throughout your daily life.

And we actually have evidence to show that you don't need to put your butt on the cushion or a chair and formally meditate. Um the data show that at least at the beginning stages the benefits are as um uh uh as strong if you do these practices actively as you're going about your daily life uh or if you do them formally as sitting meditation practice doesn't matter. M uh so you can use these activities of daily living as reminders as um we use this uh fancy term uh that comes from neuroscience neuroscience neuroscience uh which is a zeitgeab.

Um a zeitgeab is uh something that occurs with biological rhythms on a regular daily basis and there are social zeitgeabers. So eating is a social zeitgeabber. Um uh we do that every day. Brushing your teeth is a zeitgeab. Um uh and so we can piggy back these activities on daily living. And eventually uh you know you brought up the kind of challenges that we experience in our daily lives. Eventually the challenges themselves become triggers as reminders. So rather than the challenges being times when you lose it when you are getting hijacked by your anxiety or whatever it is um eventually as you practice more and more um the anxiety itself can become a reminder and uh that's when you know you can have this just infuse all of your everyday life.

I just want to push on that again and court I'll go back to you but but I I want to acknowledge I love the fact that we can do these free range instead of a formal meditation practice. I think that's liberating for a lot of people to hear uh who especially people who feel time starved or who just don't want to fold themselves into the lotus position or whatever it is. So that that's great. So I don't mean to brush past that and I will come back to it.

But just on the question of the mechanism here court for for all of us who went through your exercise, how how does doing that help me with fighting with my son over brushing his teeth or fighting with my boss over, you know, giving me more work than I can handle, etc., etc. This is this is really the central question. So, you know, going back to this idea of the really what are the central central central ingredients, you could say, what are the main factors that lead us to flourish in some circumstances and to be overwhelmed, knocked off balance, not at our best in other circumstances.

And you can almost look at this as like four questions. And I think this gets at at, you know, what you're pointing to, Dan. So, in any circumstance, say you're with your family and there's a stressful situation or you're at work and you're having a tough day, any, you really could imagine any circumstance and just say, "Am I going to be at my best in this situation if I am aware and fully present or if I'm just unfocused and distracted?" Obvious answer. Am I going to be The second question, am I going to be at my best in this situation if I feel connected?

If I feel like I'm there for other people and I feel like they are there for me or am I going to be at my best if I'm feeling alienated or isolated? Obvious question. That's the second factor that that we refer to as connection. The third one is insight. Am I going to feel better? Am I going to be at my best? Why I perform better? If I really understand the dynamics of the situation, especially the dynamics of my own mind in the moment. If for example, I can see clearly what emotions and thoughts are playing through my mind and I can see how they're shaping and influencing my perception.

Again, better or worse. And lastly, purpose. Am I going to feel more on my game if I really feel like I'm connected to my north star in my life? I have clear values. I feel like I'm living them. I'm conscious of them. I'm connected to them. Or would I do better if I feel that it's meaningless and I don't have those? These are just obvious questions. I think what's missing to people is it's not like we we just feel like we're doing well in some circumstances and we're not in others, but the ingredients aren't so clear.

And it's even less clear. How would we actually practice so that each of those things happen so that I'm more aware? I'm more connected. I'm more insightful and wise. I'm more purposeful and I feel things are meaningful. These are skills. There's brain mechanisms. There's biology behind it. It's easier than you think. I think it's just the road map isn't so clear. So what we practiced to to just boil it down to a fine point, that was one of maybe the most fundamental skill in the awareness category.

And I think what I would personally put my my money on is the most bang for your buck in terms of an awareness skill that can just radically change your inner experience. Specifically because these days we have no being in our lives. we are doing 24/7 and we're constantly force-feeding our mind information and I'd say that's a more vital it's always been a vital skill but learning how to be and to find our value and worth as human beings in our be in this quality of being I think is just a vital skill in the 21st century so but anyways it's I think it this is equally applicable in all these situations it's just the road map we just don't nobody ever gave us the map and just to just to restate the map for folks and we've said this a few times But I just want people to have their bearings here.

The healthy minds framework, the fra the the the the spine of your new book. Uh it's it consists of these four pillars. The first is awareness which we've talked about and you taught us uh how to train very quickly. Um and again it's not a oneand done. We just we it's a uh a move we want to integrate into our lives to wake up and be right here right now. Um the second is connection, the third is insight or self-nowledge. And the fourth is purpose. Let's just say let's talk a little bit about how we train these others.

Um with connection, we all know uh you know and this is something I talk about a lot on the show, we evolved uh as social animals and yet we've somehow created a world that militates against connection at pretty much every turn. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we have unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, suicide, addiction, and loneliness. I think largely as a result. Um so how do we operationalize connection and take it beyond sort of bland exhortation? bland exhortation? bland exhortation? Yeah, I mean um I I'm happy to jump in.

Um connection again we would say is easier than you think. And one of the um let me actually just back up and first say that in 2023 we had a really visionary attorney general of the United States who issued a health advisory, the first time a public health official ever issued a health advisory of that sort in our country um on the epidemic of loneliness and social isolation. And in that report, Vivec Merti showed evidence that loneliness is actually a greater risk factor for mortality than is smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

So loneliness and social isolation is not just uh a subjective quality of the mind, but it also affects our biology in ways that seriously affect our health. Uh so that's um one element important to keep in mind with respect to cultivating this one of the easiest things to do and something I do every single day. You know I have this little practice I do after I meditate where I on work days I'll and it takes me about not more than a minute maybe a minute and a half.

Uh I'll go through my calendar. I did this this morning and you're in my mind and heart Dan. Um, I just go through my calendar and see what I'm going to be doing that day and just um appreciate the people I'm meeting with. Uh, really a simple little practice. Think of something positive about them and it it just we are predisposed to feel a connection. It doesn't take much. Uh, we just need to be intentional about how we use our minds. Uh and so uh it's readily available and it's remarkable.

Um we've shown in neuroscientific research that after just a few hours of doing this practice over the course of a few weeks, our brains change. We can see measurable changes in our brain. Did you know that Fast Growing Trees is America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants and over 2 million happy customers? They've got all the plants your yard or home needs, including fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and house plants, all grown with care and guaranteed to arrive healthy.

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I don't have a as critical a lens as you do, Richie, but Barb Frederickson's uh research into micro interactions, the power, the massive power, apparently massive power of just having pleasant passing interactions with the barista, somebody in an elevator, your co-workers you may not be especially close with. Hey, how you doing? Eye contact. Keep it moving. uh this can really ladder up and scale up to uh apparently quite significant benefits in happiness. Do you agree with what the direction I'm going in here? Yes, totally. Absolutely.

I think that's important work and uh I think there's um you know an important truth to that. So we're marching through the the four I'm calling them pillars or aspects of of the the framework you lay out in the book. The first again is awareness. The second is connection. We've talked about how to practice both of those in ways that don't uh require you to reinvent your life and your schedule. The the third, and we've talked about this a little bit, but I think it's worth going a little bit deeper here, is insight.

Um, and I think this can be a tough one for people to gro. You use a word that's not going to help. Um, but it it's interesting and you can unpack it in ways that will be helpful. The word deifying court, what is that? So deification, you could say, is the the second part of a an inner movement, an inner process in which you first simply become aware of your own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and so forth. You just know you're having them versus you're fused with them as we discussed before.

That's the first thing. But you can be aware of a thought pattern and still believe it. And this is a very important point. I I had a lot of this again going back to my own anxiety where I was learning to step back and feel what I was feeling to notice the inner narratives but part of me still believed it. It's like okay I know I'm having this thought but it's kind of true was kind of how I felt at the time. Dereification Dereification Dereification is seeing that thoughts are nothing more than mental habits and they are not necessarily true or real.

In fact they are often times distorted sometimes wildly distorted. You know any anxious thought by definition is going to be a magnet for negative information and it will repel positive information. So insight is a lot of just knowing that the de the derifying it's like the de rigidifying if that's a word. I don't even know if that's a word but loosening up the mind right you're just the things that are locked and stucked you know old habits just seem so entrenched. This is a way to loosen that up and to see that the mind is much more fluid than it often seems.

There's a reference in your book, Richie, in this in this part of the book on the aha moment. What is what do you mean by that? Well, the aha moment is uh a moment of insight insight insight uh that you know I think many people have experienced uh even in sort of pedestrian sorts of ways. Uh so if you're doing a crossword puzzle and you suddenly, you know, um recognize the word that fits in uh a certain context, there's a little bit of an aha moment.

You know, you got it. It just occurs to you just like that. And um when there is that aha moment, research shows there's a burst of a certain brain rhythm that can be measured with EEG with electrodes on the scalp surface non-invasively. Uh and um that burst is a burst of gamma oscillations. Uh these are very fast frequency waves. Um and they typically last less than a second. you know, they correspond to the sort of timing of an aha moment. It could be like a quarter of a second.

Um uh and what we see in long-term meditators who do a lot of this inside practice is that they show these gamma oscillations that last a long time. They're really enduring. Uh and it's kind of like their whole uh I mean this is a little bit hard to imagine. uh and what we're talking about now is really long-term practitioners. People like Mingarimpache were participants as subjects in this research. They're showing continuous activity like this. They they're um it's as if their phenomenological world is a continuous aha experience.

Uh and so it becomes, you know, we we uh uh a number of years ago I wrote a book with Dan Gleman called Altered Traits. uh and it's a play on altered states. And the idea is that as we train our mind, these qualities that once were uh short-lived become much more enduring. And um for um very long-term meditators, this quality of insight becomes um really enduring. really enduring. really enduring. There's a there's a great analogy for this in the tradition, which is a candle flame with a glass enclosure around it.

And this also speaks to how the the four factors of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose work together. So in this analogy, awareness is like the the glass enclosure. So you can imagine a moment in life, we've all had these, where you have a sudden epiphany. Something clicks into place about your life that you see that you didn't see the moment before. And it feels like your life is totally different. Like you've just now seen something that's going to change your life forever. And sometimes sometimes it does, but often times what happens is although it feels like your life has changed indelibly, the next the next day, the next week, the next month, it's just a memory.

It's not embedded for some reason. And that reason is because awareness is unstable. Our attention, we're distracted. There's a million influences on our mind. And so that that epiphany, that deep insight is lost. So awareness practices give us that that inner stability where we can nurture those moments. But we also need the flame itself which is insight. This is you know classically what we would think of as wisdom. We need to see clearly the dynamics of our inner experience, the dynamics of our lives. And we need to be able to embody that so we act skillfully in a way that supports our own and hopefully others ability to thrive and flourish.

So we need that but we need we kind of need all of these. It's like not enough just to have awareness or just to have insight. any one of these, you actually need all all four of these and they're all skills that are mutually supportive and reinforcing. reinforcing. reinforcing. So, insight um the the fundamental promise of the book is is that there are micro practices that can help us um develop all four of the the skills that are are at the core of the book. What are some of the ways uh that we can um throughout the course of our day develop insight?

insight? insight? I mean, I'll share one. Richie, I'd love to hear kind of your go-to practices. One that I find super helpful, super easy to do is is the wise friend uh kind of analogy. So, in any situation, especially things that are challenging, difficult, stressful, I just stop and ask myself what would my wisest friend, I mean for me, I I've known Minger Ripchete for many years. He's one of my guiding teachers. So, I often times will think of him, I would just kind of imagine, what would Ripchet say about this?

And that does something very interesting. The answer doesn't obviously come from meche. What it does is it it shifts me from that you know getting locked into my own perception of the situation. It immediately unlocks that and it unlocks the feeling that whatever story I'm telling myself which usually we're always telling ourselves ourselves stories about whatever the situations are. It just loosens that up and suddenly I'm looking at it from a different vantage point. So it's not that I'm tapping into some other form of wisdom.

It's not like obviously I have some direct channel to mingle with Bache. I'm tapping into my own wisdom and insight in that moment. I'm just getting a fresh perspective and a wise perspective on whatever that situ situation might be. It's so it's really just that asking the question and then coming back to whatever's going on from that new vantage point. So simple, just takes a moment to do and it it's kind of gamechanging in the way it loosens up the old habitual patterns that most of us are carrying with us into these difficult situations.

And and in that kind of um little exercise or practice, you know, we don't need to have a necessarily a ming in our lives. It could be just imagine this from another person's perspective just to loosen the grip grip grip that um that your perspective has uh and appreciate that there are other perspectives that would see this situation differently. situation differently. situation differently. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the shift itself is the important thing. Not so much, you know, that as just an example, but it's it's so easy.

There's so many ways you could do it. It's quite remarkable and how easy and simple it is. Joseph Goldstein often says, don't side with yourself. with yourself. with yourself. That's great. That's great. That's great. I love that. That is great. That's great. So again, we're walking through the the the four pillars of the healthy minds framework and then talking about um how we can you know integrate micro interact micro um practices into our life that help us train these skills again uh they are awareness, connection, insight and let's talk about purpose.

Um how are we defining and understanding purpose? Let's let's start there. Richie, what do you say? So purpose, the way we use it, it's not so much about finding something grand uh and really more purposeful to do with your life like some big life shift, but rather how can we find meaning and purpose in our daily activities without changing any of the external features of our lives. Now it could be that there are times when we may want to change those external features and that's um important but it's also possible to nurture purpose in the context of our daily lives by connecting meaning and purpose even to the most pedestrian activities of daily living.

So, you know, I'll give you an example from my own life. And this may sound really corny. And um but it I I I do this ver v I do this every day I'm home. So, as long as I'm not traveling, I do this every day. We have a cat at home. Uh and there's a litter box and um the litter box is in the corner of a big living room and I am the one that scoops the litter every night. Uh, and I do it as a practice.

Uh, and I I really do. And you know, as I kneel down to go to the litter box, I just reflect on how this is helpful to my wife. Um, cuz I'm the one that's dealing with this. Uh, for people that come into the living room, it's they don't have to smell the cat litter. for the our wonderful um Siamese cat who's now 14 years old. This is um uh a benefit to her life. And I just, you know, it's it's just a way to um have this connect to being of benefit to others.

And it's so simple. So simple. Uh and I do something similar when I take out the garbage. um you know these are things that we do every day and often they're you know people regard them as chores. Yeah, got to do this and it's you know a kind of grind that people feel they have to do but um it's so easy to uh connect these simple activities to um uh you know an altruistic motive and that changes everything. So if you look at the active ingredients, just to interject for a second, there's two things in what you just said Richie that I think are like the key ingredients.

One is there's a sense of clarity about the motivations and values that are most nourishing. Like in this case, being of service, kindness, you could see a bunch of things kind of wrapped into that that one experience. So the inner clarity is one. And then the other is embodiment. Like it's not just you have a nice, you know, warm fuzzy thought in your mind. It's linking that to something you're doing. So you're thinking, I'm now going to put this value, this guiding aspiration or motivation, whatever it might be.

I'm going to live that in this moment in this activity. And this this too can just be a simple practice you do like something Richie because we are often recording things and doing things together. We have a little ritual just to give another example where we pause before we hit record and we we do just like a one minute motivation reset. And Richie, you can speak to what's going on in your mind. I know in my mind, I'm simply thinking that may whatever comes of this conversation we're about to have.

In fact, I did it before we hit record here with you, Dan. May whatever comes of this, may this really do some good in the world, may this reach somebody who really needs it. May this be, you know, provide some clarity or some inspiration for somebody who really could use a little boost in their lives. May this just do good in the world. And may may whatever is happening here, may it somehow be of benefit and be of service. So again, just takes a moment and you can do that.

It doesn't have to be something grand or positive. You like you said, Richie, you can be washing the dishes or taking out the the garbage or the most mundane things. You can link anything to to a value that's nourishing to you. And you know eventually everything really you know um um Mingar Piche has been teaching this uh um introductory course um anywhere anytime meditation and um uh a a friendly amendment is everywhere all the time. Yeah. And in the book I think you call it reframing the mundane which um I love.

Uh Richie, say a little bit about the science here. Uh from a biological standpoint, purpose isn't just a nice to have. have. have. Yeah, it's um uh so there's there's a lot of science of of particular kinds and also a lack of science in other ways. So there's a lot of research on variations am naturally occurring variations among people in their quote level of purpose in life that is assessed typically through a simple questionnaire questionnaire questionnaire uh and its relationship to many other factors. One of the factors that it's been related to is health.

Uh and so among people 65 years and older, having a strong sense of purpose in life is the single most important psychological psychological psychological factor in predicting longevity and that's you know after carefully controlling for other factors. Um people who have a stronger sense of purpose live longer. live longer. live longer. Uh and so clearly this gets under the skin and affects our biology. The other thing we found is that purpose is an enormous contributor to resilience. Uh and resilience here is defined in a very specific way, you know, in a neuroscientific context.

And the way we define it is simply the rapidity with which you recover from adversity. If you recover quickly from adversity, you're said to be more resilient. And people who have a stronger sense of purpose in their brain, they recover more quickly from adversity. So it's really um uh directly affecting brain circuits that uh are critically involved in our response to adversity and in what we might think of as emotion regulation. And just to be clear, I think you explained this before, but I want to make sure I've got it.

I think you're saying that we don't we don't need to have a clear rallying cry slogan of a purpose that's tattooed on our chests. It really can be no, I'm just going to um try to reframe the mundane all day long. long. long. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And you know it in and I should say that um you know some of this is still uncharted in terms of scientific research. Uh and um you know just to be clear and you know appropriately cautious and humble about it.

Um what is clear uh is the research that shows that people have a stronger sense of purpose do better on lots of different things including living longer, showing more resilience and so forth. But we there there's been virtually no research on cultivating this sense of purpose. And these little practices are really um meant to do that. Uh uh and so um there's still a lot to be discovered about how these kinds of micro interventions may um uh impact our um our experience and our biology uh and change our sense of purpose.

Got it. Well, speaking of the science, you know, you've you've referenced this a couple times that that rewiring the brain is a thing we can do and it doesn't take a ton of time. Um, can you just say a little bit more about the types of changes we can see to our brain and what kind of in investment is required for said changes and then maybe also while you're at it, Richie, talk a little bit how about how we can not only change our brains but also our genes.

Sure. So when we talk about changing our brain in this general category of neuroplasticity, there are many different kinds of neuroplasticity. Uh and so um uh you know we can get really nerdy about exactly what specific parameter of plasticity we're referring to. But broadly speaking, there are two big buckets. One we might call functional changes in the brain. The other we might call structural changes in the brain. Structural changes are anatomical changes. They're changes in the actual anatomy. Um areas may grow larger or smaller. Connections may become um larger or smaller.

Whereas functional changes are changes in the activity patterns of the brain. Changes in activity patterns of the brain can occur really quickly. You know the kind of practice that court led us through. I guarantee that if we had people hooked up to the right equipment, you would see changes in their brain just like that. Functional changes. Um uh but that doesn't mean that those changes will endure. The structural changes we think are changes that occur that um are the um corlate if you will of the more enduring changes that we see.

But the structural changes are easier to produce than we think as well. And I should just give some context not from meditation. There have been studies of people who are learning to juggle and after a 90inute class in juggling the wiring in your brain changes just after 90 minutes. Um we have new data now not yet published um that shows that less than 150 total minutes over the course of a month of practicing these four pillars pillars pillars produces structural changes in the brain. So that's that's not very much.

But again it doesn't mean these structural changes are really dynamic. They can they can revert back. It doesn't mean they're going to persist. you know, it's like weight or weight loss. You know, there's it could be very variable. Um, and so it is our strong intuition that in order for these changes to endure, we need to keep practicing. practicing. practicing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You ever get that dip of energy in the mid afternoon and it just feels like you're just trying to cut through soupy fog in order to get your brain to work?

I don't know about you, but I deal with this all the time. Which brings me to one of our sponsors today. Spark. This is a product that gives you energy and mental sharpness without trade-offs. Spark Energy Plus Focus is your go-to preworkout ritual when you need reliable energy to power through a lift, run, ride, or class. You can mix it, sip it, and get dialed in, ready to go. It has zero g of sugar and essential vitamins and amino acids for mental focus. I have to be candid and say that I can't use Spark personally because I can't have any caffeine, but one of the most effective and awesome members of my team in my company, my little company, Taylor uses Spark and says it is awesome.

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One is the um sequence of base pairs that constitutes our DNA. For the most part, for most people, that's not going to change no matter how much meditation we do. Um, uh, you know, radiation exposure and spending a lot of time on airplanes can change those that can change that. Um, but, uh, for the most part, it's not going to change. Uh, but what will change is our epigenetics. And epigenetics is the science of how our genes are regulated. And you can think of genes having little volume controls that go from low to high.

And that's very dynamic. And those volume controls can be modulated. And they can be modulated by meditation and other kinds of experience. And so there are good there's good evidence now to show that that that um even over the course of a single day of intensive practice in an experienced meditator 6 to 7 hours of practice is enough to produce uh a measurable change in gene expression. Mhm. So, one one thing to to piggyback on what Richie is sharing here. If you bring these these two principles of neuroplasticity and the insights from epigenetics together, what this is showing is just the dynamics of our inner experience and of our lives is much more malleable than previously we understood scientifically.

understood scientifically. understood scientifically. But that is that kind of cuts both ways. We are living in a world right now that is engineered to produce distraction, emotional imbalance, and social division. And so if we're not intentional about what we are surrounding ourselves with and what we are filling our minds with, that epigenetic capacity and neuroplastic neuroplastic capacity is just a recipe for the epidemic levels of distraction and mental health concerns that we see. we're we're living through a grand experiment that we can see the results of this.

So it just invites the the you know the uh importance of really taking charge of this so we can see that actually we all have a role to play and none of us can afford individually or collectively to just be passive about this. Maybe one very specific point to kind of to mention is just the information diet. If you think about information being like food to our minds and brains in the way that uh you know physical food is for our body and physical health, you would think immediately about how much you're eating and the quality of the food you eat.

And think about how much information we ingest. It's insane compared to 20 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. We are consuming information at a rate that's just totally unprecedented. And that would be questionable in any circumstance. But the quality, the second question is the quality. Is that healthy? Is the food healthy? Is it unhealthy? We can just look. I mean, most of the information we're consuming again is is making us more distracted, more anxious, feeling more more uh us them kind of feelings in society.

And so I think we just we really need to get a handle on this and and work on these inner skills so we can just be intentional about what's happening in our minds and brains and with our nervous systems because we can just see the what happens when we don't. We're just living through a collective experiment of what happens when we're not intentional. not intentional. not intentional. Yeah. And so just to say one other thing about um what Court just said um uh to make this clear, neuroplasticity and epigenetics are neutral with respect to uh its impact on our mind, brain and body.

If we uh are exposed to all this toxic information that Cord is referring to, it will harness our neuroplasticity and epigenetics to produce the catastrophes that we're experiencing right now. And so um we can harness these same mechanisms of neuroplasticity and epigenetics uh in a virtuous way to cultivate wholesome qualities of the mind that will help to counteract this. Well said. This is really one major area I'd like to touch on before I let you both go. Um and we've we've touched on this a little bit, but I I want to hit it head on.

Um because it's a question I get all the time. I have you live meditation and Q&A sessions that I do for my app community once a week and almost every time I get the question X event just happened in the news how you know what good is meditation or what's the they don't use this word uh but in the context of your book I'll put it in I'll use this word what how can I flourish in a world where X just happened Trump did or said this or whatever yeah so how do you respond respond to that question when when you feel it.

feel it. feel it. Well, I mean, I'm living my a current version of this cuz I'm from Minnesota. I grew up in Minneapolis and it's a place I love dearly and um man, I was just watching some stuff last night that was heartbreaking honestly. Um I'm even emotional just thinking about it now. Almost like the community I grew up in is almost unrecognizable kind of what's going on. And so if you take a situation like that, like here's a very real, excuse me, a very real situation in a community I love.

I'm very emotionally invested in this. And a question is sort of how what does flourishing look like at a time like this. So to go back to one point that Richie made that is super important. Flourishing doesn't mean happy. clearly seeing what's going on. In this case, in my own community where I'm from, where I grew up, being happy is not the response to that, right? I I want what I want I want the magical alchemy of wisdom and compassion to be driving me, right? I can see rage.

I can see frustration. I can feel powerlessness. I can see how any of those things would be totally understandable. It feels so overwhelming. I feel so disconnected. What could I possibly do in this? and I'm so disheartened by what's happening. That's not helpful. Like I'm not going to be at my best if I'm just overwhelmed or hopeless. So, it's how do I get in touch with this part of myself where I'm just simply seeing the dynamic more clearly? It's not the narrowing of perception when our when our conscious experience is totally hijacked by anxiety or fear or anything else.

And yet, it's infused with care. So again, this again goes back to really nurturing the care and connection and nurturing the awareness. It's it's the combination of all of these things together that when something like this happens, it gives us the space to step back, not from some cold clinical gaze, but from a place of deep care to just say, okay, what what's going on here? What what can I do? I'm not going to single-handedly fix this situation. I know it it feels terrible just to kind of drown in hopelessness and so what can I do right and then again you can take simple steps even just little things like in my immediate orbit like okay I'm not I'm not even in Minnesota right now I don't live there currently I live in Madison so at least in my next interactions I want to just send some kindness out into the world some understanding and maybe even people who I disagree with like okay I don't condone a lot of the stuff that's happening I vehemently disagree with it, but I do want to understand it so I can engage with people who I disagree with and who I just it's just unthinkable to me how people have the opinions they do and they probably look at me and feel the exact same way.

And so there needs to be some unilateral disarmament here, an attempt to just actually talk and understand. And that doesn't come from hopelessness and being overwhelmed by the emotions. So it goes back to those four questions and the four qualities we've been talking about. These are precisely the superpowers that give us the ability to navigate these situations well and to be at our best the more challenging situations are. And we're never going to be perfect, but what we can do is view them as opportunities to practice and to learn and grow.

So, you know, somebody like Victor Frankle who wrote a man's search for meaning, a victim of the Holocaust is just, you know, a great example of even the worst possible things that can happen to us as human beings. Obviously, we wouldn't wish them upon anybody, but they can be sources of learning and growth and self-discovery and coming together in ways, but we need to be intentional about it. It's it's it all comes down to practice. You know, I just add one other little thing and that is that particularly for those who are are on the front lines of social change and social activists who are trying to produce system change um that is so sorely needed in many parts of our country and the world.

Um burnout is uh so prevalent and the kinds of practices that we're talking about are really important in giving people a kind of resilience and vitality that is going to be necessary to um be effective in the work that they do. Yes. And the way you're describing these practices is it's not some massive project to add to your to-do list uh that will further stress you out. These are things you can integrate into the course of your day. Before I let you go, two questions I always ask at the end.

Is there anything either or both of you were hoping we would get to that we haven't yet gotten to? There is one other thing um which I would like and I can just very briefly introduce it. And um in addition to the uh conviction that it's easier than you think, there's another um slogan, if you will, that is at the heart of uh some of what we write about in our book, Born to Flourish, and that is that flourishing is contagious. And there's a lot of really good hard-nosed scientific evidence for this.

Uh and so when we cultivate these skills of flourishing, we not only are benefiting ourselves, but we're benefiting all of those that we touch because they actually benefit from being around us. I would add to that um another kind of key insight that drives our work and message that we want to get out into the world is that these factors the these four things we've talked about awareness connection insight purpose these are not things we need to develop that we don't have this is actually who we are we are we are a moments of awareness moments of connection moments of insight and purpose this this is actually here all the time and it's actually the fact that these things are so omnip present that makes them hard to see in in the sense that we notice what's different.

We notice what's out of the ordinary. It's much more difficult to notice the stuff that's always present. And so it just goes like we all have the raw ingredients to flourish. It's it's getting in touch with what we have rather than again some neverending self-help project, self-improvement paradigm. And I think that's super important. It's right here. It's in every moment. It's right here. I think and talk about what I'm about to say a lot. So many listeners will have heard me say this before and I'm sure my staff uh has a drinking game every time I say this, but my understanding is um the Tibetan word for enlightenment translates roughly into clearing away and bringing forth.

So, we're just clearing away a lot of the clutter that naturally occurs in a human uh brain and mind and also that is injected into us by this incredibly dysfunctional modern environment that we've somehow uh built. Um, clear that away and what comes forth is is are these innate factors or qualities that you're you're both describing in your new book, awareness, connection, insight, purpose. Okay. So the second question I always ask at the end is can you please plug everything the uh Richie I'll start with you mentioned the book um but also your center in Madison um your app just give us everything please.

Yeah so the book is called Born to Flourish. It's coming out uh March 24th. It can be pre-ordered now. Uh and uh it has rich descriptions of all of this. Uh our app is called the healthy minds program and uh it is freely available uh by um uh and it was created by our non affiliated nonprofit uh which used to be called healthy minds innovations and has just been rebranded uh and is now called human h i n uh and um uh and so please if you're interested um uh check it out and let us know what you think and court please.

Yeah. And in addition to um to those things uh we've mentioned the name Migurabashe many times both Richie and I are quite involved with Terar which is uh a meditation community with lots of amazing programs especially the joy of living which is one of the trainings that both Richie and I have done many times over. And a recent venture actually somewhat inspired by you Dan um and your work is uh a Substack and a podcast called Dharma Lab where it's just a space for us to to kind of geek out and have uh the kind of conversations that that we have behind the scenes um and just to um share those conversations with others.

It was very much inspired on by us going for walks and just catching up about the things we're most excited about. And we thought, well, why not have some of these conversations in public and uh that's that's another one that's um available on Substack. And the the podcast is of course available in all the different channels. Listeners, I will post links for every single one of those in the show notes. Courton Richie, congratulations on your new book. Thanks for all the work you do in the world and thanks for coming on the show.

Thank you, Dan. and thank you for all the work that you do to bring these teachings out to so many people. Yeah, absolutely. A real joy to to join you both.