Meditation, Solved: Is It Actually Worth It?

Welcome to Solved. I am Mark Manson and today we are talking about meditation. And is it actually worth it? Have you ever had that moment when you're lying in bed at night, brain running like a browser with 47 tabs open, half of them playing audio and you think to yourself, maybe I should try that meditation thing. And then somehow that thought alone stresses you out even more. Here's the thing that nobody tells you about meditation. The people who swear by it the most are often the worst advertisements for it. I spent years studying Eastern philosophy, reading every guru I could find, and then slowly realized that most of those gurus were raging alcoholics, cereal abusers, and running cult-like cash grabs with fleets of rolls' voices. I'm actually not making any of those things up, but we will get into that in a minute. These were not exactly the poster children for inner peace. And yet, meditation kept getting sold to us as a magic pill. Less stress, more focus, emotional healing, spiritual awakening, permanent calm, basically everything short of six-pack abs and a winning lottery ticket. Which sucks because the only thing I actually need are six-pack abs and a winning lottery ticket. Goddamn it, meditation. So here's the thing when you meditate for a while that you eventually discover. You don't suck at meditation because something's wrong with you or you don't have enough willpower or stamina. You suck at meditation because you've been given the wrong definition of what good meditation actually is. You think the goal is to empty your mind and find some pure, peaceful conscience in this hiding underneath all the mental clutter. When the actual point is to see the clutter clearly for the first time, and realize that you were never in control of it in the first place. Nope. In fact, it's clutter all the way down. So in this episode of Solved, we're going to talk about why the early research on meditation was so wildly overhyped and what the more careful recent science actually says it can and can't do for you. We're going to talk about the three specific benefits of meditation that are genuinely validated, and why none of them are the ones that you've been promised by all the gurus. Yeah. We'll discuss why the most common instruction that people get about meditation, which is sit quietly and think about nothing, is actually terrible advice that is pretty much guaranteed to fail. We'll discuss the invisible reason why so many people resist meditation that has nothing to do with time, patience or discipline, and everything to do with what they're afraid to find out. We'll get into why the people who meditated for decades and were supposed to have it all figured out turned out to be some of the worst human beings imaginable. And what that tells us about what meditation can and can't do for us. We'll discuss treating meditation as an intervention versus treating it as a skill, and why confusing those two things is actually responsible for almost all of the disappointment around it. We'll get into why you're racing chaotic monkey mind is not the obstacle of meditation. It's actually the first real sign that it's working. We'll touch on the one form of meditation that most people have never tried that is actually backed by research, required zero stillness, and you can still do it while cleaning your house, and why the real reason to meditate has nothing to do with happiness, productivity, or stress. So what if the problem isn't that meditation doesn't work, but more like you've been trying to use a skill building practice as a miracle cure this entire time. Because once you stop expecting meditation to fix things, and start seeing it for what it actually is, a process for better understanding your own mind, it stops feeling like another thing you're failing at. It stops feeling like spiritual homework, and it starts feeling like something that might have been worth your time all along. I am three time number one New York Times, Messin, and Arthur Mark Manson, and this is Drew Bernie, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the only man to be formally uninvited to two silent meditation retreats, you could formally uninvited do a lot of things Drew. Is that how we're starting this? Oh, just with some big ass alms. Oh my god, here we go. Oh my god. And this is solved, the most comprehensive podcast in the world, where every episode we aim to solve one burning question in your life once and for all. It might be useful first for me to just kind of give a two minute summary of my journey and my experience with meditation. So I discovered meditation as a teenager. Like most teenagers do. I was a weird teenager. I got really in the Eastern spirituality and philosophy. I started reading a lot of Buddhist texts. I think in hindsight, as someone who struggled with ADHD, I found meditation to be very therapeutic or or meditative in many ways. I found it helpful to help me manage my own impulses and attention, or at least become more aware of them. So I got really, really into it. And as somebody who grew up in the Bible belt in a very Christian household and a very Christian environment, who was not Christian, discovering Buddhism felt like finding water in a desert. And it became a big part of my identity when I was in university. I went to Buddhist centers. I went on retreats. I meditated every day for multiple years. It was a very big part of my life and a very big part of my identity. It was very important to me for a long time. And as I got older, I started drifting away from it. So actually, if you look at my early writing, I talk about meditation quite a bit. Way back when I started writing online, 2008 through 2012, meditation would come up in a lot of articles and a lot of what I talked about. And then it slowly started disappearing. You kind of stop mentioning it. And that is just because, in my personal life, I started to drift away from it. The older I got, the less consistent I was with it, the less I felt cold to do it. There are a lot of reasons for that. I'm sure we'll talk about them in this episode. And then by the time I got into my 30s, it became a very sporadic practice for me. It became almost like a, you know, break-in case of emergency type situation. So two, three years, don't meditate at all. And then life goes to shit. And I'm like, oh, I need to like get back on the mat and start meditating again. Very much like church for some. Yes. Ironically. Yes. So that leads me to today where I'm like, I don't, I think I may be meditated. I could probably count on two hands. How many times I've meditated in the last five years. And I don't feel particularly compelled to meditate frequently. What's interesting at all that time is that when I started meditating, so this is the second surprise. When I started meditating, when I was very into meditation in the 2000s and early 2010s, the early research on meditation was phenomenal. People were raving about it. Psychologists were extremely excited about it. You started to see it get integrated in all sorts of therapeutic modalities. People were teaching it everywhere. Interestingly, in the 15 years sense, a lot more data has come in. A lot more research has been done. And it turns out that the meditation's efficacy as an intervention is spotty. Yes. Let's say it's uneven and not so clear cut. One of the reasons like we wanted to do this episode this way was because when I started talking to people about, you know, meditation, do they meditate? What do they think of meditation? Especially like people on that team, a lot of them were like, I'm not sure I get it. I was surprised by that. I mean, we're in the self-help industry, right? This is a big thing, right? This is a self-improvement podcast. I kind of figured everybody on the team would have at least done it before or at least tried it or aspired to do it. A lot of skepticism. A lot of people on the team were like, yeah, I don't get it. I never understood why. I never liked it. Yeah. So this is going to be a little bit of a kind of a response to the skeptics of meditation. And you're going to see there's just a lot of nuance. There's kind of three big buckets that I found that people are skeptical around. Okay. And we'll kind of go through the finer points of each one of those. And yeah, that's kind of how I want to approach this. So that's all right. Should we get into it? Let's get into it. Let's do it. All right. This first bucket of skepticism, I think you could call it, is that meditation is overhyped. You already mentioned like that early research that came out. There was a lot of hype. It was like, oh, a study would come out. And it was like, oh my God, it fixed this for this person or it made them less anxious, less depressed. It made like fix their relationships. Right. All of these things, right? All of these claims came as stress relief, productivity enhancement, emotional healing, leadership development, creativity boost, even just like the manifestations and the spiritual awakenings and enlightenment and all these literally a magic pill. When yes, when you know, when you say that this one thing fixes everything, the rational response is skepticism there. Right. You would think it's funny because I distinctly recall there being mainstream articles back in the 2000s. I think one of them was literally called meditation. Why everyone should do it? I wrote an article called Why You Should Meditate. I think of our generation of like that era, right? 2000s up through like maybe 2012, 2015. It was just a conventional wisdom. It's like, this is not just an Eastern spirituality thing. Everybody should be doing it. Yeah. Everyone should do it and it will fix everything. Every problem you might have, it can do something for you at least, right? And then there were just just common marketing claims like you're going to have, you know, permanent happiness, permanent calm and light and it confidence. These aren't these aren't really like clinical or medical or even like psychological endpoints. You can't reliably produce these through standard meditation interventions. When you like really do careful studies and all this, well, as we'll see, a lot of these claims, yes, they are definitely overhyped. There's a little bit of a category error going on here because people, it was marketed as a treatment for any life problem basically, right? But really what the more careful research has kind of shown is that it's more of a skill. That's a theme that's going to come up a lot. It's a trainable skill and with skills, you know, outcomes are usually very gradual, right? They're also very sensitive to like the instruction quality that you get, your teacher or the method or whatever you're using. It's very sensitive to that. The key skill is highly variable across individuals, right? Some people are better at it. Some people aren't, some people are natural, naturally good at it. Some people are really have to work at it. There's a lot of individual variation around it. That checks out with my experience. I think one of the reasons I have not felt very motivated to meditate in the last 10 years is I do feel like I gain that skill and I have it, right? So for example, in my 20s, the first time I was able to look at one of my emotions, and question the validity of it. That was profound. It was like, oh my God, I've never done this before. I've never actually considered that like I'm being irrational and I can't trust myself. Whereas like, dude, at 40, that's like a daily occurrence where I'm like, I'm probably being irrational right now. I probably shouldn't trust myself so much. So it is, there's a lot of stuff that the first time you do it or the first 10 times you do it, it strikes you as like, oh my God, I can't, this is like so huge. This is massive. But once you've learned how to do it, you can kind of just call it, like I don't need to go sit on a mat to sit, like to really take a moment and think deeply about my impulses or my thought patterns or, you know, what are my motivations for pursuing this certain goal? Like are they actually genuine or am I kidding myself? Like those are things you, once you've learned how to do it, you can kind of just summon it at will at any point. I think the point you're bringing up is going to be an important one that will come up repeatedly, which is that mindfulness is really the goal here. And meditation is just a tool for mindfulness, right? Being more mindful. So what you're saying is, I've learned how to be mindful in my life, right? Right. Through like just an ordinary everyday life. That's kind of the goal. And I, I mean, I would still say you could probably still get some benefit from meditation as a skill. You need to do some maintenance on the skill, right? You still need to practice it. But yeah, the goal really is mindfulness. And as we'll see, meditation is not the only way to achieve that. As a skill gives you all these other skills. Once you have those, you can apply those in your life over and over again and eat that's a practice in it. That's self too, right? Yeah. Okay. Meditation got more and more introduced to the West. And by the like 90s, 2000s, 2010s, it kind of reached a bit of a fever pitch at that point. And also at that same time, like information technology was taking off. And so you got all the marketing hype around it as well. Yes. So apps came out or online courses or these retreats, whether you could reach people from far, full and places. And so there was a little bit of a perfect storm there where the cultural moment hit this technological moment and all of that was amplified as well. So that's where a lot of the hype came from too. So I agree with everything that you just said. And I think part of the internet, it led the hype into a fever pitch, but I think it ultimately was part of its undoing as well. I remember there was a point in my 20s where I was like reading all these books and studying all these teachers and gurus and all this stuff. And I sure realized that pretty much all of them are just a mess. Right? Like, like, showroom Trumpa was like a raging alcoholic and physically abusive to his followers. Alan Watts was an alcoholic. There was a guy named Adidas who sexually abused his followers. There's Ocho who took all of his followers money and bought 40 Rolls Royces with it. There's example after example after example of these supposedly enlightened gurus who came to the West to teach meditation and all of the physical and psychological benefits of it. And then it's like if you look closely at their character and their actions and their behavior, they were fucking terrible people and total scumbags. And so that it just like for me that just raised a lot of red flags. I'm like, okay, if the dude who's literally meditating eight hours a day is like stealing people's money and sexually harassing women who attend to Zoshrom, like, it can't be that great. Yeah. Yeah. It's not a fix all for shitty personality. That's for sure. I mean, as we'll see, shining the light on it through information technology was definitely part of his downfall as well. But there's, I think there is a middle ground we can kind of achieve though to. So, but the science, when they started to do more, they started to do better studies on this. Definitely, there was early on there were definitely people saying, you know, first of all, the definitions you're using of meditation or mindfulness or whatever, they're inconsistent, they're weak, they're, they're wishy-washy. You're not using proper controls or, you know, you're comparing somebody to doing nothing when maybe what about comparing it to say therapy or exercise or, you know, all these other types of things. Does it do any better than that? They weren't doing that. Publication bias to, there was just a lot of excitement around it. People, you know, you have a positive finding. It's probably going to get published whereas the negative ones weren't all of these things were going on. And once they started to do better studies though, there were a few things that came out and they're like, okay, yeah, it actually does do some good around certain areas. Okay. So, legit benefits? Legit benefits are stress reduction and management, not stress elimination. It doesn't. For you of all stress in your life or anything like that, it basically though, meditation programs, especially like the meditation based stress reduction programs that are like specifically for stress reduction, they are, typically it's like an eight week program though. It's fairly intense. Yeah. It's highly structured. They have repeatable, I believe John Kabatzin was actually, who was an early proponent in the west of meditation. I believe he was very instrumental in developing these programs. But it's highly structured. They have like very specific outcomes for them. They have careful controls when they've done all of this. That actually does work. Stress reduction, stress management, again, it doesn't eliminate the stress in your life's life. You have reduced reactivity, better physiological recovery too. We talked in the resilience episode about heart rate variability and that kind of stuff. It definitely helps with that. So stress reduction, yes, sure, that can definitely help with that. Similarly, along those same lines, emotional regulation as well. It's not like suppression of your emotions, obviously. It's more about noticing them and uncopling from them. You've talked a lot about this. Unfusing from your emotions. It's CBT talks about that gap between action reaction and how, or stimulus and response. And meditation is definitely a tool that widens that gap in your mind. It's a little wedge right now. You start to see, like, oh, I do get to choose how I behave in this situation. The whole de-centering thing around, like, unfusing from your emotions. Seeing emotions as experiences rather than like identity, I think, is a real big one. That was for me anyway. Yeah. And this has been replicated over and over again in studies. And then finally to, like, attentional control. So it does, and we just did this whole thing on focus. And it's not like it gives you, like, this laser focus forever. It basically, though, it makes you aware of when your mind is wondering. When you're messing up, yeah. And helps you to reorient back to whatever you were trying to focus on or anchor on or whatever it is. So like, meditation is just kind of that. That is a huge part of the practice. Well, my mind's wondering, come back to the breath or come back to the bodily sensations or the mantra or whatever I was aiming to do during this meditation session. Just kind of get you those, like, reps and then you can apply that to when you're trying to get something done, you know, and focus on something. There are benefits. Yeah. And they are validated. It's just that it's not like this cure-all, catch-all practice that you can do and all of a sudden your life is going to be amazing, right? I think most people kind of understand that on some level, but they're still that hype out there. I think a lot of that is a residue of the religious background of meditation, right? Because it's, it went in. Yeah. Ultimately, it is a Buddhist practice. It is an Eastern spiritual practice. And when it came over, it was very much marketed as a spiritual practice. And generally speaking, spiritual practices are, they do kind of promise salvation and cure-all. Like that's kind of what, right? That's their whole thing. So there just seems to be kind of an awkward transition into the actual psychological literature where it's like, okay, this is a useful tool. It's helpful at the margins in a number of different ways. Some people will probably get a lot of benefit out of it. A lot of people won't get benefit out of it, like pretty much everything else in psychology. That sits very awkwardly with the religious and spiritual heritage of the practice. Yeah. We'll get a little bit more into the spiritual stuff a little bit later, but there's a lot of researchers who say that what we should really be treating it like is like weight training or strength training in some way, rather than like a treatment. Okay. So it's, again, it's a skill and it's a practice that you have to kind of keep up on. There's kind of a dose dependency to it too. You have to be consistent with it. You have to have good instruction for it, which is why I usually encourage people to either go to like a meditation center or get an app or find some sort of structure and don't just jump into it like that. Like you said, too, the person has to fit the practice as well. I think the main framing here is that like you treat it as a skill not as like this. It's not a replacement for therapy. It's not a replacement for other healthy behaviors by any means. Yeah. It's a skill you can develop and it has a very specific way that it can help you. It's not this magical pill. I will point out that framing it as a skill. I think that. So I agree with that, but I also see how it derails people. One of my best friends is a meditation teacher. He's been meditating intensely his entire adult life. He goes on month-long retreats. It's like, it's what he does. And one of the things that he, I've heard him say multiple times is that the most common objection that he hears from students is they say, "Oh, I'm not good at this." And his response is always, "Nobody is good at this." You're not supposed to be good at this. It's not about getting good at it. He's told me a million times. He's like, "Dude, I meditate more than anybody I know." And he's like, "I sit down and within 10 seconds my brain's fucking thinking about my cereal or what was on TV last night." So he said, "You never turn that off." He said, "What improves is your relationship with it?" All right. That's a good caveat. That's a good framing. And also, he's just right into this next bucket. 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So what I want to do in this section is kind of go through some of these common claims that people are common objections that people make and then we can kind of, I don't want to say dismantle them because I'm over my, I think are very legit. The first one that I hear so a lot is just I can't sit still. All right. And Mark as somebody with ADHD, I think you probably relate to this somewhat, but you have been meditated for a long time too. So you figured it out right? Yeah, I went on multiple multi day retreats. It's funny because as soon as you said that, it reminded me actually of a former teacher of mine who used to always, whenever you said something like that, I really like, I can't sit still. He'd always interrupt you and say, you can, you choose not to. It was really fucking annoying. That's so true. Because he was right. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, it is a real thing. There are some people would just have a high baseline of a rouse or a restlessness. ADHD or other anxiety disorder. It's hard. And tolerance to stillness sometimes too. It's just like boredom or just sitting there. It can feel unsafe for some people for sure. Dude, I will tell you it's, it's one of the hardest things to do. Yes. It's like, I did one three day retreat. The second day of that retreat is like one of the most difficult days of my entire life. It was, it was torture. It was absolute torture. It was, I was in physically in pain because when you sit for 14 hours at a, and don't move, don't do anything like your body starts cramping up and things get sore. I was in physical pain. It was just mental anguish. It was just like you're sitting there. I remember I had like a four or five hour stretch where I had a commercial jingle stuck in my head. Oh no. And I was like, get out of my fucking head. Like for the love of God. I'm going to lose. It was like, give me a break. Give me a break. I'm trying to insane. It was on level with, I don't remember what it was, but it was something like that. And it was just like, and I remember we had everybody at the retreat had an hour a day with the Zen Master or not an hour, like half an hour or something like that. And so I remember I just walked in there and I was like, I have this jingle in my head. Like please help me get it out. And of course he was like, he was like, the more you resist it, the more it's going to stay around like God damn it. But that's absolutely true. It's true. So the instruction to sit quietly and think about nothing, that is not meditation and any teacher knows anything is not going to tell you that's a terrible instruction, especially for beginners. Yes. Okay. So usually you're giving your mind something to do and you're trying to keep on that. So what happens, what happens on most retreats is that there's an understanding that you need some variability. So like what will often happen is that you will go through, so you'll sit for maybe 45 minutes to an hour. Usually that starts to get painful for a lot of people. So then what they'll do is they'll do walking meditations for like 30 to 45 minutes, then you'll come back and sit for another hour, then you'll do like another walking. And then on some retreats what you'll do is there'll be like chores, right? So it's like you can do some of the food prep or the cleanup or sweeping the floor and the ideas that you're supposed to be mindful as you're doing. Chopboard, carry water. Yeah. Yeah. Well that's exactly what I was going to say is that there's like meditation can take many forms that's not just sitting. Yes. And staring at the wall and trying to empty your mind. That's not what it is necessarily. Walking meditation though is a very well validated actually form of meditation. It's part of that mindfulness based stress reduction. Actually, they build that into it as part of John Cabot's in help develop that as well. And it's like the movement really distributes your attention that way. So it's not all just like up here in your little head right behind your eyeballs. Yeah. I actually like it. I like it better because you're supposed to focus on your feet and exactly where you place your feet. Yes. And you're supposed to feel every part of the floor. So it's like when you're heel touches, you feel your heel and when the ball of your foot touches you feel the ball of your movement. Yeah. It's actually very nice. Yes. Distributed attention. So it's attention on your movement, attention on bodily sensations on the environment around you too. That's meditation. It's mindfulness of being mindful of your environment, right? The studies on walking meditation that you have improved mood, reduced stress and anxiety and you know, me get your steps in, right? As an added bonus, right? Oh, 9,548. If that works, yeah. The other thing you said though, too, like the chores thing, I found this, there's this book by, it's this guy called named Shokai Matsumoto. He was his Japanese monk and it's a monk's guide to cleaning house and mind. And he actually argued his preferred form of meditation was cleaning. And if you ever have been to like a monastery, I've read anything about monasteries, like cleaning is a huge part of their daily routine. Like every single day they spend hours cleaning and they're supposed to do it very, very mindfully and get in a meditative state when they clean. In his book he talks about how you know, cleaning is a form of mindfulness because it's a practice and you don't see it as a chore necessarily. And then also like some of the other principles he talks about is like the outer, outer order supports kind of inner calm or inner clarity at least to like your outer environment often reflects your inner environment. And we talked about this on the focus episode that there actually is research that shows that a decluttered environment is helpful for focus. Another benefit of it, the two doing small tasks with full intention, like you were talking about with the walking, like put your heel to toe, heel to toe. When you're cleaning too, it's not just you're just mindlessly trying to get things in order. It's like you are consciously these small tiny little tasks. He encourages you to pay very, very close attention and do them very, very intentionally. Respect for everyday objects as temporary companions to, I kind of like this is a little bit out there a little bit. But I did like this because you know, amongst they have very, very few possessions and each one of the, I think he spends time in this book going through why he owns everything that he owns. That's very small, a number of things. And you have a respect for these objects in your life as kind of these temporary companions and it reminds you that everything is temporary and impermanent, right? And you need to take care of these things. Then there's the routine aspect to it. One of the things he talks about to is care over perfection that I really like to you cleaning. It's about caring for life as it is, not for like, not for, it's not self-improvement. It's just something you just need to do. The whole point though is that you don't have to sit in a room quiet, staring at the wall. You can, there's lots of different ways to meditate. You can meditate in a crowd on a crowded bus or in an airport. I've had to do this before because I can just sit there and you can be very therapeutic. It can absolutely be. This whole stereotype of meditating, you know, sitting cross-legged on a pillow or whatever, that, no, that you don't have to do it that way. To this point, I'll tell you a story. For the first time I went to India, I went to Bodhgaya, which is supposedly where the tree is that the Buddha sat under and became enlightened for the first time, the Bodhi tree. And it's cool. There's like a big temple there now and actually a lot of monks do pilgrimages there and they'll sleep under the Bodhi tree the way the Buddha did. So it's just like beautiful. [BLANK_AUDIO] The town is tiny, it's in the middle of nowhere. You have to fly. It's kind of like Northwest India. So you fly to this town called Gaia and then you have to drive a couple hours out there and then there's basically just a temple and a couple of roads and that's it. And so I got all the way out there and I remember I ended up sharing a took-took with this young English guy and he was so excited to be there. And I was like, "Oh cool, are you a Buddhist?" And he was like, "No, but I'm really excited to meditate here." I was like, "Oh, that's cool. What's your meditation practice?" And he was like, "Oh, I've never meditated before." But I figured how cool would it be to learn how to meditate under the Bodhi tree? And I just looked at him, I'm like, "Do you realize there's YouTube videos?" He didn't have to come all the way out here. (laughing) You could have just stayed at home, watched a video, and decided if you liked it first before you. - And gotten the same result out of it. - Yeah, yeah. There's definitely like that elevation of, you know, sacred places and stuff where it's like, actually the most sacred of places are the most mundane. - Yeah, you know what I mean? - And I think a big misconception that people have about meditation is that it literally can be done anywhere. Like you can do it on a bus, you can do it on a subway, you can do it on a taxi, you can do it on an airplane. Like it is simply the practice of pure awareness and directing your attention towards something, and that's it. - Yeah, no, it is. Well, okay, that gets us into this next objection, which is my mind is too busy, I just don't feel calm, and so it's just not working, right? Like I'm trying to meditate, my mind's just racing, it doesn't work. When actually that observation is usually the first accurate observation that meditation produces for people, it's like, oh, my mind is fucking crazy. That is meditation, that's like noticing that is actually probably the first and most important step. Many of the beginners, they implicitly believe that meditation means having fewer thoughts, and that's not it. - Yeah, the misconception is that you're supposed to get rid of that craziness, whereas you're actually supposed to just observe the craziness and to attach yourself from it. It's actually very interesting. I've seen a lot of people come in the meditation groups for the first time, the first time in their life, they've meditated. In Buddhism, it's often called the monkey mind. Right, it's like when you sit down and you try to focus on your breath and your brain starts thinking about, like cheesecake and what your sister texted you last Wednesday and what flavor chocolate you wanna buy on your way home, like that's the monkey mind. It's just like the spontaneous, uncontrollable impulses of thought and whist of emotion. And it's just, it happens to you. You realize that you're not actually in control of it. And so often meditation teachers, like that they always start out talking about the monkey mind and if people are new, it's like, you know, observe the monkey mind, you're not gonna get it to stop. The goal is to just be aware that it's there and watch it and try to make peace with it. But it's interesting, 'cause a lot of people don't even get as far as realizing that they're so identified with the monkey mind that they don't realize that it is a monkey mind. - Right. They're so locked into what cheesecake they like and what flavor chocolate they're gonna buy on their way home and what their sister texted them that they don't even realize that they're out of control. Like that, that's not them, right? It's that that's something you can observe in the first place. So it's like, there's so many layers to this stuff. - I think one of the little mini breakthroughs I have with meditation too and most people do at some point is that though, like those thoughts you're having, that racing mind you're having, all of that is really no different than a car passing in front of you on the street or somebody having a conversation with you and like those things are just happening to you. And so yeah, that separation you get between those two things is really the point. And noticing that yeah, I do have this monkey mind and it's probably never gonna go away. It won't go away actually. But just like having a different relationship with it is kind of a goal there. My first Zen Master used to compare it to watching clouds. Go by. - Yeah, what are you gonna do? - And he said he's like some clouds are stormy and rainy and some clouds are beautiful and some clouds look like something and some clouds look like nothing and they all come and go and he's like, it's silly to get attached to them. - The other common metaphor too is that if you're sitting under a bridge and the cars are going up, what are you gonna do? Some of them are big loud trucks, some of them are tiny quiet little BVs right or whatever. What are you gonna do? It's just accepting. - And it's useful because it's like sometimes sometimes there is gonna be a big rain cloud and a thunderstorm that's gonna come over and you can either get really upset about it or just remember like, oh it's just a cloud. It's gonna go by. - The takeaway here though with this is that meditation it doesn't reveal this calm mind that you have under all of this clutter. That's not it at all. It reveals the mind that you actually have. - Right. - People think, oh what I'm gonna do is remove all of this clutter and I will find this very centered, peaceful mind, pure mind, right? Just pure consciousness. And I guess that is probably there, sure, but that's not, you're not revealing the mind that's there under all this clutter. You're revealing that your mind is cluttered. And so if your mind feels too busy, if you don't feel calm during it, yeah, that's kind of the point, especially early on. It's just noticing that. - Now, okay, now this next one, this next objection, I have a lot of sympathy for in some ways, I guess, anyway, which is, I don't have time. I don't have the time for it. I'm probably not the best person to argue against this one because I don't have kids. I set my own schedule, flexible schedule that I have. I have plenty of time where I can fit in things like this throughout my day. And so I don't struggle with this as much as some people. Time scarcity is a thing. - It's right. - But the thing I do come back to is, okay, you don't have to sit for 20 minutes. You don't have to sit for 10 minutes. What about one minute? Take one minute. You can find one minute at any part of your day where you can meditate. You could be driving and you could meditate. Like we just said, you can do it anywhere. - You can do it while you're doing chores. You can do it while you're taking a shower. - Yeah, yeah. - But a lot of people, a few people on team were talking to them, they're like, well, they say, everybody, like my therapist or whoever, they tell me that first thing in the morning just get up and do 10 minutes or whatever. I wake up out of bed, I'm thinking about 10 million different things and I'm like, check in emails already. I'm getting ready, I'm brushing my teeth. I'm trying to get, yes, of course it's hard. - It's hard. I mean, again, I used to have a teacher who said that anytime you feel like you don't have time to meditate means that you really need to meditate. - Right. - Because if your life was organized and you were actually in control of your day, you wouldn't feel like you didn't have time to meditate. - So Zenya found a really good Zenya on the research team. She found a really good quote, which is, everybody should probably meditate for about 20 minutes a day. If you're busy, it should be an hour. - Yes. - Yes. (laughing) - So that was like, yeah, okay. So if you think you're too busy to meditate, you definitely should be. - Yeah, which I think there is wisdom in that. - I definitely sympathize with it. I'm now speaking as somebody who feels like he doesn't have enough time to meditate each day. - But I get the argument in that, like, if you do start meditating, say, 10, 15 minutes a day, you're probably gonna have better awareness. You're gonna be more efficient with your time with everything. You're gonna make better decisions. You're gonna notice when you're wasting time doing something that you don't need to be doing, that would be the argument for it. - Like if there's like a single mom working two jobs, multiple kids, all this craziness going on, I'm not gonna say it here and say, well, you just need to meditate. Like, I think so much of this comes down to what are your goals? So I'll say this, the only times that I feel like I need to meditate is when I'm really stressed and anxious. You know, and I just feel overwhelmed by my life at that moment. That is when I do feel like I need to go back to it. A lot of time to these days, what I see a lot is that meditation's kind of prescribed for these like hardcore, super productive, lock-in, bro. We're gonna work 12-hour days. That doesn't feel super necessary to me. That's, to me, the benefits I've always gotten from meditation have been much more emotional. - I would 100% stressed. - And actually, like the, what the impetus for me starting back up last year with meditation was very much around. I was just like a bit emotionally dysregulated and I was like, okay, I need to like kind of chill. - Chill. - Yeah, I get a hold of myself. - Right, yeah. - Yeah. - Okay, so I'll give you one more objection here. It's kind of a little bit of a bonus objection because I actually don't think people actually say this out loud, but it's an objection, which is if this works, I'm gonna have to change some things. (laughing) Right? Increased awareness around things can be very, very uncomfortable. Right, and so first of all, okay, yeah, oh, I got this monkey mind. It's pretty crazy, all right. Once you get past that, then you start realizing, oh, maybe I'm not really super aligned with my values right now in my job or my relationships or unhealthy coping habits that I have. - Yeah. - This is a little bit more subtle, like I said, nobody actually says this, I think, but I think there's this little bit of a subconscious fear of it. - I think this is a resistance that people have towards a lot of things. - Yes. - I think a lot of people don't go to therapy. - It's a change in general. - Because of this. I think a lot of people don't go to marriage counseling because of this. I think a lot of people, yeah. - I don't wanna know what thoughts are in there. - Yeah, people don't journal because of this, right? 'Cause it's like, I'd rather be unaware. Right. Right. Of what's going on. If this is the case, I mean, I'm I'm not sure I can help you with that, necessarily. But I think it's a good thing to be aware of. It's like where are you, if you have this kind of like just vague resistance to it, that could be it. And that might be worth something examining as well. - I think it's a very different statement. And again, this could be true for almost any intervention, but I'll say it specifically for meditation. If I meet somebody who's never meditated in their life and they're like, not worth the trouble, I don't give that a lot of credit. Whereas if I meet somebody who has meditated quite a bit, who's tried it, who's taken like gone the classes has downloaded an app or something, and maybe they've put in a good 10, 20 sessions. And then they're like, doesn't seem worth it for me. I give that a lot of credit. - Okay. - You know, I'm like, okay, people know themselves. They know what works for them. They know how their particular brain works and what seems to help them. And I'm under no, like I said, these days, I'm under no illusions that meditation is a great solution for everybody. I think it's one of many tools. And I think for some people, it's a very high leverage tool. And I think for other people, it's a very low leverage tool. But yeah, it's kind of like people have never gone to therapy who are like, what's the point of therapy? Right? It's like, well, you should go before you make that decision. - Yeah, right. - And I think it's the same with meditation. Like you should at least do it before you discount it. And decide it's not worth the time or effort. - Yeah, no, for sure. And all those objections I just went over, I mean, they're common objections. They're ones I think that have a, there's a rebuttal to them. And there's a good case to be made against them. But that does bring us to, there are probably some people like you just mentioned. Maybe they shouldn't be meditating. There's a few things. Some newer research has come out that actually meditation can, in some cases, few cases, but in some cases can be harmful. It can increase anxiety more. It can make you ruminate more. There's, you know, certain people, people who already have a calm demeanor, you know, and are good with solitude and introspective. Yeah, okay, you're pretty prime for meditation. And it's probably, you're gonna get something out of it. And you're gonna enjoy it probably too. On the other hand, you know, people have experienced, especially people have experienced like trauma in their past, I would tread very carefully around this. - Okay. - Because again, that cold like sitting in silence, that I think for some people, your mind is probably gonna go straight to a lot of that trauma response that you have where there's conscious or just like a, trauma response that you have in your body even too. There's, there's research to suggest that this can lead to some dysregulation, even dissociation, at some point, right? Or even re-experiencing some of that trauma. - Yeah. - So if you do have a history of trauma, I would say, and you wanna do it, and you still wanna do meditation, okay? So maybe you just don't. But if that's the case, it needs to be supervised and it needs to be highly structured. And you need to go to somebody who knows what the hell they're doing. Not just hop on YouTube and find like, oh, here's a trauma meditation. Don't do that. This needs to be supervised and it needs to be highly structured if you're gonna do it at all. - Did you find any numbers around like what percentage of people have some sort of negative reaction? Or, 'cause I've seen that this is something that is becoming more noted, but I haven't seen like, - I haven't seen any reliable numbers come up, but there's definitely, in the more recent responses and critiques of the past meditation research, there's been several research that were pointed out. They're like, you guys are under reporting the negative effects on this for sure. So we don't actually know exactly what the percentages are, but it's definitely being under reported. There's some interesting, I mean, if you Google around, there's some interesting substax and articles that have been written by people who found meditation to actually be very harmful to them. - Yeah. - Some interesting accounts out there. So they're definitely out there, they definitely do exist. It seems like it's a very small minority of people, but. - Yes, yeah. I think it is, but yeah, anybody with like a trauma background necessarily if you're hiding anxiety too, and especially if you've got anxiety disorder, like generalized to end up anxiety or even OCD. While, yes, meditation can help with those things. Again, that needs to be supervised and highly structured too. - It probably depends on the person. - I think that's a big point we need to drive home too, is just that person practice fit. It has to be there, and especially in these cases where you're dealing with mental health issues. - Well, it's funny because I don't think there's anything, I don't think there's any intervention that is other than maybe exercise. - Right, that is just universally positive. I think almost everything. 'Cause even therapy, one of the things that never gets broadcast about therapy is that five to 10% of people would go to therapy actually report feeling worse. - Right. - And it's, so there is really is nothing that works for everybody. - I would guess that meditation is probably about the same 10% of people that could actively make them worse. - Yeah. - Which obviously if it does, stop doing it. - Obviously, right. - Right. Okay, so that's it for that bucket of the whole, it's not for me. - Yeah. - Okay, so again, some people, it's not for them. - Yeah. - That's true. I think though finding ways to be more mindful in your life, I think that's probably just about for everybody, whether that's through meditation or not, that's that you can decide for yourself. - I just feel like there's, so one of the things that is unique about meditation is that it's so easy to try. It doesn't cost anything. - Right, right. - The downsides are really, yeah. - Right, it takes five, 10 minutes to give it a whirl. Right, like you can, it's, there's so little upfront cost or there's so little barrier to it. It's not like therapy where it's, you've got to spend time finding a therapist and it costs hundreds of dollars and you need health insurance and you need all this shit. Like meditation, like you can literally just get online and find, you know, some audios or like an old Alan Watts meditation or something, like there's so much stuff out there. - Now for sure, for sure. - Yeah, I'm biased. I think people should absolutely try it out. Like again, though, find the fifth, if it's walking meditation or cleaning or whatever it is. And there's so many different styles. We're not gonna go through all the styles of meditation. I'm just partial to kind of like Zen and mindfulness meditation, but, you know, there's lots of different styles, like compassion, caring and compassion type stuff. - Many many different styles. - Mantras, there's chance, there's, yeah. Also, yeah. - Give it a try. - This episode is brought to you by shopify. If you've ever tried to meditate, you know the hardest part is not sitting still. It's dealing with everything your brain throws at you the second you get quiet. Before I wrote my book, before the podcast, before any of this stuff, there was a constant loop. What if nobody reads this? What if I'm not as good as I think I am? What if this whole thing is a giant public embarrassment? Sound familiar? Well, guess what? That voice does not go away. You don't beat it, you build something anyway. 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So if you've got something you've been sitting on, some idea you keep circling back to in the shower or laying awake at two in the morning, stop meditating on it and go build it. It's time to turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/solved. Go to shopify.com/solved. Everybody, that's shopify.com/solved. (upbeat music) Okay, so this last bucket of objections that will go over. This gets into one of your favorite topics, Mark, I think. I don't know. The woo-woo, new AG, pseudo religious. I'm not into that whole thing, which I totally get that. And there is this whole-- - Holy fair. - Yes, very, very fair. There's this whole packaging, at least in one wing of meditation where, like you mentioned, they can't be out of a lot of religious traditions, so there's a lot of spirituality tied to it. And in the modern age where this new age or new age adjacent at least kind of mindsets grab onto something, then they take it maybe a little too far. So some of the claims that come out of it, their meditation helps you tap into this universal energy, whatever that means, right? It's very vague, of course. Shakras are big, right? And they treat them as like a literal anatomical or a neurological phenomenon. There's all these enlightenment and narratives come around it. Like if you meditate, you can become enlightened. And that's always kind of a vague concept, a cosmic consciousness that you're tapping into, all of these types of things, right? That really turns skeptical people off. You know, especially if you're kind of like a more scientific minded person, you'll point out. Hey, these claims aren't false, falsifiable. You can't prove these right or wrong. You're presenting these like with Shakras, you're presenting these like medical level advice, or. evidence and it's not. There is just a general blurring of empirical fact with subjective experience all the time, which I think that's a valid criticism. It is an interesting confluence of different philosophical schools. So it's interesting if you look at the modern self-help movement, where are these ideas originated? Or the New Age movement? Yeah. These ideas about manifesting your future and the universe and universal energy and cosmic consciousness that we're all tapping into. A lot of this traces back to early 19th century America. There was a group of philosophers loosely known as the Transcendentalists. The most prominent and probably respectable one was Emerson, but there was a whole group of them in the Northeast United States and the 1800s. And it kind of became popularized during the time to the point that they were traveling around and giving lectures and it kind of became like a whole movement of manifesting your future and asking the universe. They probably didn't use this exact language at the time, but it eventually transformed into a very populist version of Transcendentalism known as New Thought. And New Thought in the 1900s was just very much what we would recognize as classic New Age self-help today. In fact, the genre self-help came from a book, and I believe it was 1849, called self-help. This strain of thought has been around for centuries at this point and throughout American history, it keeps getting re-adopted and repackaged for the next generation in a new form. So in the early 20th century there was a very popular book called As Man Thinketh, which was repackaged the same ideas for the New Century. And then you get into the 1920s and the Great Depression and you get Dale Carnegie and Napoleon Hill. And then by the 1950s you get the power of positive thinking. And it's just like on and on and on. Up until 2000 you get the secret. And it's just like this lineage of the same ideas being repackaged into new books, a new formats, a new seminars over and over and over again. And it's funny because like the the strand, the DNA of this school of thought is kind of this unfalseifiable lofty generic we are one with everything. And in you we've lost touch with our nature, the natural order. And we need to do certain practices to get back in touch with our nature. And if we do that then we'll be really happy and get rich and everything will be great. It's interesting seeing the eastern philosophy that arrived in the 1960s and 70s because there are aspects of Buddhism and yoga, which is where the shockers come from, that cohere perfectly with new thought or new age thinking. It's Buddhist philosophy is very explicit of like the self does not exist that we're part of this this kind of infinite nothingness. And Buddhist philosophy, it's emptiness. But it is kind of this infinite oceanic existence that we all kind of float in in various ways and forms. There is this idea of kind of the shedding of self, the return to your true nature, the removing of illusions and attachments. And of course the power of thought, the power of focus attention and the power of directing that focus attention towards specific things and the repercussions that that has in your life. And so what you've seen is that you've seen a lot of this eastern spirituality and eastern thought just get merged and integrated into new age thinking whole sale. Like there's like nobody even batting an eye. They're like, oh yeah, yeah. The universe wants you to be this way. So yeah, you should meditate. And now that'll help you reveal your true self and shed your ego. And then you'll be able to manifest your true nature that much sooner. And it's kind of like it just fits in slots in nicely with kind of the gobbledygook that gets repeated off. And it's stuff that feels good. I think meditation slots in nicely too because it is we talked just a few minutes ago about how you and I, the primary value that we find in meditation is very much an emotional one, right? It helps us regulate our emotions. It destresses us. It calms us. I think a lot of new age self-help is really just that. It's kind of this elaborate intellectual structure that's not actually very coherent, but it just, it's coherent enough to get you to do certain things or think about certain things that calms you down. And so it's really just like an elaborate cope for an anxious or overwhelmed existence. Well, so okay, what's the, what's the harm in it then, Mark? If that's what it's, we come back to this. Okay, so much. Okay. Yeah. What's the harm in it? If that's what it's doing. So how do you get there? Well, where I was going with this is that I think, I think meditation is probably being unfairly implicated in a lot of the, the same woo-woo nonsense that that we often stick our nose up at on this podcast and make fun of. Sure, it's been adopted by these people. And yeah, it does fit quite nicely into their framework or understanding of the world. Okay. But it didn't come from the same place. Meditation actually has a lineage going back three thousand years. Right. And it actually has a very deep spiritual practice that has existed for a very long time. And there are real phenomenological and psychological implications and experiences that come with that spiritual practice. So all this is the say is that I don't think people, I get the aversion, but I don't think people are being fair to meditation. If they associate this with just more woo-woo stuff. Right. It's guilty by association. It is. At this point. It is. Okay. Yeah. That's definitely where I land on it. Again, I think we have a category problem here. Right. Which is, you know, meditation is often framed as like this pipeline to some cosmic order that we can tap into or whatever it is. When really, you know, if you look at it from a more empirical lens, it's just it's attention training. It's right. Medicognitive awareness and skill building. It's emotional regulation like we talked about. That's what it is. And you don't have to complicated it any more than that. Yes. And I'll say this too. A lot of the quote unquote spiritual woo-woo stuff. I actually think Buddhism is a more proper explanation for what they're trying to get at. So I'll just give you a quick example or a quick primer. Like in Buddhist thought, the whole reason you meditate is to remove the illusion of self is to come to the realization that what you understand as true is just this completely made up arbitrary definition that you've cobbled together over 40 years of life experience. And the same way you cobbled it together, you can uncobble it. And recobble it however you want. But the point that Buddhism makes is that however you choose to cobble that definition of self together, it is going to cause suffering in whatever way. So if you redefine yourself in such a way, if you meditate enough and you like look at your thoughts and feelings and associations and Buddhism, it's often translated as attachment. For me, attachment I think is not a perfect English translation. And my observation is that it seems to confuse people more than it actually helps them. To me, a more accurate way of describing it is an identification. It's if you're angry, anger is not necessarily a problem. The problem is when you identify with your anger and you decide that that is like actually representative of who you are. And you see no separation between yourself and the anger. It's that there's a lack of that gap that we spoke about. Or if I define myself as a podcaster, there needs to be some sort of awareness that these identity markers are arbitrary and made up and selected. And I am opting into identifying with them or I can also opt out of identifying with them. And the point that Buddhism makes is that the more stuff you opt into identifying with, the more you're going to cause yourself to suffer. And so it's by holding all of these experiences loosely and understanding that they're all transitory and that they're all arbitrary and they all both good and bad don't necessarily signify anything about who you are. You're able to relieve yourself of unnecessary suffering in the world. There's a lot of real value in that. That's a deep spiritual thing you just said without being supernatural. Yes. Going into the supernatural or yeah. At no point that I describe the universe or energy or it's incredibly practical but it's incredibly spiritual. Cosmic consciousness. And part of that disidentification with everything is when you start is when that dissolution of identity begins to happen. What happens is that you actually paradoxically you start to feel very one with everything. Because it turns out that by identifying with a certain experience or emotion or trait or aspect of yourself, you're actually very much limiting your experience. If I decide that the most important part of my identity is being a podcaster, everything I experience in my life is going to be about podcasting. I'm going to see everything in terms of podcasting. I'm going to feel everything in terms of podcasting. I'm going to feel threatened in terms of my ability to podcast or not. Whereas when you let go and loosen up and you disidentify with everything, it actually frees you to experience everything more fully. So what you end up with is the boundaries between yourself and the universe, for lack of a better term, or reality, existence, starts to dissolve and get more faint. People who have meditated extremely intensely, you also see this happen a lot with people who take a lot of psychedelics. There is an ego dissolution that begins to happen and you feel like the individual self or the consciousness that is you is no longer limited to your skull and it is now like pervades anything and everything that you're experiencing. So I can see why that would be called the cosmic consciousness. Right. So there is a real phenomenon that that idea comes from. It just tends to get very butchered. Yeah. The interpretation can really be misleading there. Yeah. I think that the John Capazin came up with a definition, which is something along the lines of what meditation actually is, which I think fits in really well here, which is paying attention on purpose in the present moment non-judgmentally. I like that. And so that like again, all of those things can be very, I guess for lack of a better word, spiritual in their nature without being, without appealing to supernatural forces or cosmic, overly cosmic explanations of things. There doesn't have to be these spiritual claims. There doesn't have to be these belief systems. It's more like an instruction manual when you look at it like that. And yet that's still very profound and very spiritual at the same time. Even when you're sitting here explaining like, oh, you're becoming one with the universe or reality or whatever it is, that has that hint of kind of like this supernatural, you know, woo, woo, new, and G type thing that will still even turn people off. But I think it's the definition of that word spiritual that you need to also hang on to very loosely as well. Right. And this is the challenge of this is that, because if you think about it, the act of trying to put word, like what are words, right? Words are identifiers, right? Like you're taking some arbitrary concept or experience and you're putting a boundary around it and you are like labeling that thing. And so as soon as you do that, that is completely antithetical to what, you know, like a deep Eastern spiritual practice is trying to get you to do. So by its very nature, these experiences defy words because words are exactly contrary to what the experience is. So as soon as you say like something like cosmic consciousness or one with everything, ironically, that's a very limiting way to describe it because it doesn't, it's, you're still putting a boundary around it and putting a label on top of it and saying, this is, see this thing that I'm holding in front of me. This is, this is what that is. It defies labeling it defies identification. It defies boundary, which is paradoxical. Ken Wilber used to call it non-dualism, which is a fun little term to think about. He called what? Non-dualism? Like the whole, it's non-dualism. So it's like a non-dual consciousness. Oh, okay, okay. So it's, it's the lack of division. If you ask Freud about meditation, I imagine what he would say is that you're exercising your super ego. Like the super ego and Freud's framework, you've got the id, which is all the emotions and impulses you're unconscious. You have the ego, which is your identity, like how you define yourself. And then you have the super ego, which is kind of observing your ego and I guess tries to observe your id, but like can't really see it. I think what Freud would say is that you're exercising your super ego. You're, you're training the observer inside your own mind to get a more accurate picture of your ego, who you are, and then also like how it's responding to your id, your impulses and emotions and desires and whatnot. The better your understanding of your ego, the more adaptable that ego becomes and probably the healthier you become. That would probably be the Freudian explanation. But the funny thing is like when Freud talked about spiritual experiences, he actually saw it as like an infantile regression. Like a, like when the ego dissolves, you fall back into your id, which is where you were when you were like a child. And so your pure impulse and your pure lack of differentiation and your pure lack of identity can Wilbur came along and he made the astute observation. He said it's not infantile regression. He said that's more like what this association would be. The spiritual experience of a non-dual awareness is actually you don't, you don't lose the ego. You transcend and include the ego. So it's like when you're having this non-dual awareness, you're still aware that this thing that you know as drew exists, but you're just not attached to it. You're like, oh cool. It's just another thing in the room that you can observe and play with and. But you're not identified with it. You're not identified with it. You're not attached to it. Okay. Yeah, we talked a little bit about that in the ego episode. I guess too. Where the point wasn't necessarily to get rid of your ego. Yes. It was to have a healthy sense of ego and know when it's online and what it's doing. Yeah. Spiritual practice is to transcend the ego, but not eliminate it. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Okay. For all the skeptics who do want to stay away from that, the whole overly spiritual, I guess, or overly supernatural side of things, I mean, if you think about it, like your mind really is, it's just constantly generating bullshit thoughts. Oh yeah. Yeah. You call it thought. I call it bullshit. Thoughts, predictions, interpretations, simulations. Right. I always say our brains are big comparison machines where I was generating these comparisons. Really what meditation boils down to is that noticing of those thoughts, interpretations, bullshit, redirecting that attention, being able to redirect it. And as you just pointed out, disidentifying from all of that, too. That's what it comes down to. That can be a very deeply spiritual thing for someone without getting into all of the problematic supernatural takes on it, too. I think a nice way to differentiate, like you can experience meditation in both ways. There's a casual version of meditation, which is like almost like a hygienic practice, right? Like it's just mental hygiene. Right. Left in ways, yeah. And then there's a hardcore approach to meditation, which is really treating it. You can call it spiritual. You could call it just like deep identity work, like deeply therapeutic. But I mean, if you go super hard on meditation for a long period of time, like you will start having very interesting experiences and observations around your ego and your identity and who you are and what you feel and what matters and what doesn't matter. Like that stuff is down there. That isn't to say everybody should go there. And it's also not to say that's the only way to get there. Got you. Yeah. I would say I'm much more on the hygienic side of it, like how I use it anyway. Maybe at some point I'll get into the way more deeper into it. I don't know. But yeah, so far, the hygienic side, you can still get a lot of value out of it. It still feels even spiritual to some degree. The discipline part of it actually is very spiritual. We've discovered, okay, there's kind of two ways to approach it. There's this ultra-new AG. We'll wait to do it. Or you can be a little more of an empiricist around it. There's still a spiritual side to it, sure. However, okay, as you've noted as we've noted several times already, meditation came out of a lot of ancient spiritual traditions, a lot of ancient religions too. So are we missing something when we separate it from that? Are we, when we divest it from that, when we separate the two out? Because there's part of me that sees, when you do that, then you can run a corporate retreat on meditation, right? And you can have calm, good, little, well-behaved employees now that meditate, okay? Or you can go all sorts of ways with it at that point. There's people who will argue, and it doesn't have that kind of moral and ethical backbone attached to it, that you can start running into those sorts of problems where it can be used for the wrong reasons or become a caricature of itself. I would say it's not just the moral backbone. It's the time horizon as well. So I have multiple friends who are very serious Buddhists, and they measure the success of their meditation practice in decades, right? You and I measure the success of our meditation practice in like minutes. Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, was that good or bad when I just did? Did I do it this week or not, right? That's pretty much where I'm at these days. Right. I don't know why I say it's more hygienic for me, but yeah. Right. Like when I talk to my very serious Buddhist friends, like it's, you know, one of my friends just got a new teacher, and it was a very big deal for him. And he was telling me he was like, yeah, I just felt like after eight years with my last teacher, like I wasn't really progressing anymore. And I felt like it was time to kind of move on and try something different. Nobody talks about meditation in that way. Like everything you just described about corporate retreats and like morning routines and everything, like it just, it seems, it seems almost a little pedantic. I think there's something about the long term commitment of the practice that is, it might be one of those things where it's like, it's less the practice itself and it's more just the fact that some people are committed over a long period of time to a single thing that is relatively healthy. Right. And this kind of bleeds in to like, we keep teasing the audience that we're gonna do an episode on religion at some point. - This kind of, this kind of, (laughs) I'm, by the way, I'm shocked how many people write in and say that they want it. But this kind of people on the team too are like, "Yes, go for it." - Oh, like, I don't know. I kind of like the live for a little bit longer. This kind of bleeds a little bit over into just my, some of my perspectives on religion, like what the value in religion is. And I think a lot of the value is just, you have people who have committed their lives to something that they feel is incredibly meaningful. And it happens to also be something that has some psychological and physical health benefits. Like in the purpose episode, we talked about how it's almost secondary of like what you commit to versus just the fact that you have something. - Have some lifelong commitment to something. And I do think the value of religion, a lot of the value of religion falls under that umbrella. And I imagine a long term meditation practice does too. It's funny too. Like this question for you, but like, when I think about everybody I know who meditates or has meditated, all of the casual people who have meditated here and there, like most of them will say some good things, but most of them don't keep up with it. It's not a regular part of their life. It comes and goes. It's a habit that they gain and lose. And most of them, if you talk to them about it, it's like, yeah, it was very helpful. Or like, yeah, I was able to focus better. Or like, I went through a tough time in my life and meditation was, yeah, it was useful. Whereas when you talk to people who are like, actually Buddhist and actually in it, it's everything for them, right? It's like talking to a very devout Christian about church. - Yeah, or prayer. - Or prayer. Like to them, it's almost like unfathomable that they don't do it. - Yeah. I mean, I don't know where I land on that, I guess. But that does make sense to me where if you're attaching it to like a, you're attaching a practice to a larger system, the more likely to stay stick with it for one, but also it means something completely different to do. - And I think that added context is probably what brings a lot of the benefits. So this is the other thing. You have your woo-woo people who write, they do their little meditation retreats for a couple times a year and they go higher, some special, like I don't wanna talk too much shit, but I had some friends out here in California who got really excited 'cause they've like went and found the quote unquote best meditation teacher who was like $5,000 a day or something ridiculous. Like come to their-- - They are in their wrong business. - Yeah, it's like come to their house to teach them the meditate for a day and they like invited me and I was like, absolutely not. Like the actual Buddhist teachers, Muslim don't charge anything. - Yeah. - And don't even broadcast that they're like actual like llamas or what their rank is in the Tibetan school or like whatever branch or denomination that they're part of. And they'll just teach you a resume. Like if you're serious, they'll teach you a resume and they won't ask for anything. So there is like, there is kind of this hidden third category of like if you do really wanna take this seriously as a religious practice, it's a completely different world and existence. And I was just gonna say like one of my friends who's in that world, I mean, I've taught-- He's sat there and excitedly told me about like the lineage of his teacher, like his teacher's teacher and his teacher's teacher's teacher and like how it goes back to Tibet and how like how many centuries it goes back and how you can actually trace where it branched off from like one of the monasteries there. And like so it's cool to know that you're part of something that's thousands of years old and you're like part of the continuation of it. - Yeah, yeah, that I totally get. And there's like the tradition and the ritual and everything. I like sometimes I get a little bit into that too, just 'cause it's kind of fun. Yeah, I still don't know where I land on that because it does feel, you know, you can get into the whole cultural appropriation and all that kind of stuff. I do yoga too, which is another, you know, it's a Hindu tradition that I do that I, I'm not, there's no spiritual-- - Fuck cultural appropriation. Like seriously, the stupidest fucking concept. - I agree. - Stupidest fucking concept. - I agree. You know what, you know what I'm gonna do, Drew? I'm gonna go to China and I'm gonna start lecturing Chinese people about all the McDonald's that they have over there. How dare you steal our culture? - Of course, the American culture, you're appropriating our culture or big max. How dare you Chinese people? - I think it's perfectly fine to go take the best parts of whatever culture you use them, how you need to use them. That's great. Like I said, I go to yoga and I don't attach any sort of, like there are definitely people in there who are in the new age, woo-woo crowd that do this, but it's more for me, it's actually meditative too, for me as well. There's a silent yoga I go to sometimes. It's very meditative. I'm more on the hygienic crowd like you were talking about. And I still see a lot of benefit from that. So I don't think I get it if you're turned off by the whole kind of pseudo religious side of it, absolutely valid concern, it doesn't have to be, I guess, and that's not a huge breakthrough I know, but yeah, that's where I land on. - It is one of the few practices that it can meet you where you are. - Yes, yes. So if you just want a little boost in your morning, it can do that. If you want to give your whole life to a 3000 year old lineage of beautiful history and tradition, you can do that. (laughing) - Hey, that's the other thing though too. It's been around for so long, there's something to it. At the very least, there's something to it. And not only it's not only Eastern religions too, like actually Christianity actually has a meditative tradition in the two, it just hasn't been highlighted for a few centuries, but yeah. Prayer is a kind of meditation. - Yeah, yeah. - This episode is brought to you by waking up. After everything that we talked about today, I wanna tell you guys about something that Drew and I actually love and use. It's not one of those ads where I just have talking points in front of me, like this is actually a product that I love. Drew and I, I can honestly say, we're using waking up before it was cool. The only meditation app that I personally have ever stuck with. It was created by Sam Harris, the neuroscientist, philosopher, best-selling author, and genuinely one of the sharpest thinkers on consciousness out there right now. And you can feel that in the app, just doing the introductory playlist, you'll be blown away at some of the insights and perspectives that you'll be exposed to. Now, unlike other meditation apps, this is not just trying to get you to fall asleep or calm the (beep) down. It's actually trying to change how you relate to your own mind, how you understand yourself, your identity, in the world you live in. There's no single way to meditate and waking up understands that, which if you listen to this episode, you get it. Waking up has helped me notice things about my own attention and reactivity that I've been reading about for years and never actually experienced while sitting on the mat. The guided meditations are great, but it's the lessons and conversations that also just add to all the fun. Conversations with some of the best meditation teachers in the world, all free of religious dogma, all designed for people who actually want to understand what they're doing and why. It's genuinely one of the most valuable things I've added to my life in the last few years, and I don't say that lightly. And because we're doing an episode on meditation, we actually reached out to waking up to put something together for you guys. So I curated a playlist of my favorite waking up content for you to check out and sample. And they're giving solved listeners a free 30 day trial so you can try it with no risk, all reward. And if you keep it, you get $30 off the annual membership. Meaning it's only $119 a year, which is a great offer. So if you want to check it out, go to wakingup.com/solved. That's wakingup.com/solved. (upbeat music) So you pose this question at the top. - Yeah. - Is it worth the trouble? Is meditation worth the trouble? - As with almost every solved episode, the answer is it depends. - Sure. (laughing) - It depends what you're looking for, what you need. I think it is worth everybody trying. Like I really can't think of, if you've never meditated before, I cannot think of a good reason to not give it a genuine attempt and see what happens. - It's like eating broccoli. - He's trying. (laughing) - Eat your veggies. Just try it once. You gotta try it. - Sure. - All right, we'll go with broccoli. (laughing) - Yeah, yeah. I would absolutely agree with that. I might go a step further and say, I think it is worth the trouble, especially for the kind of person who's probably listening to this, who is a little bit skeptical. Either you either never tried it before or have tried it and had mixed results at best, get some structure around it, get it, go to an instructor, find the thing that fits for you where there's the walking meditation or sitting in a room by yourself or doing group meditation too, we didn't really get into that, but going and making a social thing out of it, cleaning your house, doing mundane things, sure, go for it. My thing is though, is that I think people should do it, but probably not for most of the reasons we've even been talking about so far, it's not a health hack, okay? This is the part that the hype I think has done the most damage, is that, oh, it's gonna fix all these problems, this is what we opened up with. It's not a health hack. - Yeah. - It's just, it's not. There might be some benefits of it, sure, but you don't wanna do it for those, I don't think that's the primary reason you should be doing it. - Something I just thought of, the irony of meditation is that if you're disciplined enough to actually do it, regularly, you're probably disciplined enough that you don't need it. - Oh, okay. - Yeah, yeah. Right, I mean, I would actually encourage people to, if you live in a major city, try to go find a group. - Okay. - Go find a group. - Okay. - Because it is, first of all, it's way easier to do it with other people. Like if you're sitting, if you've never meditated, the act of sitting by yourself in a room, for 10 minutes. Staring at a wall is like, it's agonizing. It's really rough. Yeah. A lot of people will not get through it. But if you're in a room full of other people and there's kind of a ritual aspect to it, there's like an agenda and a schedule. You're inside this framework, you know what's happening and why it's happening. It does get a lot easier and it's nice because there's just something about, I don't know, you're experiencing meditation in the way that it was kind of intended to be experienced. Yeah. Yeah. I really never was supposed to be you sitting in a room alone in silence. For working about it. Unless you're among those. No. Yeah. Right. Like nobody did that. Right. Yeah. Meditation for the people. Yeah. It's more time for people. Yeah. Yeah. Social meditation. Yes. No. But I think there is a, I think there needs to be a clarification around motivation still though too. Like I said, don't not, not for the health reasons. Don't do it because somebody said it's going to make you happy either, which I think that is, that's a, that's actually a terrible motivation for it. That could happen. You could be happier because of as a result of a good disciplined meditation practice over time. Sure. For me anyway, what meditation has become is I'm sitting down to like learn about my mind to know my mind. There's nothing else to do at that point to know the dark parts of your mind even too. And look at some of those shadowy, ugly parts of yourself and look at it, examine them, see them for what they are. And importantly, like you've mentioned over and over to not identify necessarily with them. Right. But to understand them. Okay. It's not about happiness. I mean, fuck your happiness at that point. Right. Like what, who cares about your happiness? Yeah. You're able to train your attention on itself. Yeah. And know what's going on in your mind. Know your own mind. Like to me, that's the real value of it. And that's not always easy. It's not always fun. It's not always helpful. Yeah. Two. Sometimes it, yeah, sometimes it does hurt. Yeah. I mean, well, you know what's interesting that relates to all this is so when we were developing purpose, like I did a lot of research on the meditation apps. It's kind of like, yeah, just case study. Yeah. And the two biggest ones, most people have heard of is Coleman Headspace. Yeah. And Coleman Headspace very much went after the casual user. Yes. It's like five minutes in the morning, de-stress a little bit, help you relax. Mass market. Yeah. Mass market. And it's interesting because both of those companies have succumbed to massive amounts of churn. Like they really have trouble keeping people on their apps for a long periods of time. And then secondly, both of those companies have pivoted very hard in the sleep just because it's probably a better business model. And then interestingly, the meditation apps that actually do have a lot of traction and do seem to have very sustainable business models are the smaller, more focused, kind of more intentional apps, things like weight waking up or Sam Harris is waking up and then Dan Harris is 10% happier. Both of those apps have much more of a philosophical, psychological focus in their content. And they attract more serious meditators who actually do want to do the work that you're talking about. And do want to like have a better understanding of their own consciousness and their own identities. Those apps have much smaller user bases, but they're driving in super profitable. Yeah. And people stick with them more. Yeah. Dan Harris is an interesting case study here. So for people who don't know, he was a news anchor, ABC news anchor. He had a very public panic attack back in like the early 2000s, I think, or something like that. And that's what led him to meditation. It's interesting because he's very nuanced about it as well as like it didn't say my life and maybe 10% happier. Yeah. It's like as a 10% improvement, which I think that's probably that's probably about right for meditation. Yeah. And it's a 10%. And honestly, I mean, you and I talk about this all the time that like when if you are currently struggling to say with anxiety or depression or whatever else, there is this internal sense of like, I need to do a full 180. I need to completely change. I need to get rid of everything. You probably need to be 10% less anxious or 10% happier. One of the things I'll all end on here anyway is that what meditation also does is shows you how little control you have. And that can be terrifying at first, but it's also that's what gives you agency in a paradoxical way. This is the thing I love about meditation too is that you're just forced to sit with all these paradoxes. And I know you like those two like you're really big into paradoxes. But one of the most useful ones for me anyway, that meditation is showed you is like, oh, you don't like the thoughts, that monkey mind you talked about, you don't control that thing at all. You have zero control over that actually. And you need to somehow come to grips with that and face that reality at some point. And only then can you then actually have agency in your life. Yeah. So yeah, I love the fact, and we talked about this before we started, we went on air, but just the whole question, meditation is it worth it? Is it worth the trouble? Yeah. Like looking at that title, I was like, it was like, what trouble? What trouble? Like literally meditation is just literally doing nothing. Yeah. All you have to do is just stop doing everything you're doing. Why is that so hard? Why does that feel so difficult? We go to the gym, we like, obsess over our diets, sleep routines and everything like that. What is it about just sitting there doing nothing? You've got 18 tabs open on your browser and you've read half of each of them. But just the idea of like sitting quietly for five minutes feels overwhelmingly difficult. Like it's such a funny, such a funny thing for you. Yeah. Yeah. You work out regularly. Of course it's worth the trouble. Absolutely. It is. And this is just sitting there doing nothing. And we have to do a whole like, is it? I don't know. We're even calling it trouble. Right. It's what the trouble. What is the trouble? Yeah. I think that's a good place to it. I think if you look it that way, you're going to come to the conclusion that I've come to, which is yes, it's worth the trouble. Yeah. Give it a shot. Good be. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. This was another episode of Solved. Please check out the website for free PDF guides on each of the episodes. It's at SolvePockets.com. And, June, I will be back in a couple of weeks. Good. Let's wrap.