Monitoring your meditation with Ariel Garten

0:02 A listener production. Hey guys, you're listening to Crappy to Happy. I'm cas done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, a mindfulness meditation teacher, and author of the Crappy to Happy books. In this series, we look at all of the factors that might be making you feel crappy and give you the tools and the techniques that will help you to overcome them. In each episode, I introduce you to interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field, and my hope is that they will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Today I'm speaking. With Ariel Garton, who is a highly accomplished woman with a fascinating background, which she will soon share with you.

0:42 Most recently, Ariel was the CEO of the company that created the Muse brain sensing headband, which provides real time feedback on your brain activity during meditation. You all know that mindfulness and meditation are topics I'm passionate about, so I had to talk to Ariel about the science behind this technology, it's potential benefits, and whether or not it aligns with more traditional approaches to meditation or not. Ariel was gracious enough to join me from her home in Toronto, and I hope you find this conversation as fascinating as I did. So, Ariel, I would like to just start with a little bit of your background for our listeners. So, because you have an interesting background too, you have a background in the arts, am I right, psychotherapy, and neuroscience.

1:27 Do you want to just tell us a little bit about your background? Sure, So my mum was an artist, So I always grew up thinking that you could imagine anything you wanted and bring it to life, because you'd make these beautiful canvases. For anyone watching the video, there's actually one behind me. So I grew up in the world of the arts, but I was fascinated by science and how the world worked, and that fascination very quickly turned into the fascination with the self and understanding how the self worked. So I trained as a psychotherapist and a neuroscientist. And so I spent a spent a decade being a psychotherapist in private practice, and then as a neuroscientist, developed this amazing device MEWS, which actually reads your brain activity and gives you real time feedback during a variety of activities, including meditation. So I've spun the gamut from art to science, and I'm really fascinated by how you allow people to understand and transform what goes on in their own brain.

2:19 Yeah, it is so interesting and I want to We will spend some time talking about the muse for sure, which is a brain sensing headband that you wear during meditation. It gives you real time feedback about what's happening in your brain. The inn at in a nutshell. Ye, so you got it. So before we get to that, what's your personal experience of meditation and sort of what inspired you to go down this path when it comes to all the things you could create with this technology. So I was a terrible meditator as a psychotherapist. I would be always recommending meditation to my patients. I would teach them how to meditate, and then I would go home and I would sit there and I'd try to let my mind focus on something and it would do a million things at once, and it'd be like, ah, man, this is so frustrating. And then my patients would come in and be like, so did you meditate this week?

3:06 And they're like, oh, yeah, totally for like three minutes once. Yes, okay. At least you're not lying to be like the other patient was. And when I started working with this very early brand computer interface technology, we did all sorts of crazy stuff with it, but it became really clear that if we wanted to help people in the world and help move the needle for humanity in some way, that if we could use this technology to teach people to meditate, we would be doing something really meaningful. I know I relate so much to that because I'm a psychologist and I teach people meditation as well, and I'm not always the greatest at maintaining my own practice, but yes, how was the meditation practice? Like people couldn't sit for longer than three minutes.

3:48 That would sit for three minutes maybe twice a week, and that's their limit. So I'm all for anything that helps people to do more of it, or to be encouraged or incentivized in some way to meditate, because obviously we know what the benefits are as a neuroscientist. Actually that leads me to do you want to talk to some of the known benefits sure of mindfulness and meditation. So there are so many known benefits. If you look at the letterature, there's over a thousand published studies talking about meditation's ability to improve your sleep, decrease your stress, improve your gro scores, improve your productivity, improve your relationships, and change your mood. Like the studies over and over and over again demonstrate meditation's ability to have meaningful impact in our mind and our body. As an euroscientist, I can dive into the cool things that meditation can do for your brain.

4:43 Exactly, yeah, please cool. So at the front of our head over here, we have an area called the prefrontal cortex, and it's a sort of a higher order control center. It's the thing that allows us to think, organize, plan, It's a thing that we have that other mammals do not have. And as you age, unfortunately your prefrontal cortex thins. Bad news. But the good news is if you're able to maintain a long term meditation practice, you can maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex even as you age. So there's one study by doctor Sarah Lazar at Harvard and she had a fifty year old long term meditator who had the prefrontal cortex thickness of a twenty three year old. So moving back in the brain, so the prefrontal cortex lets you organize and plan. Behind it, we have in the middle of the brain we have the amygdala, and the amygdala is your fight or flight response. It's the thing that's going like, ah, there's a fire, or ah, my pants are rinkly and I'm walking into a meeting, or add that person across the room maybe doesn't like me.

5:40 It's firing all the time, and not necessarily in ways that are always helpful to us. And when you look at somebody with a meditation practice, you can often see a decrease in amygdala activity, and if you look at a long term meditator, you may even see a decrease in the size of the amygdala. That's fascinating. Yes, so we're seeing like real structural changes in the brain, and there's really a relationship between what's happening in the prefrontal cortex and what's happening in the amygdala. You can kind of think of the prefrontal cortex as the parent, as the thing that can plan and organize and see the world around it and see what's clearly going on, and the amygdala being the little three year old that wants to have a temper tantrum and freak out and is scared. And as you meditate, often part of what's going on is that you have an increase in prefrontal cortex control that down regulates the amygdala. So the wise parent is getting wiser and it's able to calm down the anxious, scared child. And so meditation allows us to really in many ways, structurally change our brain potentially through both those dynamics and lots of other ones. So you also see cool things like increased connectivity through your corpus colossom, so increased connectivity in the left and right brain. You can see increased size of the hippocampus, are learning in memory area, and you can even see changes in the an area called the temporal pridal junction, which is responsible for compassion, empathy, and perspective taking.

7:07 It's really interesting stuff and I love that because I think, you know, obviously, for a long time we knew that people felt better, they felt more calm. But knowing that that is actually the result of actual structural changes in your brain, that is, it is actually changing you at a cellular level, is so interesting. It is fascinating. So it can change you to cellular level in your mind it can also change you to cellular level in your body. Go talk and well, let's do it. So this is some super cool stuff that comes out of doctor Elizabeth Blackburn's lab. Doctor Elizabeth Blackburn is a Nobel Prize winning scientist. She's not some. Weird woo woo hippie scientist. And what she looked at was the length of one's telomeres. So, the telomeres are the protective caps on the end of your DNA. So in the same way that on your shoelace, you have a little piece of plastic at the end that once it unravels, your shoelace unravels. So too, we have these little telomeres at the end and they protect the DNA.

8:10 And as you age, they get shorter and shorter. They are a marker of cellular aging, so they can show how old the organism is, how much it is aged. As you age, the telomeres get shorter and shorter. Well, it turns out that when you give somebody a meditation practice, there's the potential for those telomeres to actually start increasing again. And in doctor Blackburn's landmark study, she showed that moms who are chronically stressed caring chronically ill children when they were given a meditation practice, were actually able to increase the length of they're telomeres. And that finding has been replicated over and over and over again in various populations and average populations as well. So we're literally slowing, potentially reversing the aging process potentially.

8:55 I mean, it's an incredibly big claim to make. Look at the literature, there's some pretty interesting conclusions that you can come to. And Ariel, are you aware of any of the research. I'm just curious about because I know that there's also studies about compassion meditation specifically, for example, basically turning off and on the genes for disease. Have you read any of that research? Yeah, so you're referring to meditation's ability to have an epigenetic. Impact in the body. Yes, yes, So overall, when we look at the meditation literature, there's just like we were turning on the gene for telomerase, telamerase being the enzyme that would lengthen your telomeres. We can also through meditation turn potentially turn on and off genes in your body that increase your immune system, that help you go into rest and digest that in general improve the health of the organism overall. It's not a panacea.

9:52 I don't want to oversell it, but there's fascinating avenues that the literature points to pretty compelling. So even though we know all of. This, and even you and I like, even knowing all of this stuff, get to get people to sit down and spend ten minutes, fifteen minutes, five minutes just focusing on their breath is it seems like it's the hardest thing for people to do. There's every excuse to not do it. They can't find the time to do it, it's too uncomfortable. What's going on? We've got all the information. What is it that stops us being able to do this. It's a good question. And I mean I've seen it over and over and over again, and for some people it was like, oh, well, meditation is woo woo. But that perception, I think has gone away at this point. Everybody knows they should be meditating. It's, you know, part of a balanced lifestyle. You eat well, you brush your teeth, you go to the gym, and you meditate. And most people manage the first two. The going to the gym as much harder and meditations like way off the spectrum. Yeah, and I think for most people, you know, you sit down, most people don't know exactly what meditation is. So there's the perception that metal is letting your mind go blank, which it's not exactly. So when you're doing a basic meditation, what you're probably doing is focusing your attention on your breath. So you're putting your focused attention on a single point. Your mind then begins to wander. You notice it wanders, and you return it to your breath, and you don't get mad at yourself that your mind wanders, because all of our minds wander.

11:20 What you're just trying to do is notice and return. And so I think most people don't know what meditation even is, how you're supposed to do it, And then when you do sit down to do it, your mind wanders all over the place, and so we create all sorts of judgment about it, and we're like, oh my god, I suck at this, and we don't like being bad at things. That makes us feel bad about ourselves. Yeah, and so then we just get up and we don't do it. Yeah, that's so true. That's voice of self criticism chimes in, very quickly, and then we do anything to avoid that. And the funny, you know, the ironic part is that meditation teaches you to deal with that yourself criticism. That's really a big part of the process. You observe the judgment, you let the judgment pass too. You observe the criticism, you let it go. But only once you sit in the practice and steepen it can you get to the point where you even comfortable facing the judgment in that way.

12:06 Yeah. I read a study where people would rather administer electric shocks to themselves than be with their own thoughts for five silent minutes. They would actually shock themselves rather than sit alone with their own thoughts. It's a frightening it's a frightening concept, but it's true. So the Muse headband, which you've created, how do you think it helps to counteract some of that or to you know, encourage people to sit for longer. Yeah, and it's been very successful teaching people to sit right at all and then for longer. And so what news does is it gives you real time feedback on your brain while you meditate. So it answers that first question of what am I supposed to be doing. And then I also answer as the second question people typically have, which is am I even doing this right?

12:55 Like? What am I supposed to be doing? What's going on in my mind? Is this working? And so with NEWS, we're literally reading your brain wave activity. We're reading your brain and we're letting you know when you're quote unquote doing it right, when you're in focused attention and when your mind is wandered, cueuing you to when your mind is wandered, so that you're cue to come back to your breath. It's kind of like having rumble strips for the road. It's like you're going down the right path. Hope you're going off, Come on back, You're going off, come on back. And so we're able to take real time feedback that really teaches you what to do and reinforces you and holds your hand using super solid neuroscience. And then at the end you're actually able to see what your brain is doing. So you have charts, graphs, stats, gamification, stuff that makes it fun to meditate and to come back and do it session after session after session.

13:43 And I have been using a muse for the last few weeks, and so just to explain to anybody, listening. What happens is you put it on a wrap it around your head, just tuxs behind your ears, and then you have an app on your phone which will tell you to start meditating, and it collects the data. And then what happens is you've got earphones in or you listen to sound on your phone, and so as your brain becomes more active. I know there's lots of different sounds you can do, but the basic one is that storms whip up. Right, wind picks up, it becomes noisy and windy, and then when your brain calms down, it becomes very quiet. And so the whole time you're sitting it's like it's, well, it's a bit windy.

14:26 Oh it's quiet. Oh it's a bit windy. Oh it's quiet. So initially I found that I normally meditate in silence. I've been doing it for quite a long time. Initially I found that a little distracting, and initially I was questioning usking, but I was not thinking. Then why is that wind up? Why is it doing that? Because my mom was very calm, then I'll have you know, because almost arguing with the device. But eventually you do learn to kind of tune it out. So for somebody who doesn't have a meditation practice, it's not distracting from your practice. It's just like, Okay, now I'm learning, and I actually have a teacher in my head. And for those who do have a practice, very quickly it just becomes this intuitive sense that the sound is your brain. Yes, And so you're hearing when your brain is noisy and stormy, and when your brain is quiet.

15:13 And then when you stay super quiet you get birds, which people love. Little birds chirp, and it's so satisfying to get the little bird chirping, it really is. And it's like a little gold star, which leads me to. When obviously I've trained in mindfulness, meditation, mindfulness space, cognitive therapy. I've done you know, silent retreats, done a lot of Buddhist sort of meditation, and the whole thing is about non striving. But technically mindfulness is about the one thing that you can do that does not need you to be doing anything or striving to achieve anything. And yet built into the meuse is this kind of you kind of want to get the birds, So it's got this striving aspect to it.

15:57 Can you talk about that? I was thinking, Oh, but doesn't that just fly in the face of what mindfulness is all about. So the funny thing is is that the birds are actually there to undermine the goal directed nature of the gamification. So the first time you get a bird, you're like, okay, a bird, saying that's nice, and then as soon as you find out that it's a reward, you then try to get the birds. And so try to get a bird. You can't do it because now you're striving, working, you're focusing, and you can only really get birds by letting go. And then so you can only get it by non striving. And then often once people get their first bird, when they know what a bird is, they're like, oh my god, I get the reward, and then your bird flies away.

16:38 And then the storms come up again. As soon as you get the bird, it's gone. So it suddenly teaches you to be just as uninvested in your rewards as your failures, to be just as non judgmental. And when you get a reward is non judgmental when you get a failure. That to me, that is because that has definitely been my experience after using the muse. You know, the more often that I've used it, and the more that I've become just used to it now, I don't I know that I no longer sort of react whether it's a burd or whether it's a storm. Just keep on breathing, just keep on meditating. And so we have this gamification with points and scores that people are excited about when they come in, and very quickly it moves from the extrinsic reward of points and structure that keeps you doing it to the intrinsic reward of seeing the value, and then you don't care about the points anymore. It really doesn't mean anything, but it's the thing that got you into the practice and kept you there, and kept you.

17:30 There long enough to get you to the point. Where you've established a regular practice, you understand how to do it, and you're actually feeling the benefits in your life. And once you feel the benefits, then you're hoted. I hope you're enjoying season four of the show, and hey, I would love for you to check out my brand new YouTube channel where I'm sharing even more tips on how you can feel less crappy and more happy. It's YouTube dot com Forward slash Cast Done, so come over check it out. I'd love you to subscribe. And if you haven't already taken my free seven day Happiness challenge, you can sign up for that at castdone dot com forward slash happiness. So it does sense your brain activity. But I notice I've got the MEWS too, which is the latest one. Uh, And I notice in the app I haven't done a lot of it, but there's a there's a heart, and there's a body like I did the body one. So it's senses when when you physically are moving so that you stay still, and then there's a heart one. Is it actually measuring your heart beat while you meditate? Do you want to talk about all the different sort of functions of the moose shore.

18:38 So in the original MEWS, we give you real time feedback on your brain and that's been out for the last five years and super successful. Hundreds of thousands of people use it every day. And then use two, which just came out last year, gives you real time feedback both on your brain as well as your heart, your breath, and your body. So it has additional sensors. There's a PPG sensor that tracks your heart rate and you actually hear the beating of your heart like the beating of a drum, and it tunes something called your inter reception, your ability to actually understand sensitively what's going on inside your own body. And then the body sensor is able to sense your movement, so it helps you find comfortable posture and it helps you find stillness. And for a lot of people, finding stillness is the first step. And once you find stillness in your body, it's easier to find stillness in your mind.

19:25 I went to do the body one and I put it on my head, and then I went to look at my app and it said, stop you moving too much. We can't we can't get reading it you as soon as I just turned my head towards it to look at my phone. Yeah, that's the don't look at your phone. Worn Yes, you're meditating, don't look your phone. And then the breath. The breath sensor actually senses your breath, and we have guided breathing exercises, so in the heart meditation you can learn to hear when your heart rate is increasing and when it's decreasing. And then in breath meditation, we teach you breath patterns to teach you to increase your decrease your heart rate and to be able to potentially affect your heart rate variability. So obviously, with mindfulness meditation for anybody unfamiliar, you know, part of it is also tuning into the sensations in your body. We tend to walk around the world. We're very cerebral. We've engaged with world through our thinking mind, and we've become quite disconnected with our physical sensations as a whole world of like information and intuition and wisdom stored in our body, and so we connect with the sensations in our body like in a body scanned meditation.

20:28 So with the muse, that's one of its functions, I guess, to help you to really connect inward to what's happening. Yep, to be able to start to sensitively understand what's going on in your different systems, and meditation occurs throughout the whole body. So meditation is partly about stilling the mind and changing your relationship to your thoughts. It's also about being able to understand and use your physiology positively to help you relax. So when you take deep breaths, it becomes a huge your autonomic nervous system to calm down. So when we learn deep breathing patterns, we recognize that we can begin to shift our bodies physiology out of fight and flight and into rest and digest, and that changes our heart rate and that has a feed forward effect which is then able to calm the mind. So all these systems really work synergistically with one another to help us get into an optimal state.

21:24 It's amazing. You can really see the progress session after session, and like we have users who've done literally thousands of sessions, and you can see the progress. They see the progress over time. Yeah, and hopefully translating then, as you say, into their lives then really realizing the benefits in the day to day life, which is where it counts. And you can even see progress over you know, the first five or ten sessions that you do. You know, I'll sit with people during their first few sessions and they can immediately start to see how their mind is calming down, how they're getting the practice. I just ran a session with a number of people for three weeks, and like the that they were noticing in their lives after the first two weeks were amazing. Shifting relationships to how they were yelling, you know, yelling at their husband, how they dealt with stress at work, how you.

22:10 Know, how sleep is for them. It can take varying lengths of time for people to find ease with the practice and start to see the changes, but it can be surprising what you might finally start doing it. So Ariel, just looping back to the beginning of our conversation, when you said that you you know, even you as a psychotherapist teaching people to meditate. You know, you found it really difficult. And for you as a woman. Now you have got young. Children, right I do with three year old, have three year old, and you have we're a sea of a major company for seven years. You've stepped down now with having children, but you know, busy working mum professional. How has it helped you? What's how has it helped you to build your own meditation practice? What what have you noticed in your own life?

23:00 So, first of all, I literally learned to meditate using news. I had read so many books, I had, you know, so many resources, but it wasn't until I actually started regularly using music. I was like, oh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Okay, now I get it. And then all of a sudden, you know, the two thousand years of history that I'd been reading made sense, and once I started to do that, the benefits were fascinating. So one of the first things I noticed was an increase in my productivity. I was typing a long format document, which would normally take me forever. Because I was the CEO of the company, I was in an open office. You know, everybody going past me. I felt like needed me in some way. It was always distracting. And for the first time, I sat down and I wrote something just all the way through in my open office with all the sounds around me.

23:45 Yeah, I see your face. Yes, I was shocked. I was like, what just happened? Well, it turns out the practice that I had learned that taught me to notice when my mind is wandering and then move away from the distraction back to the object of my focus translated beautifully to my own productivity. It's like my mind would begin to wander, nope, back to my document. Begin to wander, nope, back to my document. And the next thing I noticed was my cell phone behavior changed. You know, that urge to constantly check the phone just started to sort of peter away because I'd feel that sensation of like, oh, check my actually, no, I don't care, back to what I'm doing in front of me. And so I started to notice that my you know, my impulses and my urges and desires all of a sudden became much wiser and much easier.

24:29 To manage, just naturally. And then from there the emotional changes also began to take place, you know, my dialogue's aka arguments with my husband. There was no longer the sense of I need to be right and I need to like say this fifty thousand times so that you hear me. I would just say it once and then I hear what he said, and then I'd be like oh, and then I could just reflect on it. It wasn't this constant, you. Know, react well shit inside of me, yeah, reactivity like needs, My needs presented themselves and that I could articulate them. It wasn't quite as straightforward as that, but you know, standing back, it was kind of like an astonishing shift. But that's the point is that that's that's really interesting, and that's the point, isn't it. Like people who say, what's the point, Like, what is the I can see her and focus on my breath, but what's the point it's because that is learning to train your mind to go where you want it to go, not where it wants to go, and then applying that to work and focus and the people in your life. You know, conversation that you're having, whatever it might.

25:30 Be in negative thoughts, yes, so you know, for a lot of people, so we have these internal dialogues, and for a lot of people, those internal dialogues are negative and unpleasant and just keep you feeling a little bit shittier than you need to every single day. And when you learn that you have a choice about the dialogue in your head, that you can hear something inside your head and say, actually, I'm going to choose to take my attention elsewhere. I don't need to be caught up in you right now. It's an unbelievable sense of freedom, an unbelievable shift in what who you are because you are no longer those dialogues in your head. You're an individual with agency and a choice of how you are living. I would have to agree.

26:11 I think that's so important, and that's certainly in the work that I do. I hear people all the time say they feel powerless, like this is just who I am. I just can't stop this. My mind just does this or I just do this, And it's giving people back that power over the thoughts in the head, the managing those urges and impulses and that reactivity. Like, you do have a choice in this. These might be old patterns that you've had for a really long time, but with some awareness and with some present you know, some present minded awareness, then you. Do have a choice about how much impact they have those things have over you. Yes, it's extremely empowering, and that's why it was so clear that you know, for me and my team that this is what we needed to build, that this was the best possible thing we could apply our lives to.

26:56 You know, when you look at the fact that eighty five percent of the world has low self estelle and that we're all pulled by these urges that just don't serve us, it's like, how can we help humanity by teaching them to meditate? This must be personally just so rewarding for you beyond yes, so Ariel, for our listeners who perhaps like like you were, and like many people are, who struggle to just get started with a meditation practice and who don't necessarily have their hands on a muse today, What advice do you have to help people to just start to get started with some sort of mindfulness meditation practice. So the first thing is meditation is not complicated, it's not weird. It's really simple and a focused attention practice.

27:40 You're just going to focus your attention on your breath. Your mind will begin to wander. At some point you'll notice that it's wandered away from your breath, and then you'll return it to your breath. That's it, and you'll do it. Over and over and over again. Doesn't matter where you're sitting. You don't need to be in a mat, you don't need to be in half lotus, you don't need to have candles, you don't need anything. You can do it anywhere anytime. You're just going to sit there. Set aside of time to do it. It's useful to do a timer. You can start with three or five minutes, a very short period of time, and then you just sit there and you focus your attention on your breath. Your mind wanders, you notice any return until your timer goes off. And if you do that, you'll totally meditated.

28:21 You've meditated, And I would say even somebody potentially listening to this episode, they're on the tram or they're on the train going to work. You could just set the timer right now and just do it right now. Just breathe, focus on your breath. Your mind will wander. That's what minds do. That's not a problem. Come back to the breath. I would love that. I think we should put that challenge. If you're listening to this right now, get to the end of the episode, set your timer and spend three minutes focusing on your breath, and you've meditated, and. We are cheering for you right now. Ariel, I have really. Loved having you on the show. I appreciate your time so much. I know it's nighttime where you ask after your whole dinner, bath, bed routine. I just want to say thank you so much, and I hope that people will go out and have a look for the mus and if not, I hope they will at least be encouraged and inspired to start some sort of meditation practice.

29:14 Thank you so much, it has been such a joy and pleasure. If you're interested in the MEWS headband, you can check it out at meus dot com. And of course, if you're interested in learning how to start a meditation practice. You are welcome to join my eight week online course Mindfulness for Busy People. Go to cast Doune dot com, forward slash MBP and use the code Crappy to Happy to take fifty. Dollars off at the checkout. My new book, Crappy to Happy Love What You Do is out in all good bookstores, so if you want to find more. Happy in work, go and check it out. On the next episode, I'm. Chatting with triple Olympian Sally Kelly, who incredibly recovered from a stroke using the power of neuroplasticity. Sally has such an inspired hiring message to share with anyone facing challenges that seem insurmountable. Crappy to Happy is presented by Cast Dunn, produced by Davis Lensky, Audio production by Darcy Thompson. Listener