A Neuroscientist’s Guide to Changing Your Brain with Dr. Richard Davidson

Your brain is changing all the time, whether you realize it or not. Everything from your hobbies and chores to the media you consume can physically shape it. So how can you make sure it’s changing in ways that actually serve you? Laurie speaks with neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson https://www.richardjdavidson.com/, whose decades of work with the Dalai Lama helped pioneer the scientific study of meditation. Drawing on research with Buddhist monks, stressed-out school teachers, and others, Richie explains why psychological flourishing is a skill we can train, and how simple practices involving awareness, connection, insight, and purpose can help us become more resilient, focused, and fulfilled. His new book, Born to Flourish https://www.amazon.com/Born-Flourish-Science-Ancient-Thriving/dp/1668066238, is out now. Experts Mentioned: Richard Davidson https://www.richardjdavidson.com/, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry and Founder and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds https://centerhealthyminds.org/ at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Cortland Dahl https://cortlanddahl.com/, Contemplative Scientist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison 14th Dalai Lama https://www.dalailama.com/, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism Matthieu Ricard https://www.matthieuricard.org/en/, Buddhist monk François Jacob https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1965/jacob/biographical/, Nobel Prize-winning biologist Resources Mentioned: Born to Flourish: How New Science and Ancient Wisdom Reveal a Simple Path to Thriving https://www.amazon.com/Born-Flourish-Science-Ancient-Thriving/dp/1668066238/ref=sr_1_1?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9. CHFoDDIv-n9u2ZvSZFwFE78KVuGHPt8F0MZajnBjwNwHR_Xc4Bb2bHf7PJqFFlPU7dh3tTXu2kviYmAjOcg2N-Vr8EdiYyodsDMLzbaYOpvNILmL7UjBxve3YfRUSqNc2nfmZ4Cy_q7pLWPilxUXtxrx4vo4M-dfAcULgKsE8_NnuNvtr00WbL9PrYmY2F2wODHiCcoEEtP9Htam-q4QtvbEtvHK-74Ej9_ndTlFnJw. OU_xjilHt6Y8TalD7k99IFI6xJJ3D3ZfLW17bksrrrw&dib_tag=se&hvadid=778077574248&hvdev=c&hvexpln=67&hvlocphy=9060351&hvnetw=g&hvocijid=2134011542470597080--&hvqmt=e&hvrand=2134011542470597080&hvtargid=kwd-2460680050021&hydadcr=20364_13639485&keywords=born+to+flourish+book&mcid=78f677841744347794a3168582b0c1fa&qid=1788969739&sr=8-1, by Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl (2026) “Neurogenesis in the adult brain: death of a dogma https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11252770/,” by Charles Gordon Gross (Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2000) “The book of neurogenesis https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/the-book-of-neurogenesis,” by Matthew Sloan (Harvard Health Publishing, 2021) “In pursuit of resilience: stress, epigenetics, and brain plasticity https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26919273/,” by Bruce McEwen (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2016) “The plasticity of well-being: A training-based framework for the cultivation of human flourishing https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014859117,” by Cortland Dahl, Christine Wilson-Mendenhall, and Richard Davidson (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020) “Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.070039597,” by Eleanor Maguire, David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner, Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2000) “Training induces changes in white-matter architecture https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2412,” by Jan Scholz, Miriam Klein, Timothy Behrens, and Heidi Johansen-Berg (Nature Neuroscience, 2009) “Long-term meditators self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407401101,” by Antoine Lutz, Lawrence Greischar, Nancy B. Rawlings, Matthieu Ricard, Richard Davidson (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2004) “A Randomized Controlled Trial of a Smartphone-Based Well-Being Training in Public School System Employees During the COVID-19 Pandemic https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36387982/,” by Matthew Hirshberg, Corrina Frye, Cortland Dahl, Kevin Riordan, Nathan Vack, Jane Sachs, Robin Goldman, Richard Davidson, and Simon B Goldberg (Journal of Educational Psychology, 2022) “Altered anterior insula activation during anticipation and experience of painful stimuli in expert meditators https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23000783/,” by Antoine Lutz, Daniel McFarlin, David Perlman, Tim Salomons, and Richard Davidson (Neuroimage, 2013) Healthy Minds Program https://apple.co/4irVVDP (meditation app) “Integrating mindfulness and connection practices into preservice teacher education results in durable automatic race bias reductions https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022440521000881,” by Matthew Hirshberg, Lisa Flook, Evan Moss, Robert Enright, and Richard Davidson (Journal of School Psychology, 2022) “Sitting and Active Meditation Practice: Utilization and Associations with Outcomes in Naturalistic and Clinical Trial Data https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12971069/,” by Simon B Goldberg, Zishan Jiwani, Cortland J Dahl, Raquel Tatar, John D Dunne, Richard J Davidson, Matthew J Hirshberg (Mindfulness, 2026) Related Episodes: “How to Find Your Purpose https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/how-to-find-your-purpose” “The Power of Awe… and Where to Find It https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/the-power-of-awe-and-where-to-find-it” “Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Socrates and Self-Knowledge https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/happiness-lessons-of-the-ancients-socrates-and-self-knowledge” “How to Adopt a Growth Mindset https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/the-happiness-lab-with-dr-laurie-santos/how-to-adopt-a-growth-mindset” See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Laurie Santos?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 2:12Laurie Santos?

  You know, so many people are talking about how to support your gut health these days, but honestly, it can feel a little overwhelming. That's why I love when I find something easy, like Kashi Gut Health Granola. It's just so refreshingly straightforward. It's loaded with fiber, prebiotics, and gut-activated cultures. And it's absolutely delicious. No joke. We're talking blueberry almond delicious. With Kashi Gut Health Granola, you have a yummy breakfast and you fuel your gut. Doesn't get any easier than that. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change.

• 2:57Laurie Santos?

  Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. Each episode shares the latest research in behavioral science and dives into themes like the power of self-control, shaping your mindset for success, navigating new beginnings, and why starting over can feel so hard. Katie talks to authors, athletes, Nobel laureates, and everyday people about why we make irrational choices and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. You'll learn about tools and strategies to help improve your decision-making and a ton of other fantastic things about the mind. Listen and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast or find it wherever you listen to your shows.

• 3:45Laurie Santos?

  Pushkin.

• 3:52Laurie Santos?

  When I was in college, which I feel compelled to add does not feel that long ago, we were taught that people were pretty much born with all the brain cells they would ever have. Back then, it was assumed that you start life with a certain number of neurons, and that's pretty much it. The brain cells you were born with get shaped as you develop, and neurons that you don't use just die off. Under this old view, once you reach adulthood, the architecture of your brain is largely fixed. The door to your identity is locked, so to speak. But just around the start of the current century, scientists discovered something astounding. Our brains actually generate new cells all the time. I was in graduate school when this new research was coming out, and I can't emphasize enough just how much of a neuroscientific game changer this was.

• 4:37Laurie Santos?

  Many of the limitations we had placed on the adult brain were simply out the window. Brain development was just way more dynamic than scientists originally realized. This remarkable capacity for change is what scientists refer to as neuroplasticity.

• 4:53Speaker 03

  One of the things that I often say is that neuroplasticity happens wittingly or unwittingly.

• 4:59Laurie Santos?

  This is University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientist Dr. Richie Davidson.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  And most of the time, neuroplasticity happens unwittingly. Most of the time, we're thoroughly unaware of the forces around us that are shaping our brain.

• 5:14Laurie Santos?

  Tell me about the London cab driver study, because I think this one's just so telling of what experience can do to shape the brain.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  I mean, this was in the days before GPS. I know for some viewers, it's difficult to imagine, but there was a time when we didn't have these maps on our phones that enabled us to figure out where to go. And for those of you who've been to London, it's a complicated city, and cab drivers prior to GPS had to learn the map of London to do their job. And there was actually an exam that these drivers took. And so there have been a number of famous studies in this genre, but the first one

• 6:00Speaker 03

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

• 6:45Speaker 03

  to juggle. And so this is just indicative that the brain is highly sensitive to this kind of training and will show physical signs of plasticity very quickly.

• 6:58Laurie Santos?

  And so that's all great when we're learning to juggle and learning, you know, the streets of London. It might not be so great, given all the negative training forces that are around us all the time.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Right. I frequently say that we're all part of a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent. And that, of course, is exposure to the Internet, exposure to social media, to media in general. And that is very difficult to buffer ourselves from. We're barraged by that kind of input, and that is really shaping our brain. And so it's important to recognize that neuroplasticity is neutral with respect to its potential impact. If we are exposed to toxic influences, the presence of neuroplasticity will actually

• 7:48Speaker 03

  make things worse because we're going to be shaping our brains with all of this negative input. And this is an invitation to take more responsibility for shaping our own brains in ways that promote wholesome qualities.

• 8:06Laurie Santos?

  Everything your brain encounters affects it. Tiny moments from your everyday life will change your mind in the most literal sense. So how can you take advantage of your brain's plastic nature to become the person you want to be? Well, Richie breaks all of this down in his incredible new book, Born to Flourish, which he co-authored with fellow neuroscientist Cortland Dahl. And in this episode of our Back to School series, Richie will break down all the basic steps so that we can learn how to harness our brain's capacity for change and start shaping it for greater resilience, focus, and well-being. Stay tuned.

• 8:43Laurie Santos?

  Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy, but what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  I was extremely nervous. I was told to sit to wait. And I began to really just tremble.

• 9:14Laurie Santos?

  In the early 1990s, Richie had an encounter that not only changed his life, but also helped to reshape the scientific study of well-being as a whole.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  You know, I would regard myself as someone very average in terms of anxiety, sort of in the middle of the bell curve. But for the first time in my life, and the only time in my life, I nearly had a panic attack.

• 9:34Laurie Santos?

  You see, for the entirety of his career, Richie's work has focused on one singular question.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Why is it that some people are more vulnerable to life's slings and arrows? And why are others more resilient?

• 9:47Laurie Santos?

  And his approach to that research looked a lot like the cutting-edge neuroscience of the time.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  I focused a lot on the adversity side of the equation and studied the brain mechanisms that were associated with vulnerability to anxiety and depression and stress-related disorders.

• 10:05Laurie Santos?

  That is, until his research attracted the attention of someone pretty unexpected.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Everything changed in 1992, which was when I first met the Dalai Lama.

• 10:15Laurie Santos?

  That's right. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, had heard of Richie's work and requested that they meet. And Richie was, to put it lightly, a complete nervous wreck.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  But then, once I was with him in the first 15 seconds of that encounter, all my anxiety was completely dissipated, and I felt very much at home.

• 10:37Laurie Santos?

  Turns out, the Dalai Lama, big neuroscience nerd. But he had a question about what researchers at the time were choosing to study.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  He asked me very innocently, "Why can't we use the same tools of modern science that we were using to study depression and stress and anxiety and apply those tools to the study of qualities like kindness and like compassion?" He was interested in encouraging research on meditation and the qualities that were said to result from these practices. And that was a wake-up call for me. You know, when I went to school, I was trained to look at people and try to figure out what's wrong with them. And this was an invitation to look at people and try to figure out what's right with them. Very different orientation.

• 11:28Laurie Santos?

  That conversation set Richie on a new path, using cutting-edge neuroscientific tools to study the effects of mindfulness and meditation on the human brain. In your early work, you set about to test this with the London cab drivers of contemplative practice, the expert monk meditators. How did you get connected with this population? And what did you notice when you started to work with them?

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Well, I got connected with this population really through the Dalai Lama. He was really urging us to take this seriously and to start this research. And he had the early intuition, given that science was an important currency in the West, that if we began to study this scientifically and if we found that it was beneficial from the scientific findings, that would actually help people to take this kind of practice more seriously. And at that meeting was a French Buddhist monk by the name of Matthieu Ricard. But Mathieu also has a PhD in molecular biology from the Pesteur Institute,

• 12:34Speaker 03

  where he worked with François Jacques Hove, the Nobel laureate. And Mathieu raised his hand and said, "I'll be the first guinea pig." He had been meditating for years in the Himalayan regions. He was our first long-term practitioner. We began that study in 2001, and the very first paper on that work was published in 2004. And if you look at the number of neuroscientific publications on meditation, you see an inflection point right around 2004 and '05. And at least in part, I would like to believe that that early work that we did helped to stimulate this field and showed that there was really a there there.

• 13:19Laurie Santos?

  And so what did you find when you looked at their brains?

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Well, we looked with both brain electrical measures as well as with MRI. And we found several things. First, with the brain electrical activity, we saw very high amplitude gamma oscillations. Gamma is a brain oscillation that is seen in ordinary people like you and I. But when it's seen in ordinary people, it's typically seen for really brief periods of time, typically less than one second. And it's seen during moments of insight, where you have a flash of, for example, a solution to a problem. If you're doing a crossword puzzle and you suddenly recognize the right word that fits within a certain column or row,

• 14:07Speaker 03

  there's a moment of insight. It's very brief. It's very fleeting. And in those moments, you typically see this burst of gamma oscillations. What we saw in these long-term meditators is gamma oscillations that were present for very long periods of time, for the entire duration of the meditation period. And in fact, we saw that there was significantly higher prevalence of gamma during the resting baseline when they weren't meditating.

• 14:34Laurie Santos?

  So what does that mean? I mean, their brains are completely different than what we're seeing in normals. Like, how did you interpret that?

• 14:41Speaker 03

  Well, it was exciting to us because we saw that there were indeed these dramatic differences. In many cases, we found associations between their lifetime duration of practice and the magnitude of effect in these different brain metrics. And by the way, for this first study with long-term practitioners, the average lifetime hours of practice in this group was 34,000 hours. And viewers can go do the arithmetic at home, but 34,000 hours is a huge number. They spent a lot of time in formal meditation.

• 15:19Laurie Santos?

  So if you're a Buddhist monk and an expert meditator, this sort of practice can change your brain in a way that gives you an extended state of insight. But what about the rest of us who don't have 34,000 hours to devote to this sort of thing? Those of us who spend most of our days amidst the chaos of work life and home life, rather than the Zen life of a monastery? That's the focus of Richie's new book, Born to Flourish, which explores what it really takes for everyday people to rewrite their brains in order to thrive in the midst of life's challenges. We'll explore what Richie's book says when the Happiness Lab returns from this quick break.

• 15:58Laurie Santos?

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• 16:42Laurie Santos?

  from warm, reasonably sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14-karat gold jewelry. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  This is Jacob Goldstein from Business History. Imagine Henry Ford trying to create the assembly line. He had factory plans, production schedules, supply information, research, and ideas coming from all directions. His team spent years studying how to make the process work. Now, imagine having ChatGPT work. ChatGPT work can help with big projects that have lots of steps. You give it the goal along with real information like notes, files, reports, feedback, and project plans. It can use approved apps, connected tools, and files to help turn all of that into something useful. A plan, an analysis, a tracker, a presentation outline, or a workflow you can keep improving. And you stay in control.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  You give direction, review the work, approve actions, and choose the final result. Would Henry Ford have built the assembly line faster with ChatGPT? We'll never know. Ford didn't have ChatGPT. You do. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 18:16Laurie Santos?

  I just moved into my new sabbatical house, and I've been trying to make it feel more me. The living room is already furnished with a boho vibe, but it lacked the perfect rug to bring the room together. That's why I turned to Wayfair. I bought Wayfair's washable, distressed, vintage floral oriental rug in blue. That rug is so soft and cozy, and I was able to find it in a vintage-looking blue color that perfectly matched the rest of the items in the space. And with Wayfair, you can get rooms that look great at every price point. I'm only staying in my sabbatical place for a short time, so I didn't want to spend a lot on a new rug. But with Wayfair, you can shop thousands of products across every style and budget, whether you're simply replacing an appliance or transforming your home from top to bottom for the holiday season.

• 19:00Laurie Santos?

  And now that the weather's getting colder, I gotta say that I'm especially loving the coziness of my new rug. Find pieces made for real life and get even more value with Wayfair Rewards. Join Wayfair Rewards today to get 5% back on every purchase. Head to wayfair.com to shop all things home. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com.

• 19:23Laurie Santos?

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• 20:05Laurie Santos?

  Visit tacha.com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off your first purchase. That's T-A-T-C-H-A dot com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off.

• 20:20Laurie Santos?

  The book is really all about this idea of flourishing. I'm curious how you define flourishing.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Flourishing, the way we define it, is having four key qualities. One is being fully present. The second is being totally connected, connected to others and to one sense of place. The third is having a deep understanding of how our thoughts and beliefs and expectations shape our experience of the world. And the fourth is having a sense of purpose, really being motivated. And when all four are operating, that's when we're flourishing. And so flourishing is not happiness.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  And I think it's important to say on this podcast because we can flourish when we're sad. There's a story told in the book about a very dear friend of mine, a very famous sociologist, who was dying. I was with him the day before he was dying, and he wasn't happy, but he was flourishing.

• 21:27Laurie Santos?

  We're also starting to see that we can build some of these skills with way less hours a day. Give me an example of what some of the research is showing for these shorter-term contemplative practices.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's one of the things that we talk a lot about in this new book and what is so exciting to us. So one of my passions these days, in fact, it's really my central passion, is to figure out how to scale human flourishing. I think most viewers would agree that the world is really in desperate need of increased flourishing and the skills that we associate with flourishing. And so how can we increase these qualities even among people who are never going to spend a lot of time meditating? Ordinary people who are totally stressed in their work.

• 22:17Speaker 03

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

• 23:03Speaker 03

  And then we actually looked at the data to see if this made any difference. And it turns out, if you do it every day, five minutes a day actually produces real change. It produces change in our experience, and it even produces change in our biology. And so one of the important messages here is that consistency is really important.

• 23:29Laurie Santos?

  So you defined flourishing for us earlier with having these four pillars. And so now I want to kind of dive into each of the pillars. First, starting with this idea of awareness. How do you define awareness?

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Awareness is the faculty of knowing, being fully present. And there are different components of awareness. One component is self-awareness. So that would be awareness of sensations in our body, awareness of our thoughts and emotions in our mind. And it really is the sense of being present. And I think all of us have experienced, particularly with its opposite. How many listeners have had the experience of reading a book where they might be reading each word on a page, and after a few minutes, they have no idea what they've just read? Their mind is somewhere else. That's an experience of not knowing what our mind is doing.

• 24:25Speaker 03

  And meta-awareness, which is knowing that we're knowing, is really important. If we don't know what's happening in our own mind, it's very difficult to change it. So this is really a quality that we think is necessary for all other forms of human transformation. And if there's one thing we've learned from the scientific literature on meditation, it's that this is something that really can be strengthened.

• 24:53Laurie Santos?

  One of the things I was struck by is when what we're aware of is something that's pretty bad. For example, like our own experience of bodily pain. What did you find when people were experiencing pain but attending to that pain using awareness?

• 25:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is really one of the areas where there's, I think, real practical import of these practices and clinical relevance. We've studied pain extensively in the scanner. And what we find is this: when a person is experiencing pain, there's a network in the brain that's activated directly by the pain itself, but then we also have emotional reactions to the pain.

• 25:34Laurie Santos?

  Yeah, we're thinking, this sucks, I can't handle this, I want this to stop, I hate this, I hate this.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that secondary emotional reaction, which is associated with a very distinct brain network. This is something that's been studied extensively by neuroscientists. We found that that network in particular can be altered by training in the simple awareness meditation practices. And when you decrease the activation in that emotion-related network, you significantly decrease the distress that we experience in response to physical pain. We still know that there's something painful happening, but it just doesn't bother us

• 26:21Speaker 03

  as much, and we're able to cope with it much more effectively.

• 26:26Laurie Santos?

  I mean, this seems to be this interesting paradox of awareness, right? Which is this idea that challenging situations become less challenging when we sit with them, when we're aware of them, when we're present in the horrible experience. That seems to be a very strange thing about brains, but a really powerful thing that contemplative practices can help us with.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  That's absolutely true. There's a lot of emotional energy, if you will, that's put into pushing these negative experiences away, and that turns out to be a significant source of distress. And so when we're able to accept them, when we're able to look at them for what they are, it turns out that they're much more porous. And that really is extremely helpful. For example, is there any part of me that's not in pain? Any little morsel of me? Is there any place in my body that I can become aware of that's not experiencing pain? And that kind of opening really is helpful in allowing us to sit with it and see its

• 27:28Speaker 03

  differentiated nature.

• 27:30Laurie Santos?

  We can also engage in these awareness practices formally, like kind of sitting down to do meditation. But you, in the book, talk about all these times when you engage in awareness practices in your own life during these almost informal, maybe more mundane ways. Tell me some examples where you've tried to become more aware in your own life.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  I'm doing it right now.

• 27:48Laurie Santos?

  I could tell, you're very chill at the podcast interview.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  You can do it anywhere, anytime. Or another way to say it is you can do it everywhere, all the time. It's really a matter of how we intentionally deploy our mind. And in fact, one of the really cool things is in this app that we have developed called the Healthy Minds Program, we give people the option of doing these practices as formal meditation practices or doing it actively while you're engaged in other activities of daily living. For example, commuting or doing your laundry, washing the dishes, doing physical exercise. We actually have collected data on this, and it turns out that the benefit of these practices is equal.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  There's no significant difference in the benefit when it's done as a formal meditation or as an active practice as you're engaged in other activities of daily living. So that's really great news, and we can honestly say you don't have to take any extra time out of your day. You can do it as you're doing other things.

• 28:57Laurie Santos?

  I love this finding because often when I talk to people about the benefits of meditation, I'm thinking specifically of my Yale students. They'll kind of sigh and be like, oh my gosh, I have so much on my plate. I don't have another 20 minutes a day that I'm going to not sleep or not do my homework to do meditation. But it's like, wait, you can meditate while you're doing your homework, or you can engage in an awareness practice when you're doing your homework. You can engage in an awareness practice when you're doing your laundry, walking to class, and so on. And so I think that's really freeing because sometimes when people hear about these practices, I think we mistakenly assume that we have to go hardcore monk style to engage in them.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Right, not at all.

• 29:31Laurie Santos?

  I want to emphasize this point because I find it so powerful. You don't have to do any sort of formal meditation in order to experience the benefits of an awareness practice. You can get similar results by just being a little more mindful when you're running errands or doing your housework. Instead of doing your chores on autopilot, try to consciously pay attention to the sounds around you and the feelings in your body. Regularly shifting your attention during these everyday moments can help you train your brain to better manage thoughts and emotions when bigger challenges arise. Okay, so that's awareness, Richie's first pillar of flourishing. But we still have three more to go. We'll tackle those when the Happiness Lab returns from the break.

• 30:16Speaker 01

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• 31:22Laurie Santos?

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• 32:04Laurie Santos?

  Visit tacha.com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off your first purchase. That's T-A-T-C-H-A dot com and use code HAPPINESS for 15% off. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. There are plenty of reasons we put off getting support, and for a lot of people, cost is one of them. With BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. And while we're reconsidering old assumptions, maybe there are a few others worth questioning, too. Women these days inherit a lot of unwritten rules. Be ambitious, but not too ambitious. Be there for everyone, but still make time for yourself. Have it all together, but don't look like you're trying too hard.

• 32:49Laurie Santos?

  I've been trying to unwrit the unwritten rule that I'm never allowed to say no, that it makes me a bad person. I've been trying to give myself the grace that I would give other people and to remember that no one has the bandwidth to do everything all the time. If you're trying to work through your own unwritten rules, therapy may be of help. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks, and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance or live outside the US? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/Laurie to explore your payment options. That's better H-E-L-P dot com slash Laurie.

• 33:32Laurie Santos?

  Life has a funny way of changing when we're not even looking. One day, your routine feels set, and the next, something shifts. A new job, a move, or maybe just a quiet realization that what used to work doesn't quite fit anymore. On this show, we talk a lot about how the little things in our daily lives shape our well-being, often more than the big flashy milestones. And that includes what we drive. Because when something you use every single day feels aligned with your life, it removes friction. It makes ordinary moments smoother, less stressful. That's where Cars.com comes in. They have over 2 million new and used cars and powerful filters that let you narrow your search

• 34:15Laurie Santos?

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• 34:42Laurie Santos?

  I'm speaking with neuroscientist Dr. Richie Davidson about his new book, Born to Flourish, which explores four foundational skills that humans need to thrive. Before the break, Richie and I touched on the practice of awareness. But the second pillar he and his co-authors emphasize is connection. I asked Richie to define this idea for me, since connection is something we hear about a lot these days, especially in light of the loneliness epidemic.

• 35:06Speaker 03

  It's really a sense of being connected to others. It's not the physical presence of others necessarily. It's really about qualities that are important for healthy social relationships, qualities like appreciation and gratitude and kindness and compassion. It's a subjective sense, and it doesn't necessarily require that we have this large circle of friends. And one of the ways that we find it very accessible is to reflect on appreciation. Think of a person in your life who has been helpful to you in whatever way, and just allow this natural sense of appreciation to arise.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  And that's something that you also can do anywhere, anytime. And it really changes the coloring of how you see the world.

• 35:58Laurie Santos?

  You talked about a practice that you do before a particularly busy day. As someone who has busy days a lot, this is something that I could resonate with, where you use the power of connection to get more grounded and feel more appreciative of the people who are making up your busy day. Tell me more about what you did there.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I meditate every morning. And after I meditate on weekdays, I take out my calendar. I did it this morning, and you are in my practice, Laurie. And I just, it takes me about 60 seconds. I just scan my day, see what meetings I have, and I bring the people I'm going to be meeting with into my mind and my heart. And I just reflect on something positive about them, even if I don't know them. And it doesn't take much, and it really just helps me develop this kind of vitality for the day. And I can have a day where I have 10 hours of back-to-back meetings and come out the other side and feel totally refreshed.

• 36:58Speaker 03

  I really attribute, at least in part, the vitality to this simple practice.

• 37:04Laurie Santos?

  And this was the kind of thing that you tested in teachers during a really difficult time during the COVID-19 pandemic. What kinds of benefits from these types of connection practices did you find with your teachers?

• 37:15Speaker 03

  So we've been doing a bunch of work with public school teachers in the US, as well as in other countries, but primarily in the US. And we found that these practices, and again, on average, about five minutes a day, are just enormously beneficial. If a teacher shows up in his or her classroom and is really present and is connected to the kids, this really can be so powerful. And one of the things that we found that we attribute to connection practices in particular is we found reductions in measures of implicit bias, implicit racial bias.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  And we found that teachers who are randomly assigned to a group that received this training showed significant reductions on this behavioral measure of implicit bias, and that reduction in bias persisted at the six-month follow-up period. And so there are real consequences to doing this that we think are enormously beneficial.

• 38:22Laurie Santos?

  So that's the connection practice. Now I want to jump to insight, starting with an interesting thing about the human mind, which is that we constantly get caught up in our own narratives. Give me a sense of what it looks like to be kind of stuck with a lack of insight, stuck with our own inner narratives.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, insight is having a deep understanding of how our thoughts and beliefs and expectations shape our experience of the world. There are folks who have very negative narratives. They have low expectations of themselves. They may have negative beliefs about themselves. And of course, that is a prescription for depression. And what's really important for well-being, we think, is not so much changing the narrative, at least initially, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative so that we see the narrative for what it is, which is simply a constellation of beliefs and thoughts and expectations.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  And if we can see that, it gives us some distance from them. It really helps for us not to be completely fused with these beliefs and expectations. Many people are not even aware that they have a narrative, let alone what the narrative might be. They just operate so automatically. One simple practice that we do to help people become aware of this is if you're having some challenge in your life, just imagine what another person who comes from a different perspective, how they might view the situation, to see if they might view it any differently than you. And that can really help loosen the grip of this kind of narrative.

• 40:08Laurie Santos?

  Well, I mean, it seems like this idea that you're talking about with insight, it's really just all about getting curious about our inner narrative and just bringing that curiosity seems to have a whole host of benefits.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Exactly. Curiosity is really key. And activating that curiosity to really try to work with your own mind is extremely helpful.

• 40:29Laurie Santos?

  Another thing we do when we loosen the grip of the narrative, as you talk about in your book, is that we can start to use the bad stuff, maybe our inner demons, as teachers. How does insight help us do that?

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Well, insight helps us to recognize that, first of all, some of the bad stuff that we do is motivated by qualities that are actually good qualities. So, for example, addiction is one case. We might become addicted to looking at the news, or we might become addicted to exercise in a way that becomes maladapted. The initial motivation, the initial spark for our interest in a particular activity may be wholesome. You know, we may want to know what's going on in the world

• 41:20Speaker 03

  to be a better informed citizen. We do exercise because we recognize that it's good for our health, but then it takes on a kind of pathological extreme. But when we have insight, we can recognize that the initial seed might actually be a wholesome seed, and we can honor that. And that helps us to begin to make these changes.

• 41:45Laurie Santos?

  So that was pillar number three, insight. Now we turn to the final pillar that we need to flourish, which is purpose. How do you personally define purpose?

• 41:54Speaker 03

  When we use purpose, we're not thinking about trying to find something big and grand and more purposeful for you to do with your life. But how can we find meaning and purpose in our everyday activities, even in the pedestrian activities that we do in our life? Can taking out the garbage be connected to our sense of purpose? And of course, it could be. It just requires a little bit of reframing, a little mindset shift. And so if we can connect our activities with core values that are important for us, then it just opens up a whole range of possibility. And so if one of our core values, for example,

• 42:36Speaker 03

  is being kind to our family, to the people we live with, taking out the garbage is not just taking out the garbage, but it's actually an act of generosity. So we can reframe simple activities of that sort. And in that way, we really can change our experience. In the work we did with school teachers, purpose turned out to be one of the most important pillars. We did a simple practice where we invited them to reflect on their sense of purpose in becoming a school teacher. And this was just like an elixir for their soul. And many reported that it reminded them of why they became a teacher in the

• 43:18Speaker 03

  first place. And that was really beneficial.

• 43:22Laurie Santos?

  So that's purpose in the small things in life. You've also talked about how we can use this pillar of purpose when big, even more challenging things come up. And I know in your book, you talked about your experience of shepherding your son through a difficult situation. If you're comfortable with it, I'd love if you could share the lesson that you learned while doing that about purpose.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  So he had a very challenging adolescence. At a certain point in time when he was 16, we never thought he would go to college. We gave up many of our expectations for him. We were just trying to keep him alive and healthy. And so that sense of purpose really became a defining value for us at that time. It really just helped us focus and refocus and recalibrate and really helped us through this very challenging period. He's now in his 30s. He's an amazing father. He's become a school psychologist and helping kids very

• 44:23Speaker 03

  much like him. So I often think of him as a poster child for plasticity.

• 44:29Laurie Santos?

  And so we've heard about all of these different pillars. We need these practices to get there. Any specific practices you want to leave our listeners with that they should be thinking about if they want to build these things up?

• 44:41Speaker 03

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

• 45:26Speaker 03

  one minute before we eat, we can even do this as we're eating. So it doesn't take any extra time, but just to reflect on all the people it took to bring food, food on your plate. When you think about it, there really is an enormous number of people that were required. And it gives you, first of all, an understanding of interdependence. We're not isolated creatures, but rather we critically depend on this interconnected web for survival. And secondly, it allows a sense of appreciation. So you can do these simple practices around these regular activities of daily living. Before you go into any important

• 46:10Speaker 03

  meeting, you can reflect on the people you're meeting with and think of something positive about them. When you're walking outside, that's an opportunity for an awareness practice. Just bring your awareness to your body. See how it feels to walk. And again, there's nothing to change, nothing to fix. And in many ways, it's shifting from a mode of doing to a mode of simply being. Our lives are just replete with opportunities if we just harness these situations.

• 46:42Laurie Santos?

  I love this insight, and it's given me such a shift in how I relate to these mundane different tasks. You know, a big one for me was your inspiration of your schedule. Normally, I would pull out my schedule and look in and be like, oh, gosh, the day. And I was like, wait, four pillars, connection. I'm having these meetings with interesting people like you, Richie, who I get to talk to, and it's so fun. Or I get a sense of purpose from what I'm doing. It's also been this moment of kind of just awareness of noticing of like, oh, that's a sense of overwhelm. Maybe tomorrow I shouldn't have as many meetings in my schedule. That's just like a two-minute period, but I'm bringing in so many of these different pillars to notice what's going on. And I really think it's having just a big effect on like how I treat the day and how I feel during the day.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  That's great. I love that. Thank you for all you're doing, Laurie, to bring these ideas to the world.

• 47:31Laurie Santos?

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

• 48:05Speaker 04

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

• 48:30Laurie Santos?

  All that's next week on Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.

• 48:42Laurie Santos?

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• 49:08Speaker 05

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• 49:40Speaker 02

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• 50:21Speaker 02

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• 50:29Laurie Santos?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.