How Meditation Works & Science-Based Effective Meditations

People are often not present to what they are doing, and that is a great source of unhappiness—even if their thoughts are those of happy, joyful thoughts ... To have the ability to be fully engaged in what you are doing at a given moment—that is the strongest predictor of being happy.

Meditating is not necessarily a practice that we do divorced from the rest of life; meditation and mindfulness, in particular, being present to what we are doing in a given moment, is one of the essential keys to happiness and improved mood, even if what we are doing is unpleasant.

If something were easy, if you can perform any activity or thought, etc., well, then there is absolutely zero reason for your neural circuits to change. It's the friction, it's the feeling that something is hard, that turns on the enormous variety of mechanisms... that allow you to potentially change your neural circuitry. So, challenge and discomfort is the signal to your brain and body that something needs to change.

A meditative practice can be made far more effective—that is, it can invoke more neuroplasticity, more shift in brain states and brain circuitry—if we do not take the easy path. That is, we go against the grain of what our brain would naturally do in a given moment.

If your inhales are longer and/or more vigorous than your exhales, then you will tend to be more alert ... In contrast, if you emphasize longer duration and/or more vigorous exhales relative to your inhales, you will tend to relax more; you will tend to calm your nervous system.

They revealed that people were less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were not—and this was true during all activities. And then, third, what people were thinking at a given moment was far better a predictor of their happiness than what they were doing.

When you sit down to meditate, it is going to be most effective to do that interoceptive/exteroceptive bias assessment. Ask yourself whether or not you are more in your head or outside your head, if you will, and then to do a meditation practice that runs counter to where you happen to be at...

One of the key elements of any meditative practice... is that it's really a refocusing practice ... The more time your mind wanders and you bring it back, actually, the more effective that practice is.

It's very clear that replacing sleep that we've lost is an area of research that's still active and ongoing, but NSDR and Yoga Nidra are very promising, if not downright useful, for replacing sleep that you've lost.

We now sit at an interesting frontier where most people think of meditation as one thing. So, like the word exercise, which, of course, could mean weight training. it could mean running; it could mean high-intensity interval training. All of which, as you know, will get you different results ... So, too, meditation can give you very specific results. It can give you more focus; it can give you better sleep; it can give you a combination of results, just like exercise can, depending on the exercise.

If you are somebody who's feeling pulled out of yourself a lot during a moment and you want to bring your awareness into your body and sort of calm down, well, then I would encourage you to, yes, use a deliberate/somewhat unnatural or non-default pattern of breathing, which, by definition, will force you to attend to what's going on interoceptivly.

When we close our eyes, we stop, we slow down, we focus on our breathing or that third eye center, the majority of our perception then shifts to interoception ... What happens is that those two regions, the ACC (the anterior cingulate cortex) and the insula, really ramp up their levels of neural activity.

Breathwork itself can be a form of meditation, and meditation can involve breathwork, but one should know that the more deliberate and unnatural that pattern of breathing is, the less you will be able to focus on other things.

There was a statistically significant reduction in cortisol levels, the stress hormone, immediately after the Yoga Nidra practice that we believe would be paralleled by very similar, if not equivalent, practice of NSDR.