Selects: How Mindfulness Works

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Terms apply subject to approval. Hi, everybody.
Since self-improvement is kind

of in the air this time of year, I thought I would choose our 2022 episode on mindfulness. We cover its origins, how it became a thing in the West, and the upsides, and yes, drawbacks.
I hope it changes your life for the better. Enjoy.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here-ish.

And this is Stuff You Should Know-ish. This is full-on Stuff You Should Know, Charles.
Remember that point? I feel like it was about eight to ten years ago where everyone was just saying ish on the end of things instead of saying like, you know, finding the real word that they were looking for. So like an approximation of the word or of the thing they were describing? So like I'm 40-ish? No, not even that.
Like when there's like a real word that could be used and they would just throw ish on another word. I don't know what you're talking about, no.
Yeah, it was a thing. It swept the nation.
When was it? Or maybe I'm thinking of the Macarena. That's what you're thinking of.
Okay. Man, that really did sweep the nation.
Remember that? Who let the dogs out? It was like a one-two punch. Who did let the dogs out? Did they ever find that out? No.
I think it was a rhetorical question. Ish.
It's the kind of rhetorical question you could ask yourself, Chuck, while you're meditating. Yeah.
But first, thanks, thanks. But I'm going to step all over the segue because before we get started, Chuck, I want to do, if you'll allow me, another shout out for my little niece Mila's movie, big time movie called No Exit, that's coming out as far as when this episode drops tomorrow.
So February 25th, 2022. No matter when you hear this, just immediately go onto Hulu, subscribe if you haven't yet, and check out my niece Mila in No Exit because she is amazing.
You sent me the trailer. What'd you think? It looks like a taut thriller.
She looks fantastic from what you can tell from a trailer. I know, man.
Unless you just saved all the bad parts for the movie. I don't think they did.
I was reading an interview with the director, and he was saying she was doing such an amazing job of being terrified and freaked out and everything, that in between takes, the other cast members would be like, are you okay? And she'd be like, yeah, are you okay? She's like, you know I'm acting, right? Yeah, exactly. She's like, it's acting.
Like John Lovett said. Yeah, so on Hulu, no exit, February 25th, my niece Mila just kills it.
There you go. Can't wait.
Thanks again for that, Chuck. So let's get started.
Thank you for not passing judgment on that either way. You're re-segueing.
Because passing judgment means I'm not being mindful because a big part of mindfulness is to not judge. Yeah.
So that's like this is one of those ones, you know, those episodes where we just start talking about the thing without defining it. This is not going to be one of those episodes because I think it would be kind of rough otherwise, you know? Yeah.
And I guess if you're going to define mindfulness, you need to kind of go back in time. I mean, I guess we could hop in the Wayback Machine.
We haven't done that in a while. Yeah, it's been a while.
Let's pull the old cover off.

It's quite dusty in here.

And a little bit of mildew.

A little mildew.

There's some old crystals boxes.

Those are yours.

Remember, you had them accidentally delivered to your house?

Right. And then we went back to the Old West to celebrate.

You're thinking of Back to the Future 3.

Oh, right, right, right.

I called Mary Steenburgen.

Meaning I get to play her, not date her or anything.

Oh, I don't know if I'd date Mary Steenburgen.

I always had a big crush on her.

Isn't that, oh, really?

That's Ted Danson's old squeeze, right?

It's his current squeeze.

I'm not going to fight him for her. Are they still together? Yeah, I think so.
Gosh, they've been together for a while. Oh, really? That's Ted Danson's old squeeze, right? It's his current squeeze.
I'm not going to fight him for it.

Are they still together?

Yeah, I think so.

Gosh, they've been together for a while.

Yeah, good couple.

Okay, great.

Good stuff.

So who knew we were going to be talking about Ted Danson at the beginning of mindfulness?

Not me.

I could have guessed Richard Gere, but Ted Danson's a big surprise.

If we get in the Wayback Machine and go back in time to sort of the beginning of Buddhism, you'd have to look at the language Pali and the word sati. Pali is P-A-L-I.
Sati is S-A-T-I. There are a lot of different words for mindfulness, but the one that we kind of identify with has kind of been used most from Pali, which is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language from the early branches of Buddhism.
Yeah. It's a lot to take in.
The reason that Pali is so important is because they say that it was the language of the Buddha, and at the very least, it was the first language that the Buddha's words, which had been passed down orally, were written down in. So it's like legit old-school Buddhist thinking and teachings.
And one of the basic parts of that is, like you said, sati, which has been translated to mindfulness. But it was translated by a British colonial administrator, wasn't it? That's right.
And it kind of more accurately is translated as memory of the present, which I think is a really kind of a cool way to look at mindfulness. Yeah, absolutely.
It really kind of reveals what's going on, especially once you kind of learn a little more about it. You're like, that actually works about as perfectly as can be.
But it got translated into the word mindfulness, sati into mindfulness, by a British colonial administrator in Ceylon, which is now Sri Lanka, back in the 1880s. So, it was some British guy who said sati means mindfulness and actually kind of gave it to us today, although there was a long period where it had been forgotten.
But I think you can't really talk about mindfulness, even though it's changed so dramatically, especially in the last decade or so, without kind of describing what it was originally meant to describe or what it still describes if you're a practicing Buddhist. And that is that you are not only paying attention to the moment and like experiencing this moment without letting your thoughts wander to the past or the future or anything like that.
But that whatever you're experiencing in the moment, no matter what it is, you're experiencing with equanimity. Which means that you're not passing judgment on it as good or bad or anything else.
It just is. And it sounds easy to describe, but if you've ever tried it, it's one of the hardest things a human being can ever set out to do.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's very, very natural for a human to seek out and contemplate and think about the things that feel good and please them and to try and stuff down and get rid of and avoid things that either hurt, literally hurt, or emotionally hurt or things that are painful or unpleasant. And boy, that is a tough thing to overcome, my friend.
Just the condition of being human makes that very difficult.

But yeah, and you just nailed it on the head not once but twice, Chuck, when you said that it's a very human condition.

And part of sati, the point of sati, as far as like Buddhists are concerned, is that it's a step that you take on the path to enlightenment, to free yourself from the cycle of like life and death and rebirth and to become like a truly enlightened being that's freed from all of that. And so you have to free yourself from that human condition.
And a big part of that is to free yourself from yearning, from wanting, because yearning and wanting or being repelled by something and wanting to get away from it, there are two sides of the same coin as far as sati is concerned, which is you are wishing that something is different or was different than it actually is. And that's the basis of suffering.
And suffering is the thing that keeps you in that cycle of life and death and rebirth. So meditating to become mindful and nonjudgmental about your present experience is one step toward relieving yourself of suffering and then freeing yourself from that shackle of being born and reborn and reborn again.

Well, you, my friend, have just spoken about the noble truths in part, because craving is the cause of suffering, is the second noble truth, and to cease that craving will bring about the ceasing of that suffering, which is the third noble truth. And basically experiencing the moment without – and everything about the moment without judgment is sort of the goal.
And for modern – we're going to talk a lot about sort of the beginnings of mindfulness and kind of how it's become kind of a hip thing to do here in the United States, starting in about the 1970s and on, and especially today. Yeah.
But we're kind of talking in American modern terms about stress and de-stressing. And the Buddhists have a term for that, which is dukkha, D-U-K-K-H-A.
And that is, you know, again, to avoid or destroy something that we don't like. And what we usually don't like is something that's going to put a stress on us.
Right, exactly. And they're saying like, dude, this is part of the point of life.
I'm reading this really amazing book by Thich Nhat Hanh right now. I'm rereading it, actually.
It's one of those ones you just kind of go back and reread. Very, like, easy, slim volume.
It's called No Mud, No Lotus. And it basically says, like, without suffering, you can't have happiness and vice versa.
Pretty basic stuff. But, like, he really gets into explaining how to confront suffering and understand that it's just part of life.
And that's a huge part of the Buddhist approach to mindfulness. It's not to get away from suffering, it's to recognize it as it is, and also simultaneously not make a bigger deal out of it than it is.
Because suffering's enough, it's bad enough as it is. But another part of the human condition is to make it way worse by anticipating it, worrying about it, like focusing on it after it happens.
There's a lot of stuff we do to our own suffering that explodes it. And part of mindfulness training is to stop doing that as well, too.
You ain't kidding. And the lack of judgment is a big, big part of all of this.
And we're going to talk quite a bit here and there about Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is, I would say, easy, far and away, the sort of leader of the modern American mindfulness movement in a lot of different ways. And we'll get to him in more detail later.
But he says that awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose, and that's another big part of it, it's a very purposeful practice, but not meditation, which we'll get to that as well, because meditation is a true physical practice

and mental practice, whereas mindfulness is more of a state of being that you're trying

to get to.

But he says on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally.

They always have to kind of hammer home the lack of judgment being a key part. Right, exactly.
And he's a proponent and kind of one of the founders of what you can refer to as secular mindfulness, which is this current incarnation of mindfulness that's sweeping the West. It's like you said, hip, that's been kind of like removed deliberately, as we'll see, removed from its Buddhist roots and Buddhist context to make it more palatable and scientific seeming.
Yeah. Secular.
Secular. Strip it of all the religion and maybe we can sell it to Americans.
Exactly. And an app.
But the, yeah, the upshot of all this though, Chuck, is that no matter who you are or where you're coming from, if you're talking about mindfulness, you're talking about paying attention to the present moment and doing the best you can at not judging anything that's going on in that present experience and just taking it on its face value and engaging in it fully. That's mindfulness in a nutshell.
Yeah, and it's not anything that the Buddhists

had a corner on. They just probably did it better because all different kinds of religions

throughout antiquity had, you know, chanting or some kind of mindfulness practice, maybe prayers

or through songs or dance. You know, that kind of thing has been around as long as people have

been practicing religion.

So the Buddhists did not invent it, but I think they got it fairly right.

So let's talk a little more about how we got here today, historically speaking, after a break.

What do you think about that?

It sounds great. I'm going couldn't pay the bill.
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That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.
We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
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on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you like to listen. Hey, let me teach you something I've been using that Thich Nhat Hanh taught me.
Not personally, but through his writing in a book that was published that I purchased with money. Smash your hand with a hammer? Yeah.
He said, try to focus on anything else, chump. Right.
There's a bunch of different mantras you can say, and I'm not even sure that's the right word, but one that I keep using is, and it's just striking, what taking a breath and deliberately focusing on that breath, just breathing in once and breathing out once, can do to, like, just suck you right out of wherever your mind is in the past or the future. It's really striking how it can do that.
But his was, it's breathing in, I notice that I'm alive, and then breathing out, I'm happy to be alive. And just doing it once like immediately brings me back into the present moment.
And it's really cool. I like it.
It's all very new for me, but I think it's pretty cool. Yeah, there's a lot of value there.
And, you know, you can like practice something like this and those breathing techniques. It's not exclusive to mindfulness or meditation or Buddhism.
You know, that's a great technique if you have kids. I found that, you know, if my daughter is having a bad time, just kind of get her to slow down and take a couple of good deep breaths.
Always a good thing to do. And Emily, who, you know, is someone who has a lot of anxieties in her life as a struggling small business owner, we will do this thing where we have hug breathing where I will go up to her and we will have a good, tight bear hug embrace and we'll breathe in together.
And it sort of like doubles the power of it. Wow, that's neat, Chuck.
Is that your own? Did you come up with that? I mean, I'm sure. I mean, I didn't get it from anywhere, but I'm sure I didn't invent that.
It sounds like a Viking mindfulness. Like Hell's Angels? Sure, yeah.
It's the Hell's Angels technique you came up with. You can call it whatever you want.
It's your invention. It's a good one.
Yeah, there's something about breathing together that close physically. It's pretty powerful.
So if you went back a few hundred years, a couple hundred years even, and you spoke to any Buddhists around the world and said, hey, how often do you do mindfulness meditation? They would look at you like they had no idea what you were talking about. And if you said, you know, sati, they'd say, oh, that's not for us.
That's for like the monks and the nuns up in the caves in the mountains. Like we don't do that kind of stuff.
We're super Buddhists. We care about morality and we worship local deities and all that stuff.
But that's kind of advanced. That's more than the average Buddhist does.
And it wasn't until I think the late 19th century in Burma that that

was finally kind of broken up and meditation and mindfulness together were kind of introduced for the first time to like lay Buddhists, like just the normal everyday average Buddhist living their life. Yeah, this is pretty cool.
Like I know we love it when we can kind of pinpoint when things happen or when things change.

And this is one of them on November 28th in 1885.

This is when the British Imperial Army conquered Burma and said, King – we're going to mispronounce some of these. Thibau maybe? I think that's right.
You're out of here. And that king was promoting mindfulness and promoting Buddhist institutions throughout the nation.
The Brits, of course, said, no, we're not going to really do that. So it fell to the lay people to get organized, to find new places to meet, to find their own gathering grounds.
And a lot of times these were monasteries and it would go through monks. but they would it basically went to them to kind of figure it out because it wasn't

I don't want to say

state sponsored And a lot of times these were monasteries and it would go through monks. But it basically went to them to kind of figure it out because it wasn't, I don't want to say state-sponsored, but it kind of state-sponsored.
Yeah, or state-supported or something like that. Yeah.
Yeah, but so rather than being like, oh, I don't know, I guess we're not Buddhists anymore. They took it by the horns and like they did something with it.
But one of the outcroppings of that was that, like, these monks who used to just go meditate out in the, like, in the mountains or the hills or in the woods were now, now had audiences of, like, everyday people who were practicing Buddhists that they were teaching this stuff to. And it was one of these guys, Leti Sayadao, who was a Buddhist monk who said, you know what, this isn't just for us.

This is for everybody.

And closely in Leti Sayadaw's footsteps came Mingen Sayaw,

S-A-Y-A-W, Sayaw.

I think that's right.

And that monk was the first one to actually teach mindfulness

and meditation to regular people, I think around 1911.

Yeah, I mean, it's cool stuff. Like, I love the idea that Leti Sayadal kind of put forth,

which was, you don't have to go to a monastery even, like we've set these up for you. And you

can, you don't have to retreat to a cave, you don't have to, you don't even have to go into

a deep meditative state or

anything like just momentary bits of mindfulness are very helpful. Uh, and that's a good way to reach regular lay people.
And I think through practice is when, uh, Sael came along and said, Hey, that all sounds great. And buddy, I'm going to teach it.
Right. So the, the, the people in what is now Myanmar are the ones who kind of broke mindfulness and meditation out of its little… Slumber? Sure, cage or something like that.
All right. And democratized it a little bit.
But it was, as far as the people in the West are concerned, it was the Japanese and their development of Zen Buddhism that we have to thank because this is, you can pretty much trace a direct line between the mindfulness and the meditation and the approach to Buddhism in the West today, back to the 20th century Japan, and specifically a guy named Daisetsu Teitaro D.T. Suzuki.
So D.T. Suzuki was kind of a, what's called a Buddhist modernist thinker who said, there's different things we can do with this, but let's approach this a little more rationally, a little less dogmatically and open it up to people like our friends in what's soon to be Myanmar.
And not only that, let's start relating to the West a little more.

And D.T. Suzuki actually kind of carried this message,

this idea of Zen Buddhism with him over to America and Europe,

and it just started to catch on like wildfire.

Yeah, I think it's really interesting, too,

that it was another act of war that led to, you know,

that helped give rise to someone like Suzuki, just like when the Brits overthrew Burma, when the U.S. Navy attacked Tokyo Harbor in 1853, there was, you know, basically Japan was like, you know, we got to start relating to the West a little bit more and sort of modernize.
And this was known as the Meiji Restoration. And part of that was saying, hey, Shinto is going to be our religion, our main religion and not Buddhism, which led the Buddhists to say, hey, maybe we should modernize our religion as well, you know, so we don't get left by the wayside.
And that gave rise to someone like D.T. Suzuki.
Right. So it was from that modernization that Buddhist modernism came about.

And it's basically what you would recognize as Buddhism today, like very thoughtful, very interior dwelling, the idea that the universe is all connected.

All these were like Buddhist thoughts before, but it was Buddhism allowing itself to be influenced by modernism and by other groups like the Romantics and the Transcendentalists, right? So they jumped on it big time. It was pretty, it was like a confluence of perfect timing as far as coming to the United States and like the counterculture ready for this.
But in a weird way, it was like the United States, unbeknownst to the counterculture beats and then later the hippies, that their predecessors, like the transcendentalists, had pre-influenced what was coming back to them.

So it was already in a very palatable form for Americans who were open to the idea of like mind expansion and taking acid and, you know, and meditating.

And we're just open to the ideas of other cultures of becoming like more in tune with the universe. It was, they were just waiting for it.
And it came to them in the briefcase, I guess, of DT Suzuki. And it just kind of took off from there.
So the idea, everything we understand about mindfulness and meditation, you can trace back to like DT Suzuki and those beats. Absolutely.
And there were three people in particular in the 70s and 60s and 70s practicing this. Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, and Sharon Salzberg, who were not together, but they studied separately meditation in Burma.
And then in the mid-'7070s founded the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, which became sort of the center of the Vipassana meditation movement here in the United States. And they're still around.
They're still doing their thing. Right.
So it was from that same group, there was actually a time where Jon Kabat-Zinn, the guy we mentioned earlier.

Z-I, by the way, not Z-E-N.

That would be too far on the nose.

Oh, wait, what?

If his name was spelled Z-E-N.

Oh, I got you.

Boy, I was not paying attention to the current experience very well.

I'm sorry.

Oh, that's okay.

That'd be like a boxer being named Boxer.

Yeah, it would be.

But spelled differently.

Right.

For some reason, I was going more toward the Cabernet-Zinn play on words.

Well, because that I is in there.

Yeah.

So he's known as the godfather of modern mindfulness, according to The Guardian, at least, which is a pretty legit newspaper. And by the way, thank you also to Olivia for helping us out with this one, Chuck.

This was a tough one to wrangle.

She did a great job.

She did.

She did.

But Jon Kabat-Zinn was among those people.

Jack Kornfield, great name, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein, he actually taught at their Insight Meditation Society. And he was a big-time practitioner of Zen Buddhism.
And he was on, I guess, a meditation retreat. And he had a bit of insight.
I guess an epiphany is probably what you'd call it. That he was meant to help apply Buddhist techniques to help people who are in pain.
He had either a microbiology or molecular biology degree, and he ended up applying it to medicine and figuring out how to join Buddhist practices and medicine to help people in the 70s. And it really started to take off from there.
Yeah. I mean, he sort of had the same idea as previous cultures, which was, hey, if we want to and not sell for money, but if we want to popularize this, we should get a little bit away from the religion part, the sort of hippy dippy new agey part.
And he really wanted to start talking in concrete terms about things that everyone worried about, which was stress. And, like, if you want to make your life less stressful, here's a way to do it, and more on mindfulness and less on meditation, which was still a tough sell to mainstream America, and still is today, I think.
Yeah, but it's gotten less and less. I feel like he finally overcame the threshold that was, you know, keeping it back in the last like five, 10 years and achieved what he was looking for.
I mean, think about mindfulness is everywhere today and it is almost totally divorced from any kind of religious connotations. It seems like a neuroscience tool more than anything, the way that it's treated in the West.
And that was his goal. He was trying to get it to the most people possible, study it scientifically, and then apply it to help people.
And specifically, again, he was initially looking at how it can help people with pain. And he came up with mindfulness-based stress reduction, MBSR, which is still very much in use today.
And then there was an offshoot too, Chuck, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. And that takes CBT, which is a proven type of talk therapy used extensively in psychology, and applies Jon Kabat-Zinn's approach to mindfulness to it, right? Yeah, and I think one of the big tenets here is to interrupt automatic thoughts and the automatic thoughts that can lead to an automatic behavior.
So the automatic thought might just be your propensity to feel that stress and reach for a drink immediately and not even think like, oh boy, I need a drink because I'm stressed out and that'll help out. It becomes this automatic thing.
And he was all about, and the practice of mindfulness is all about disruption and disrupting that flow without judgment. Yeah, because one of the big things in cognitive behavioral therapy is that you have a thought, your thought leads to a feeling, and your feeling leads to a behavior.
And oftentimes, it's like you said, it's very destructive and you don't even realize it's going on until your life is kind of falling apart or it's certainly not as good as it could be.

And it doesn't even have to be a drink. It could be a donut.
It could be yelling at a cashier at a, you know, a grocery store, like all sorts of different things. And you are totally out of control of it.
The idea behind this, mindfulness, adding mindfulness to cognitive behavioral therapy is that you are training yourself to detach yourself from all thoughts and emotions so that you can evaluate them clearly, so that none of them can jump out of nowhere, pounce on you, and the next thing you know, you've eaten a dozen donuts and had six scotches, and you have no idea why. You do have the idea why, and you probably haven't gotten to that point because you've stopped the whole process by recognizing it the moment it began.
Ideally, theoretically, on paper, that's the purpose of using mindfulness to help, especially with mental health. Yeah, there's a journalist named Robert Wright, and he kind of put it in a way that I kind of like, which was to think of your thoughts and emotions as transient.

So it's not like that kind of goes back to the no judgment thing. You can have these bad feelings and bad emotions and bad tendencies, but if you allow them to just flow through you, they become transient.
They don't stick around. The same sort of ideas that you can't – why worry about things that you can't control? But not in an office poster kind of way.
You know what I mean? Sure. It runs a bit deeper than that.
It's not like a Pollyanna thing. No, and as a matter of fact, like if you want to trace it all the way back to its original Buddhist roots,

it's that like we have very little, if any, control over life.

And that recognizing that will free us from all of our desires and the idea that like we have to have things and we want to hang on to it.

Like it just lets you let things flow by and you can enjoy them and experience them as they come rather than hoping for the next one, needing the next donut or fearing the next loss. You just experience life as it comes.
That's kind of the point of that, of understanding that everything is transient and impermanent, including your own life. Like you're going to die one day.
There's ultimately the big, like, you know, like bingo number. Yeah.
Like that's ultimately what it's leading to. You're going to die.
You yourself are impermanent. And so understanding that through getting there through meditation, daily meditative practice, is kind of the goal.
Yeah, and it's interesting. They found that it's, even though something like MBSR is more rooted in that sort of neuroscience-y thing and not spirituality or religion, they found it's sort of a chicken and the egg deal where once you do participate in MBSR, you may become more spiritual as a result, even though you weren't going in.
But I think the reason why is because even if these people don't know it, even if they're at a corporate mindfulness retreat, they're engaging in a deeply spiritual practice that they're kind of doing it wrong, as we'll see, but it's still, it's still, you know, part of this very long established tradition that actually has like legs. It's not mumbo jumbo, like it actually has a pronounced effect on the human brain, the human psyche, the outlook that we have on life.
And so depending on the context you're doing it in, it can be very useful, it can be harmful, or it can be totally useless in some cases, too. But it is a spiritual act, so it makes sense that it would make you

more interested in spirituality. Well, I say we take our second break, if that's good.
Okay. And

because we're Stuff You Should Know, we have to talk about whether or not this works,

and if there have been studies that tell us one way or the other. So we'll get into that right after this.

All right. It's fun to sit around and talk about mindfulness.
So fun. And to just sort of zen out and lose ourselves, become one with each other through these headphones.
Yeah. Man, you sound like Rory Cochran in Dazed and Confused.

Martha New, man. What was his name? Oh, Slater.
Was he Slater? Maybe. Hey, Slater, you happy giving me drugs, man? Yeah, Slater.
You're right. I don't know.
Get some from your mother,

man. It's funny.
I've seen him and he's been in a bunch of stuff since then. And it's always

impossible to see him as anyone other than Slater. I mean, he was on CSI Miami, I think, for years and years and years.
And you're just waiting for him to whip out a doobie. Yes, and he's all clean cut and everything and you still can't not see it.
I totally agree with you. He's not fooling anybody.
All right, so does this stuff work? There have been plenty of studies, of course. And there is a lot of evidence that mindfulness programs can help people through emotional problems, through mental problems.

They've done controlled trials of MBSR programs in clinical settings and non-clinical settings. And they generally found that they do, and this is self-reported stuff, obviously, but they reduce self-reported anxiety, depression, and stress and increase well-being as opposed to people who got no treatment at all.
Yeah. So, yes, I mean, it does seem to be effective.
There's also, especially with self-reporting, Chuck, that seems to be like the big one, that if you look at studies where they're using self-reporting, like it has the most pronounced effect. Objective tests, there does seem to register some sort of effect, like on the objective experience of, say, like pain or something like that.
But social psychology has jumped all over this. It's like we're going to study this.
And there was this one study from 2021, which I have to give a hat tip to Yumi because she turned this one up. But it was a study of white people who, some of whom received mindfulness training and a control group who received sham mindfulness training, which is hilarious.
And the effect that it had on their willingness to help black people

who they saw in need.

And not like in need like homeless or something like that.

They would be subjected to a test unwittingly where they'd be in a room

and a black person would come in and drop their papers

and their willingness to help that person pick up the papers. Or if a black person entered the room and they were on crutches, their willingness to give up their seat.
And apparently black people tend to help black people more. White people tend to help white people more.
Hispanic people tend to help Hispanic people more. People help their in-group more.
But this mindfulness group actually kind of crossed lines way more than was expected, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I think that kind of says it all.

You do help your in-group more, but the people that received the real mindfulness training were definitely far and away more willing to step outside their in-group and help someone of another race.

You know, there's something to be said for that.

Yeah.

And I mean, it was significant. Three times more is really significant, statistically speaking, for a study.
And it seems like it was a pretty good study. Like the fact that they had sham mindfulness training ruled out the possibility that the group that got mindfulness training was behaving a certain way because they thought like that's what was going to be the result of it, almost like a placebo effect.
So the group that received sham training thought they were getting mindfulness training. What was that like? That's what I want to know.
I would love to know what sham mindfulness training looks like. Right, it's like breathe in, really concentrate on all the anger, really feel it.
Or they'd let them in Lamaze breathing, where there's like a... You're like, I don't think that's right.
That doesn't feel right. They start to float away.
That's really funny. And shout out to Cal State San Marcos and Professor Daniel Berry, and I guess Yumi for all that.
Yeah, sure, the trifecta. Yeah, sure.
What's Cal State San Marcos' mascot? Oh, jeez. I'm going to bet $5 on the Lobos.
That sounds good. Okay, let's go with that.
All right. Los Lobos, even.
Yeah, the band Los Lobos is their mascot. All right.
And not coincidentally, their halftime entertainment as well. But we do need to say that there's another school of thought, and it's not a competing school of thought.
It's just a, hey, be aware that it's not always great for everyone. There's this one article you sent about people that experience trauma in their lives that have buried it, and it sits in their body as unconscious trauma that mindfulness practices and meditation practices can dredge that stuff up.
Yeah. And so they found that when these people, they're studying them and they're doing these mindfulness practices, they're experiencing like rage and anxiety.
And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this is the opposite of where we're supposed to be headed here. and i think they have figured out in a lot of these cases it's people that are uncovering these buried traumas yeah and here's where we reach like the first initial part where the west has kind of screwed this up because it is unexpected when somebody in america goes to a meditation retreat and tries to become more mindful and they're confronted with trauma or they're confronted with rage or self-hatred or something like that.
And they're not expecting it. If you went and talked to like an actual like Buddhist monk, they'd be like, well, somebody probably should have told you that that's a real possibility.
Right. That you're not, this isn't all, this isn't like, you know, it's like an acid trip.
It's not always like flowers and sunshine.

Sometimes it's like the darkest thing you'll ever be confronted with kind of thing.

Same thing.

The good thing about mindfulness meditation is that you can stop immediately.

But supposedly in some retreats, in some situations, they're like, no, you've got to press through, you've got to press through.

And people are kind of enticed or forced into staying in really uncomfortable trauma experiences way beyond their comfort zone. And it can actually be damaging.
And it's very rare from what I can tell for there to be like lasting harm. But there are reports of people having to go to therapy for years after having gone on basically a bad trip at a meditation retreat for years, years of therapy.
So it can happen. And I guess, like, I think, Chuck, there's a 2019 study that found like 20 to 25 percent of people who meditate reported experiencing unwanted effects, right? Like negative effects that they were not planning for.
And that's the big problem. There's no or very little warnings about this stuff.
It's all treated in a very Pollyannish, naive manner as if like, you know, America and Europe got its hands on like the cube from Hellraiser and just like, this is awesome. Let's figure out how to be more productive using this thing.
That's kind of what's going on. Yeah, and I think another thing that can happen is it can lead to a spiral of anxiety if you're not able to get to that place that you think you should be getting to by practicing it.
Yeah, yeah. So it becomes like this cycle where, you know, you're thinking like, well, I'm practicing this meditation.
It doesn't seem to be doing anything for me. Why can I not even do this right? And all of a sudden that is building upon itself and creating anxieties because you feel like you're supposed to reach this sort of moment of like floaty bliss that is, I mean, that's really hard to maintain.
Yes. Yeah.
I mean, not maintain, but like even touch. Even reach.
Sure. And it's been packaged like that.
It's been marketed as something that you will just reach some floaty bliss with. And yeah, I can totally see being stressed out because you don't reach it because it hasn't been explained to you even what you're doing.
Right. So there's a, it's a, it's a good little short read.
It's called Mindfulness, Meditation, and Trauma. Proceed with Caution.
I found it on goodtherapy.org. And it doesn't say, like, don't do this.
Even if you know you have trauma, don't meditate. Don't try to become mindful.
It says some, you know, make sure you find, like, a good coach, a good guide, a good teacher who understands how to deal with trauma and can prepare you for it and can pull you back and be like, don't forget. Life's actually good.
You're good. And now let's try a little more and just kind of little by little expose yourself to it rather than like, you know, ripping your shirt off and standing in front of like the baseball pitching machine.
There's when it comes to physical pain, that's a pretty interesting area as far as the studies have been concerned, like the idea that can it actually help reduce physical pain or at least the subjective experience of pain. And, you know, in some studies, in some cases, the people who practice meditation do report lower subjective experience of pain or what they call pain unpleasantness.
So this might be a little bit of a mind over matter, like the actual pain is still there, but I've gotten my mind to in such a place that the unpleasantness or the anticipation of that unpleasantness isn't as great as it would be if I weren't able to practice that mindfulness. Yeah, which ties very closely into a Buddhist tenet of the first arrow of suffering, which is where everyone has to experience that.
Let's say you're bitten by an ant. It's not a very pleasant sensation, and everybody's going to experience it roughly the same.
But there's also a second arrow where you can be worried about being bitten by an ant, And it makes the first arrow 10 times worse.

Not just twice as bad, but 10 times worse.

And the idea is that if you're mindful,

if you practice sati,

you won't really experience the second arrow,

just the first arrow.

And that's the best you can hope for in this life.

That's right.

Message for you, sir?

What?

That's from, I always just crack up when I, every time I think of an arrow hitting a human body I only think of Monty Python when that guy takes the arrow message for you sir there was one study though in 2019 a review of studies actually that found that MBSR can reduce severity of chronic pain or improve daily functioning and depression about like associated with that pain, which is, you know, that's, there's something to be said for that. Like, I don't think it should only be looked at as some sort of hippy dippy thing.
Like if you have real physical pain, it could possibly help. Yes.
And yeah, for sure. I mean, that's kind of like one of the outcomes of it being exposed to Westernization is that it's being studied and it's actually holding up in studies.
And boy, is it being exposed because if you work for a big corporation, if you especially work in Silicon Valley, chances are there are mindfulness retreats, maybe mindfulness rooms in the offices where they say, hey, we know we work you to death and it's not fair. Why don't we set up this little room that used to be a room for, you know, for your kids to come to work, but we don't let that happen anymore.
It used to be the nursery. But we'll put you in here and you can zen out and be cool.
And here's one of the criticisms. As long as you come back and you get all that work done, we think it's a great tool for you.
Right, exactly. And not just corporations, but the military is using mindfulness.
Schools, little kids are being taught mindfulness and to meditate prisons and there's there's an enormous amount of like out just out there in the culture it's it's gotten really popular i guess in 2012 just over four percent of americans meditated five years later it was up to 14 That's a pretty big increase in just five years.

And I would propose it's probably more than that now in 2022.

So it's everywhere.

But it's also really kind of lost its way, I guess, once it hit America.

And corporate America in particular, mindfulness kind of got perverted, I think, is a way you could put it. Yeah, I mean, that critique is really valid.
Like, it's great that a company might take mindfulness into consideration as something beneficial for their employees, but to ignore the root cause, which is you're working too many hours a week, and you're overworked, and you can't possibly get done what you should get done. And that's where this anxiety is rooted.
Here's a mindfulness room so you can help correct all that. Like it totally puts the onus on the employee to sort of self-adjust to what's probably way too much work instead of saying, hey, maybe people wouldn't be in this position to begin with if they, you know, didn't have to work 60 hours in a week.

Right. And the same thing goes for social movements as well.
Like some people say, hey, you know how like a lot of us are mentally ill these days? That's because society's screwed up. So rather than putting the onus again on the individual person, just kind of suck it up and deal with it in a mindful manner.
Why don't we focus instead on these social problems that are causing all these other social problems? So we don't have to do that. And those are really valid criticisms of westernized mindfulness in the 2020s.
And there's actually a term for it that a guy named Miles Neal coined.

And another guy named Ronald Purser

wrote a book using that name.

It's perfect.

McMindfulness.

Yeah, I love that word.

And they're basically saying like,

hey, you guys have so completely detached this

from ethics and morals and religion

and kind of co-opted something

that had its roots there that, yeah, there needs to be a term for that. You've micked it.
Yeah. You've micked screwed it up.
You've micked screwed it up. Exactly.
Wait, you miffed it. You've miffed it.
I like that. And that, you know, you can't ignore the theological roots and have it be the same thing.
And HR reps across the country say, oh, yes, we can. Yeah, exactly.
And look what happens. We're really screwing people up.
That's right. So there's a couple of quotes I found that I really feel like kind of get to the heart of what happened when mindfulness came over here and got picked up by corporate

America and the military and just other surprising groups and maybe put to not the best uses. There's a really good New York Times article from back in 2015 that was kind of a meditation on the idea of mindfulness or the word mindfulness and what it means by Virginia Heffernan.
And she says that what commercial mindfulness may have lost from the most rigorous Buddhist tenets that it replaced is the implication that suffering cannot be escaped, but must be faced. And that's that mis-packaging, that mis-marketing that we talked about, that the idea that if you meditate and you're mindful, it's going to free you from all your problems and make you less stressed and more productive and just happier.
And that's not necessarily the case because we in the West tend to really like to, like you said, avoid all of the stuff that really stinks and just get as much of the stuff that we like. And that's not what that's meant for.
Yeah, this, I think it's from the same article about mindful fracking. Could that be next? Putting a neuroscience halo around a byword for both uppers, productivity, and downers, relaxation, to ensure a more compliant workforce in a more prosperous C-suite.
Right. There it is.
And there's another one, too. The Dalai Lama apparently pointed out that even a suicide bomber would likely have to cultivate some sort of mindfulness.
It's not inherently ethical. And if it's not inherently ethical, then that means that you could conceivably use it to nefarious ends.
And the way that Buddhists for thousands of years kept it from being used to nefarist ends is by encasing it in wholesomeness, like mindfulness, specifically what's called right mindfulness by the Buddhists, is it's a wholesome approach in separating wholesome thoughts from unwholesome thoughts. And if you just take the mindfulness practice out of that context, you have a problem.
You want to read that quote from Andrew Olinsky? True mindfulness is deeply and inextricably embedded in the notion of wholesomeness, just as a tree removed from the forest is no longer a tree but a piece of lumber. So also the caring attentiveness of mindfulness extracted from its matrix of wholesome co-arising factors denigrates into mere attention.

Yeah.

It's not just attention. That's the best you can hope for is it just denigrates into mere attention and not something harmful, you know? So I think it's great.
I think it's wonderful that people want this and they're seeking it out and they're trying it. I think the people who are selling it to everybody need to just package it more transparently and explain the true purpose of it and stop using it for productivity.

Agreed.

If you want to know more about mindfulness, go research it and see if it's for you and give it a shot and go into it with right eyes, right vision. I can't remember.
And since I said I can't remember, of course, that means it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this tribute to Ziggy Bombach from his son, Michael.
We got a great email that, and I've been conversing with Michael for the past couple of weeks on this. Good dude.
And his dad was a good dude. Hey guys, long time listener.
I recently lost my father and I've been going through a great deal of grief. My dad was at high risk for catching COVID.
So I made sure it was my priority to keep him safe. And since being social wasn't an option over the past couple of years, we turned to nature during the pandemic and rekindled our love for the great outdoors, though he never had to rekindle his.

He was born in Poland and immigrated to the States in the 60s and was only ever comfortable in his gardener in the woods.

He was a simple but passionate man.

So we started driving out to western north New Jersey to Stokes Forest to get spring water and go fishing.

It's a gorgeous part of the state.

It was about 50 minutes each way. Perfect to introduce him to my favorite podcast, Stuff You Should Know.
Even though I had to describe to him what a podcast was, he was instantly enthralled, and I can still hear him quietly asking in the car if Chuck and Josh were going to be broadcasting today. It's just adorable.
Like me, he adored your ability to convey something complex and tough information in such a sweetened conversational way. He would always come home and tell my mom what he had learned with so much isolation the past two years.
It was warming to hear him happy about all these new subjects that he was learning about. You gave him that happiness and made his life that much better over the last couple of years of his life.
I can't thank you enough for everything that you continue to do. There's so much bad in this world right now, and people are hardly operating at their best, but you continue to do something worthwhile and worth making, something worth learning.
So thank you for making the life of Ziggy Bombach a little brighter towards his end. And that is from Mike.
And he sent me a picture of Ziggy, and I I read the obituary. I looked it up and Ziggy seemed like a great, great guy.
And I had to zen out to reading this so I wouldn't cry. Yeah.
I cried every time. That's a really amazing email.
Thank you so much. It's impossible to not pass judgment on that one.
I'm going to say I feel very proud, Chuck. That's right.

In this case, great judgment.

And R.I.P. Ziggy, you sound like a great guy.

Yep, R.I.P. Ziggy.

And thank you, Mike.

I'm glad we could help bring you and your dad together.

That's pretty amazing stuff.

If you want to be like Mike and get in touch with us

and write us the email of the century,

we are willing to read it.

You can send it to us at stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

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