Train Your Brain: Mindfulness Meditation for Anxiety, Depression, ADD and PTSD | Daniel Goleman
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Published 2017-09-06
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By now, everyone knows that mindfulness meditation is good for you—but what's still surprising scientists is just how quickly it works. Ten minutes of meditation won't make you a better mutlitasker—there's no such thing, as psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman explains—but it will make you more adept at switching tasks and returning to a deep level of concentration more quickly after a distraction. Every time you practice meditation, you’re strengthening the neural circuitry for focus and training your brain away from mind-wandering. Beyond the need to concentrate for work, pleasure, or to overcome negative emotion, mindfulness meditation can also help to manage disorders like PTSD, anxiety, and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This last one particularly has shown incredible results, and Goleman cites one exercise a teacher in a rough neighborhood of New York City practices routinely with their class of seven-year-old kids, over half of which have special needs like ADD and autism. That daily ritual keeps the class environment calm and constructive, and is empowering the children with self-control strategies early on. The scientific research evidence on the benefits of meditation is already compelling, and there are major studies underway, which Goleman expects will reveal many more insights that can be used to instruct creative, educational, and mental health practices. Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson are the authors of Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body.
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DANIEL GOLEMAN
Daniel Goleman is a psychologist, lecturer, and science journalist who has reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year and a half.
Goleman is also the author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. The book argues that new information technologies will create “radical transparency,” allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made – changing every thing for the better.
His latest book is Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, which he has co-authored with Richard Davidson reveals the science of what meditation can really do for us, as well as exactly how to get the most out of it.
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Transcript
Daniel Goleman: What’s surprising, at least to scientists, is that the benefits from meditation show up right from the beginning. You can do, for example, mindfulness—that’s a very popular meditation—if you do mindfulness practice ten minutes a day or ten minutes three times over the course of a day something remarkable happens to your attention, and it has to do with the fact that we’re all multitasking these days. People on average look at their email about 50 times a day, they look at their Facebook 20-something times a day and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's Instagram, there's your phone calls, there’s whatever it is you have to do. And what this means for attention is that we’re challenged. Focused attention is an endangered species, however, we need that focus to get work done well. So it’s a real problem and meditation, it turns out, even at the beginning, has some of the answers.
It goes like this: when you’re really intensely focused on that one thing you have to do or you want to do—the paper you’re writing or the project you’re working on—then you think, 'Oh, I better check my email,' and then that leads to your Facebook and that leads to the phone call, it leads to—we call this multitasking. The brain actually does not do multitasking, it doesn’t do several things at once in parallel, rather it works in serial and it switches very rapidly from one thing to the next.
Read the full transcript on bigthink.com/videos/daniel-goleman-how-10-minutes-…
All Comments (21)
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A moment of silence for those of us who are reading the comments while listening to the video.
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He’s right. Most of us can’t even listen to this video without reading the comments. Our brains have learned to constantly be going going going. Some of y’all will stop reading this by now after seeing how long it is, and that’s an issue with your attention and concentration and is further proving my point. We have to be stimulated at all times. And then you add caffeine and things on top of it and our brains actually probably hate us. Technology is probably most responsible for the increase in mental disorders like depression and anxiety. Just remember, it’s okay to be slow. It’s okay to take it slow. I know your work day probably has to be fast paced and stressful and that’s okay too. Just take the time to breathe for 5 minutes if that’s all the free time you get in a day. For me, meditation is almost something I HAVE to do everyday. It’s not really an option for me. Almost everything we take in on a daily basis is bad for our mental health, remember that. News is bad for us. Work can be bad for us. Rarely do we take in positive information. Good Sleep, meditation , exercise and a good diet are the only sure ways to make sure you bring in good energy. Think about it, If your sleep is whack, your diet is whack, you don’t meditate and you don’t exercise.... you have no room to complain about being in a bad mood, Because you have the answer right there. Life is hard but it doesn’t have to be harder when free tools are at your disposal at every waking second. Good luck y’all. Off to meditate I go.
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I have been diagnosed with Dysthymia and ADHD and Social Anxietv. I get mad all he time for no reason and I lack social skills because of the anxiety and I'm actually switching schools because there is a school (I recommend you check it out) it's called PACE and it's an all girls school for people who have mental health issues which cause them to make bad decisions or get bad grades or even if you just need counseling along with school. Every student at PACE has their own counselor to make sure you follow your goals.
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Around 2 weeks in on meditation, my anxiety has reduced alot
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Brilliant. Daniel's voice is so relaxing as well, like a guided meditation itself :)
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I've struggled with social anxiety for the majority of my life. After practicing attention training using CBT techniques I have seen amazing results, this video resonates perfectly with my experiences. Great video.
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To the person reading this: I don’t know you but I wish you the best of what life has to offer to you 💕💜💖
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I took a massage and relaxation class in college before my harder classes, and we would take the hour to meditate, mind you i never did it before. And it was one of the things that made me focus more clearly on subjects I didn't understand. And I passed that math class.
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surfs web while listening to this video in the background ... oh the irony.
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Thank you Dr. Goleman.
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Needed a reminder for why I meditate everyday. Thanks
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Islam has something called Salah(prayer) it's a combination of yoga exercises and meditation exercises. As it encourages all these qualities. This is might not have been intentional in its making but it's remarkable how it works.
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I was watching the video while trying to catch up on my social media then stopped… put my phone down, watched the video and was mind blown 🤯 this is all too true!! I notice the difference of not even a year of meditation has done for my ADD and this explains it!!!
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I was watching this and opened Facebook, chatted a bit and finally came back. What a wonderful message, totally agree.
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This spoke right to my soul and made so much sense. I’ve been trying to clean my house, for years. But I can’t and I don’t because of a stupid cell phone addiction. Meditation has been proven to literally increase the size of the gray matter in your brain.
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Absolutely correct, Daniel
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A brilliant author (Emotional Intelligence and many more), a brilliant researcher, a brilliant practitioner, and a thoroughly brilliant human being!!! Daniel Goleman!!
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Amazing. As a person struggling with ADHD, this video was inspiring!
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Un video cortito y muy bien explicado. Muy práctico para compartir y crear interes en el tema de mindfulness
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Daniel Goleman! I love this guy's writing! Thanks Big Think, this is sick!
