Healthy Brain, Happy Life (39 page)

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

So who wins this exercise–meditation smackdown? Based on the data in humans that we have at the moment, it’s a draw. There is evidence that both activities provide clear brain benefits. Both provide striking mood enhancement for both patient population groups and healthy control populations. Both can increase the size of various brain structures, and both have positive effects on attention.

I often ask myself what the best ways are to optimize the positive effects of exercise and meditation. Clearly, you want to be including both aerobic activity and mindful practice into your workout regime, which is exactly what I do. Maybe twice a week I’ll take a Vinyasa yoga class, and another two or three times a week I’ll go sweat it out in a spin, kickboxing, or dance class.

What does this all mean?

How many times a week should you do yoga? How many times a week should you meditate? How many times should you work out to get your heart rate up? What is the right number for optimal results? Is there a best time to practice? How long should each session last so that I can give both my body and my brain a chance to improve? These are the questions I ask myself.

We still don’t know the final answers to these questions, but the neuroscience evidence shows us that both exercise and meditation have positive effects on the brain. For me, I feel best when I sprinkle all three throughout my week. I also pay close attention to how I’m feeling. You can experiment with your own concoction of exercises to try to find the perfect recipe for you. Yes, science should be able to make this all easy for us, and we are heading in that direction. In the meantime, the good news is that whatever combination and style and frequency of exercise and meditation that makes you feel the best is the one that works for you.

CONFESSIONS OF A YO-YO MEDITATOR, ROUND TWO: MEDITATION WITH PETER

About a year after my
Ah
meditation experiment, I was ready to try again. I signed up for Deepak Chopra’s twenty-one-day meditation challenge. This is a free online program that sounded like a great way to reinvigorate my meditation practice. I jumped right in. I also told all my friends and the students in my weekly exercise class that I was doing the challenge, so they could help motivate me. Despite all this support, I floundered pretty quickly, and I basically gave up on day three. I just didn’t enjoy listening to what the leaders had to say, and there was someone new every day, so I couldn’t get used to anyone either. I had failed Chopra’s challenge.

Six or eight months later, I gave it another go. This time, I chose a different twenty-one-day meditation challenge, once again designed by Chopra, called “Manifesting Abundance.” That title really appealed to me, and I signed on. Finally, something clicked. Maybe it was because for this challenge, Chopra had done all the meditations himself, and I just loved the sound of his soothing voice. I enjoyed listening to his stories too. Each meditation also had its own mantra, a Sanskrit word used to help focus our concentration. Chopra told us the meaning of each word and had us repeat the word throughout the meditation. One of my favorite of these mantras is “
Sat chit ananda
,” which means “existence, consciousness, bliss.” Another favorite, “
Om varunam namah
” means “My life is in harmony with cosmic law.”

I think I was particularly drawn to these two mantras because of the sounds of the foreign words that I found beautiful to the ear and because of their meaning. Their sound and their meaning were both soothing and comforting, and I found myself able to focus on these mantras particularly well. It reminded me of when I discovered the intenSati class in the gym that really energized my physical workout. In the same way these particular mantras energized my meditation practice because I connected with them. So it seemed that mantras could actually work for me. I was thrilled when I completed the full twenty-one-day challenge! This was a first for me. I knew meditation had really clicked for me when I found myself going back to the beginning and starting over again. I was still a long way away from monk status, but I had definitely made a step in the right direction.

To tell the truth, the intention that I was focused on at this point was specific. I wanted to meet the man of my dreams, a partner with whom I could share my life. I had the exciting job, the great social life, and after recovering from the breakup with Michael, I was happy again. It was time to see what life would bring me next.

I knew I needed an intelligent, fit, social, energetic man who shared at least some of my love for food and travel and exploring New York. I also knew by then that I needed a man with a spiritual side, something that Michael had shown no interest in. As my meditation practice slowly grew stronger, I continued to keep that clear intention for a romantic partner in mind. And then, a curious thing happened. I met a man who liked to meditate! And he was really hot too!

One day, on a whim, I decided to try the online dating sites again for the first time since Michael. After many weeks of perusing the sites with little luck, I finally saw someone who looked really interesting. He had a charming profile; he seemed very intelligent and was clearly an athlete. And he loved to dance—double gold stars in my book because I love to dance and have never gone out with anyone who could really dance. I learned his name was Peter, and we arranged to meet for a drink at one of my favorite Italian wine bars in the city.

The first thing I noticed about him was that he looked just like his online picture: very handsome! The second thing I noticed about him was his very calming presence. I soon also learned that he had a strong meditation practice that he had developed over many years. We also discovered we had something else in common: We both spent a formative year in France, he as a high school student and me as a junior in college. We both spoke French fluently, but needed someone to speak with. By that point, my French was quite rusty, and speaking French with Peter that night forced me to dig deep to find that French vocabulary hidden somewhere in the recesses of my brain. In addition to speaking French beautifully, Peter was also musical; he liked to sing and fool around on the guitar. I think I’ve had a soft spot in my heart for musicians ever since François, so here was another thing in Peter’s favor.

But of all the interests we had in common, the one I was most excited about was his meditation practice. Maybe it was because he had such a deep and calming presence. I wanted to learn more about him and his practice and bask in the glow of that presence as much as I possibly could.

Peter and I had a whirlwind romance. After that first date at the wine bar, he invited me out to dinner and dancing with live music. It was one of the most fun dates that I’ve ever had. We followed that date with one that included a dance performance and a group of my friends, then more causal dinners and evenings playing music and singing (well, he did most of the singing while I kind of hummed along).

Peter told me that he had started his spiritual journey when he went to a yoga retreat and found a teacher who really spoke to him. The teacher described spirituality as a way of life and not a religion, and Peter really responded to that. He had been following this teacher for years by the time we met, going to retreats with him, reading his books, and using his teachings in his everyday life as much as he could.

These discussions forced me to think about and then articulate my views on my own spiritual practice—and this was new to me. I had never been religious growing up, and as an adult who happened to have a job as a neuroscientist, it felt awkward to even consider any kind of spiritual practice. Meditation as an exercise in attention was just fine, but a common opinion of many of the quantitative and empirical minds around me during my science education and career was the harsh view that religion and spirituality were for the weak and feebleminded. Eventually, however, as I got deeper and deeper into my own meditation practice, I was clearly drawn to the spiritual side. In most organized meditation sessions, tapes, or other presentations, including yoga classes, references to the spirit or the universe or simply energy were always present. Consistent with this idea, I found there was a power in the act of meditation. For me, that power came from going within and the feeling that I was tapping into a kind of universal energy that linked me to all others. For me, this experience felt spiritual in nature. I would say that at this point, my spiritual practice is still in its early stages. I’m still learning and exploring. Because of these conversations with Peter, however, I had started to think more about how my spiritual practice relates to my life as a neuroscientist. No, I didn’t have empirical evidence that there was a spirit or any special energy source linking us in the universe. I’m not sure if we actually have the ability to even do the kind of experiment to prove or disprove this idea. But what I did know was that I was committed to continue exploring the spirituality through meditation and see where it took me.

The Dalai Lama said that Buddhism shared with science the goal of exploring nature. I feel that my meditation practice is an exploration of both spirituality and my own true nature. I may not be able to prove the existence or inner workings of a larger universal energy, but I’m still interested in exploring how it works in my life. In a way, this is exactly how I approach the science questions that I’m tackling. I don’t know exactly how exercise is affecting brain function, but I can develop my own hypotheses and take steps to test these hypotheses or ideas systematically. Similarly, I am developing my own hypotheses about how spirituality works in my own life, and while I’m not doing large-scale experiments to test these ideas in a randomized controlled fashion, I can and do test them in my own personal spiritual practice. At their heart, my pursuit of the understanding of how exercise affects the brain and my pursuit of an understanding of meditation and spirituality in my life share my own curiosity about the nature of life and experience.

After all this talk of meditation, Peter and I eventually started meditating together. While I enjoyed my solitary morning meditation practice, I also loved meditation in a big group too, like what happens at the end of a yoga class or at a meditation retreat. When I meditated with Peter, it didn’t feel exactly as if I was in a whole roomful of meditators, but it was very different from meditating alone; he made the meditation somehow feel deeper just because he was there. It was also clear that nothing was going to interrupt his practice when he started meditating, and that focus transferred to me.

A couple of weeks after we started dating, Peter and I decided to play hooky, just because we could. We went skiing in Colorado. He was a beautiful skier, and despite a bout with severe altitude sickness that hit me in the middle of the first day, I bounced back and had more fun skiing with him than I had had in many years.

Our relationship was going so well. He was handsome, athletic, intelligent, spiritual, and a great dancer. What more could I ask for? We just got along in so many ways.

But there were ways that we didn’t get along. His monklike demeanor was fantastic for a good meditation, but he could be very independent, maybe even verging on distant. Sometimes, we would have fantastic and fascinating conversations and other times it felt hard to find things to talk about at all. Not because he was not interesting but because he didn’t always want to interact at the same level that I did. These instances left me feeling lonely and wanting more.

But more important, I realized quite quickly (after only a couple of months) that while we shared many interests and I appreciated many of his qualities, I didn’t love Peter. I just really liked him. I asked myself what it meant to be wishing that a guy were different this early in the relationship. If I didn’t really love him, and I wanted him to be different, I decided it might be time to move on.

So I told Peter exactly what I was feeling. He was very gracious. He said he was grateful for my honesty and my self-awareness.

I’m sure this was the right decision because Peter and I are still good friends today. In fact, I must admit that my breakup with Peter was the most adult breakup (yes, there is such a thing) that I have ever experienced in my life. And there is a reason for that. My meditation practice was starting to pay off. I found that meditation was beginning to shift the way I responded to the world in three very positive ways. The first was that I was becoming more self-aware and grounded. I was becoming clear on what I really valued and what I wanted out of life; to be fair, this realization was likely a combination of meditation and exercise plus life experience. But the quiet internal contemplation of meditation helped me develop this improved awareness. With this improved awareness came appreciation—appreciation of my life at all levels from awards or recognition to wonderful friends to all the things that bring me pleasure during the day, such as meditation, tea, a great workout, a walk through the city, or (one of my favorites) finding a new restaurant to try.

I had spent so much of my life using maximal effort and willpower to reach my goals. Initially it was my goal of building a great research lab and getting tenure, and then it was my goal to rebalance my life, starting with exercise. Meditation not only allowed me to finally appreciate all the benefits that all that rebalancing brought to my life but also allowed me to realize that maybe I didn’t need to use so much effort to bring these changes about. This lesson took me quite a while to learn. It went against everything I had ever learned about how the world works. My old view: Work hard and at 100 percent for what you want because no one is going to help you. My new view: Enjoy what you have, and look for the signs telling you which direction to go next. And you will have help along the way.

The second way that meditation has shifted my worldview is that it has helped me live more in the present. As I described in Chapter 7, exercise first got me to appreciate focusing on the present moment, but it was only with more regular meditation that I really started to develop this skill. I had been living so much of my life focused on a future goal and doing everything I could to get that goal that I never gave myself time to live and appreciate the present moment. I now notice when people are really in the present moment. There is a presence to them that contrasts so strongly with the distracted, smartphone-checking interactions we have with so many people. The people living in the present moment are there, they are focused, and they are taking it all in. This is part of the reason there is something so striking about the Dalai Lama. He is hyperpresent in the moment, and we are just not used to seeing, feeling, or experiencing that. I’m certainly not present all the time, but I am much more sensitive to when I am and am not, and I am on my way to increasing the amount of time that I am living in the present moment.