The INSANE BENEFITS Of Meditating Everyday For LONGEVITY (Try This Today) | Dr. Mark Hyman

what's the point of it anyway what's the point of meditation it's not to get better at meditation it's to get better at life if there was something you could do every day to boost your focus your productivity to feel energized to reduce stress to sleep better to maintain the positive outlook to support your whole body Health wouldn't you do it well it's for all those reasons

and more that I consider meditation a foundational pillar of good health I used to think I didn't have time for meditation now I know I don't have time not to do it because it's become that important in helping me manage all of my other responsibilities and passions so why is it so hard to focus pay attention well Starbucks built a 13 billion dollar business because we

need help paying attention psychiatrists often diagnose adult attention deficit disorder I think one in 10 kids is is on some type of attention medicine like Ritalin and they are now prescribing ruling for grown-ups who can't focus or pay attention I mean I'm not sure coffee or prescription speed which is essentially what Ritalin is is the answer to our modern problems and distraction we're distracted by email

by iPhones by the paying of a new text message by bad news on television by social media by the stresses of work and relationships family it's it's easy to be overwhelmed and to be stressed and to miss this Incredible Gift of being alive the problem is our bodies break down over this chronic onslaught of stress we get insomnia anxiety depression and by the way all chronic

diseases heart disease cancer dementia diabetes all obesity all are worsened by stress or maybe caused even by stress so what matters most in life is the quality of our life the quality of our experience our ability to be awake to be attend pay attention to be present to what's Real and True in our lives for both the good times and the bad times the Happy Times

the sad times to be awake too everybody we touch to our own experience to the moment we're in because that's all there is to the simple sweet and and simple gifts of just a smile or a touch or a kind beat or breeze on our skin or a firefly flickering in the early summer night all these things are the magic of being alive and we kind

of miss them when we go through life at 100 miles an hour and are constantly stressed but um doing that appreciating life being grateful which by the way is a very powerful medicine and you should try gratitude practices are very powerful there's actually a lot of science behind it uh but doing that it's kind of harder than it sounds our monkey mind gets in the way

our crazy thoughts and just distractions are always interfering with our ability to be present so in order to pay attention we need to be quiet we need to be able to practice this um we need to know the habits of our mind we need to be skilled at working with them to not be controlled or dominated by our thoughts and our mind we need to learn

the practice of witnessing our thoughts and feelings without having them overwhelm us dominate us or control our lives or being driven by them I mean think about it if you want to go and do 100 push-ups you just can't go and do 100 push-ups you got to work up to it you need to exercise the muscles that allow you to do that the same thing with

the mind you know we talk about exercise to train the body but what do we do to train the mind we don't do anything we just come with Bops around in the world and has no guidance or practices that allows you to actually do what we'll call Inner size to exercise your mind to become a master of your mind and when you master your mind you

master your life it's that simple and not be controlled or at the effect of everything that's going on all the time around you and being caught off balance so um actually how I got into this all into Medicine by the way it was maybe you may or may not know is I was at Cornell and I studied Buddhism I was my major I was very interested

in the mind the nature of our Consciousness and the ways our thoughts and perceptions control Our Lives how to work with them in a in a juicy way that brings more love and kindness and compassion and insight into every moment rather than just darkness and suffering and struggle and pain which most of us go through life with so it's a very amazing practice for understanding how

to master our minds and that is a key to good healthy life is if you are in control of your mind you're going to control your life now pain is inevitable loss is inevitable death illness War disaster always have been going on for thousands of years and they'll always be part of the human condition but within it I wondered as a young man I thought is

there a way to understand suffering in a different way in a different light to break the cycle of suffering and that's when I really gone into studying Buddhism which is basically a method it's not really a religion it's a method of practice and thinking that allows you to actually break the cycle of constant suffering and I realized back then that there was a way to be

more awake to see things as they truly are unfiltered by my conditioning my beliefs to notice it and perceiver it and to love it and to wake up with gratitude and lightness and celebration in the magic of life it's always there we just miss it we just miss it and so we don't notice it and that's why often Our Lives feel so hard um but in

order to notice that you have to be present and to be present you need to have a little bit of a quiet mind and it's not so easy to do that for most of us being awake takes a lot of practice each of us has to find our own pathic Awakening but many of these Asian Traditions provide a pathway um you don't have to believe in

a particular religion or philosophy or anything you just being present isn't you know necessarily religious practice meditation is not a religious practice we've done that throughout the Millennials human beings we've danced we've prayed we've sung we've chanted we've meditated we've done all sorts of practices to help us to focus our mind so it's a it's really important to just have a simple desire to be able

to show up and be present in your life and and uh pay attention to what's going on without any judgment without any criticism any self-hate and just to notice the ebb and flow of our breath and our thoughts that's what meditation is you're sitting there and you're laying down sitting up and you just watch your thoughts almost like you know clouds going across the sky you're

not good or bad they're not things that you can control or hold on to or like you know ripples in the ocean you just kind of let them come like a thought as a ripple and it comes then you watch it and you let it go you don't grab on to it um and that really is a powerful practice and that's like doing push-ups for your

brain right it's like how do you do bicep curls for your brain right you need to do some kind of practice and meditation is one of those powerful practices and it doesn't mean you have no thoughts it's like people say I can't meditate I I might I can't shut my brain off well you're not going to be able to I don't think even maybe an enlightened

Master maybe they can do that for a few minutes here and there but it's really tough so the key is really to sit with your mind and to not grasp on to the thoughts and not actually have them control you or guide you you know Victor Frankl who is a psychiatrist who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp wrote a book called man search for meaning about his

experience and you realize he had a choice when he was there he was in the most awful conditions a human being could ever experience he was constantly at the effect of his Nazi guards um behavior and at their Mercy they could do anything to him and they did and he had the idea the notion that um it's really up to us how we respond to our

situation people say oh I have this horrible situation I can't do this and that but he said he said between um your thought and your action there's a pause and in that pause lies a choice and that choice lies your freedom and it's a very Buddhist idea right you basically don't have to believe the thoughts you have and you also don't have to um hang on

to the beliefs that are common in your Society or that you're conditioned with as a child you can actually learn to slow down the process of some input right somebody says something somebody tries to hurt you whatever there's just by an event whatever that is and then there's your reaction to it and in there in that space there's this pause it just it's just for most

of us it's collapsed into one second or a millisecond but the key to meditation is it helps you practice the muscle of just paying attention um it's kind of hard you know it's not easy but we have to learn how to be patient with ourselves to love ourselves and just kind of not pay attention and get stuck on those thoughts that may not be so great

so um it basically helps us create calm in the chaos and Rob Knox talked about uh loving non-judgmental self-awareness most of us have no clue how to do this but it's actually really possible when I was 20 years old I I decided to do a 10-day Meditation Retreat of Silent Meditation Retreat basically we just was meditating 12 hours a day eating in silence and sleeping and

that was it and it was really wild I mean it was the most extraordinary experience to do as a young man and it took me a little bit to settle in but as I began to settle in each day I felt more and more awake More Alive happier than I'd ever been and it wasn't connected to something outside of me it was an inner happiness something

I'd really never had before it wasn't because somebody did something or I got something good in my life it was just this pure joy of being alive and be able to notice what was around me the magic of the forest and the birds and nature how sparkly and beautiful people were and everything it was just like everything was looked like I was sort of looking through

brand new glasses where I could see everything clearly and that was a profound experience for me and I've done those Retreats over the course of my life and I find they're profound a friend of mine just did what we call a dark Retreat which is going in a cave pitch black for a week which I think is a little scary but he said he found in

that week he got the most profound sense of safety and happiness and joy just being with himself and most of us don't cry down enough to actually be with ourselves or know ourselves but it's pretty important now sometimes I've gone far away from it crazy amazing kids and building a career but whenever I go back there it just feels home and there's a thousand ways to

meditate right you can do mindfulness meditation breath meditation Mantra meditation you can do dancing meditation walking meditation breathing meditation prayer yoga all these things are powerful powerful techniques that allow you to reap that state so um what's the point of it anyway what's the point of meditation it's not to get her get better at meditation it's to get better at life right so it's it's uh

inner it's just constantly yattering mattering in your head and when you're still like that your life becomes richer your actions are more clear your words are more powerful and direct your ability to see things is improve your capacity be engaged and life is enhanced it's not a retreat from life it's a way to go fully into life and to cultivate your own power and happiness so

what what are the benefits though from a medical perspective because those are all life benefits right there's a lot of scientific benefits it reduces chronic pain it lowers blood pressure uses headaches anxiety depression helps you lose weight balances your cholesterol improves your sports performance you know uh Chicago Bulls Michael Jordan and and Phil um uh listening film whatever it was Phil Jackson who was the coach

he was really he was like an old hippie from the 60s and really into meditation and he taught the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan how to meditate and that meditation wasn't key to their success um Seattle football team also uh did meditation as part of their practices to improve their Sports Performance meditation also improves your immune function it helps you sleep better it boosts serotonin the

happy mood chemical increase your creativity helps her fix your brain waves calms them down helps you learn Focus uh pay attention increase your productivity enhances your memory and so much more I actually I find it's a superpower if I'm like having a little lull or something and my brain is going to shut down I do a 20 minute meditation I feel like I had a three

hour nap uh it's super powerful so um I don't meditate for both reasons I mean it's those are nice and they're side effects um and and yoga after me I was host a yoga teacher before I was a doctor and I before practice a form of yoga that we call meditate patient in motion which was very mindful meditation based yoga using the breath and awareness to

actually guide your body through different postures but it's really the reason I do it is to be more awake alive to myself to to cultivate my own sense of peace and loving kindness and compassion for me and others um the good news is you don't need that much time you can do 10 minutes five minutes 15 minutes 20 minutes a place to sit you don't even

need something quiet I meditate on planes on trains on buses uh and you just kind of go in I go in I'm like I have my my little noise headphones I use sometimes but you really don't have to be anywhere particular I mean it's obviously better if it's super quiet and it's helpful but you don't have to be so just going through meditation what is it

how do you do it it's pretty easy you can sit in a comfortable position you could you know sit without back support or not a back support um you should relax your shoulders you should uh you know just put your neck and your head straight your chin down a little bit face relaxed and then just start breathing through your nose uh and just feeling your belly

rise and fall your ribs expand and your collarbones and shoulders move as you breathe and just notice your breath one of the forms of meditation simply noticing the breath exiting the nose and entering the nose texting your nose entering those when you lose track and you start thinking and drifting off or thinking about what you got to do tomorrow just come back to the breath it's

really simple so just watch that simple breath and that's a very powerful way also um you know when your mind kind of tears off you just keep coming back every time there's not your failure meditation uh there's no judgment here it's really just practice uh and maybe you know when you first start doing it it'll be like three seconds before your mind takes off somewhere else

like you only do one push-up but after practicing a while you'll be able to do like 10 push-ups or 100 push-ups which may be like really stay focused for a long time so uh to start with five minutes start with ten minutes uh until you can sit for 20 or 30 minutes I actually recommend a form that people are not used to it that they can

try it's called zebra meditation you've got is even meditation.com it's an online course easy to do super simple super portable I do it everywhere I go plane streams automobiles everywhere and I find it it's such a life hack I don't know how I'd live without it and now I used to think I didn't have time to meditate now I have don't have time not to meditate

um so encourage you to check it out and learn more about how to bring this into your life as a key life skill for many many aspects of your health and your life and your well-being if you love that last video You're Gonna Love the next one check it out here not good even when you're an expert in something you can't function when you're tired so

next to sort of nutrition exercise and maybe even before it's what are you sleep maybe the fundamental Foundation of health and disease prevention and even weight control