In this episode 37 protocols
▶ 1:35 Body Scan Meditation Behaviors “Other of those practices are focused on a body scan, you know, really focusing on one area of the body and its contact with whatever surface you happen to be sitting or lying on” ▷ 1:47 Walking Meditation Behaviors “In fact, there are walking meditations done with eyes open.” ▷ 2:15 Meditation Practice Selection Based on Goal Behaviors “meditation is powerful, but you want to make sure that you pick the right meditation practice. So we will talk about picking a meditation practice that isn't just feasible because you'll do it, but is actually directed at the goals specific to you and what you need most.” ▷ 15:33 Mindful Eating Behaviors “There's also meditation practices where you're focusing on what you're eating with a lot of so-called mindfulness, being very present to whatever's happening, not letting your mind wander or think about yesterday or tomorrow, what's happening next, but really focusing on the present.” ▷ 27:12 Meditation Setup Behaviors “a meditation practice is going to involve stopping, meaning getting out of motion, sitting or lying down” ▷ 35:41 Focus on Breathing During Meditation Behaviors “or in some cases where people will focus on their breathing. So the movement of their stomach or the movement of their diaphragm or the lifting of their chest or the extension of their belly while they breathe.” ▷ 37:53 Heartbeat Counting Without Taking Pulse Behaviors “there's a pretty good measure of whether or not you have high levels of interoceptive awareness or capability, and that is your ability to count your heartbeats without placing your fingers anywhere with any pressure to take your pulse.” ▷ 38:17 Train Interoceptive Awareness Behaviors “It's an ability that can be trained up quite a bit. And in fact, meditative practices will improve your interoceptive awareness.” ▷ 40:04 Exteroceptive Meditation Behaviors “Some people may opt, in fact, I would say some people ought to opt for a meditative practice, which involves more exteroceptive awareness. Actually a meditation, like a walking meditation, or even a seated meditation, where they are bringing their focus to a place outside their body as opposed to inside their body.” ▷ 54:17 Self-Assess Interoceptive vs Exteroceptive Bias Before Meditating Behaviors “This is the sort of thing you want to do every time you decide to do a meditation practice. In fact, I would suggest that you use this to determine what meditation you do at any given moment.” ▷ 56:47 Focus on the Third Eye Center Behaviors “If you feel you can do that reasonably well to the exclusion of what's happening around you, well then, an important question arises.” ▷ 57:14 Meditate Against Your Default Bias Behaviors “my bias would be one in which you work against your default state... when you encourage, or we could even say force yourself a little bit to anchor your attention to either inside your body or outside your body... you are actively training up the neural circuits.” ▷ 58:06 Three-Minute Meditation Behaviors “there's good evidence that even three minutes of meditation can be beneficial for a variety of things, including enhanced focus and enhanced anxiety management.” ▷ 58:58 Interoceptive Meditation Behaviors “if I were to sit down and try and focus on what's going on internally and I kept getting distracted by things happening outside of me... Well, then I would actively engage a meditation practice... where I'm deliberately trying to focus my perception on events at the level of the confines of my skin and internally.” ▷ 1:03:38 Set a Timer for Meditation Behaviors “that would be setting a timer. Maybe you don't even set a timer. You just sit or lie down, close your eyes” ▷ 1:05:07 Refocusing Practice Behaviors “One of the key elements of any meditative practice... is that it's really a refocusing practice. The more number of times that you have to yank yourself back into attending or perceiving one specific thing... actually the more effective that practice is.” ▷ 1:09:25 Waking Up App Tools “I decided to use the Waking Up app. I think it's terrific... I think one of the reasons it's terrific is that Sam includes short descriptions of what meditation is doing and what a specific meditation can do for you just prior to doing that meditation.” ▷ 1:22:05 Daily Meditation Behaviors “a daily 13-minute meditation, which is of the traditional third eye, interoceptively biased, focus on breathing and focus on that location directly behind one's forehead or both, that meditation done daily for about eight weeks... greatly improved mood, improved ability to sleep, improved cognitive ability and focus, memory” ▷ 1:22:56 Meditate Consistently Behaviors “If you answer the question about consistency honestly, and you find that you can only do one meditation session per week” ▷ 1:25:31 Cyclic Hyperventilation Behaviors “deep, deliberate breathing. So big inhales, exhales, big inhales, exhales. In the laboratory, again, we call that cyclic hyperventilation.” ▷ 1:26:55 Double-Inhale Then Exhale Breathing Behaviors “or in some cases, doubling up on inhales and then exhaling. So inhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, inhale, exhale” ▷ 1:27:02 Box Breathing Behaviors “controlling the duration of inhale, breath hold, exhale, breath hold, repeat, so-called box breathing, where the inhale, the hold, the exhale, and the hold are of equivalent durations.” ▷ 1:27:14 Slow Cyclic Breathing Behaviors “Any number of different breathing patterns, slow cyclic breathing” ▷ 1:27:20 3-2-7 Breathing Cadence Behaviors “Three to six seconds in, holding for two seconds, and seven seconds out.” ▷ 1:30:17 Control Breathing During Meditation Behaviors “I do believe that based on what we know about the capacity for specific patterns of breathing to shift our brain state, that controlling one's pattern of breathing during meditation can be enormously useful.” ▷ 1:32:28 Inhale-Biased Breathing for Alertness Behaviors “if your inhales are longer and or more vigorous than your exhales, then you will tend to be more alert or you'll shift your brain and body towards a state of more alertness.” ▷ 1:33:00 Exhale-Biased Breathing for Calm Behaviors “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.” ▷ 1:34:11 Balanced Inhale-Exhale Breathing to Maintain Current State Behaviors “if you'd like to be right where you're at at the end of your meditation as where you started... well, then you would just keep your inhales and your exhales relatively balanced in terms of duration.” ▷ 1:36:54 Natural Cyclic Breathing During Exteroceptive Meditation Behaviors “well, then that meditation practice that you do really should be focused on exteroceptive bias... And I would encourage you to use a natural cyclic pattern of breathing, where inhales follow exhales, follow inhales, follow exhales.” ▷ 1:37:35 Deliberate Non-Default Breathing to Ground Into the Body Behaviors “if you are somebody who's kind of feeling pulled out of yourself a lot or in 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” ▷ 1:57:34 Avoid Traditional Meditation Too Close to Bedtime Behaviors “for a number of people that do that typical third eye meditation for 13 minutes a day, if they do that too close to sleep or when they want to go to sleep, they have a hard time falling asleep” ▷ 2:02:52 Two 20-Minute Meditation Sessions Per Day Behaviors “there are other studies... that doing two 20 minute sessions per day of meditation can reduce the need for sleep... the stress reduction... brought about by that type of meditation practice” ▷ 2:04:57 Use Meditation Regularly to Reduce Stress Behaviors “if people meditate regularly, that's reducing stress. The reduction in stress is reducing cortisol.” ▷ 2:08:32 NSDR / Yoga Nidra Behaviors “If you want to get better at falling and staying asleep or falling back asleep if you wake up in the middle of the night... an excellent behavioral practice... yoga nidra or an NSDR practice done frankly any time of day is going to be beneficial.” ▷ 2:09:38 Use Traditional Third-Eye Meditation Behaviors “a more traditional third eye center type meditation... would be beneficial.” ▷ 2:09:42 Use Traditional Exteroceptive Focused Meditation Behaviors “or a more traditional exteroceptive focused meditation would be beneficial.” ▷ 2:16:46 Space-Time Bridging Meditation Behaviors “there's a meditation practice that I call space-time bridging that incorporates everything that I've talked about today. It balances interoception and exteroception. It balances interoception and dissociation”