In today’s video, we sit down with Ariel Garten, the Co-Founder, and CEO of Muse, a leading consumer neurotechnology and meditation company. With a background in neuroscience, psychotherapy, and art, Ariel is dedicated to bringing easy-to-use and accessible tools for well-being to the masses. Ariel’s unique background has taken her from working in neuroscience research labs to owning a fashion design label, to being the female founder and CEO of a Silicon Valley-backed brain-computer interface tech start-up, InteraXon, the technology that sparked the creation of Muse. Muse, the brain-sensing headband is an award-winning wearable technology that assists and trains meditation. It’s used by hundreds of thousands of people, including the Mayo Clinic and NASA, to track the brain and teach meditation. Ariel is consistently invited to share her unique insights in keynotes around the world speaking about happiness, meditation, how the brain works, empowering women in business, and so forth. Additionally, she is a host of the Untangle podcast, where she guides audiences on how an understanding of your brain and how it works can help improve your life. Of note, Ariel and Muse have had over 1000 media appearances on sites like CNN, Wall Street Journal, and Forbes.
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Audio Transcript
(Note: This script has been auto-generated so there may be some errors)
00:00:38:22 – 00:00:42:24
Nathan Crane
Ariel, thank you for joining me here. Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:43:21 – 00:00:46:14
Ariel Garten
Anything. It is my joy and pleasure to be here today.
00:00:47:09 – 00:00:52:16
Nathan Crane
So what got you into neuroscience?
00:00:54:05 – 00:01:28:11
Ariel Garten
That’s a great question. So I laughed because I couldn’t think of anything more fascinating to understand than the brain. You know, the brain is the organ that really determines our entire experience of life. What we see, hear, think, feel, experience, all of this, to some level or others, starts or ends in the brain. And so for me, I really wanted to understand how it is that we can enhance our experience of life, how we can understand our experience of life through the organ that really creates our experience.
00:01:28:11 – 00:01:30:18
Ariel Garten
The brain.
00:01:30:23 – 00:02:10:23
Nathan Crane
So I’m sure you’re familiar with the stomach, as is the concept of the stomach as a second brain, and even the concept of the heart as a third brain, or even some would argue the first brain. What are your thoughts on that? And how do all these actual organs tie together? And then we’ll get into I want to know more about your background and your fascination on the brain as well as some of the research you’ve done around neuroscience, because I think that’s really interesting and how that relates to health and well-being and longevity and disease prevention, helping the body to fight disease.
00:02:10:23 – 00:02:15:14
Nathan Crane
Naturally, all of this ties together and I’m excited to get into that with you.
00:02:15:14 – 00:02:19:05
Ariel Garten
But let’s start with the gut and the heart.
00:02:19:05 – 00:02:20:04
Nathan Crane
Yeah, let’s start there.
00:02:21:06 – 00:02:50:04
Ariel Garten
So our body is obviously connected, and as much as the brain can determine what might happen in the heart, the heart also speaks to the brain. So there are just as many, if not more, innovations from the brain to the heart as there are from the heart to the brain. When we talk about a brain, what we’re typically referring to is a collection of neurons, and a ganglion is a collection of stuff that can then control another part of the body or speak to another part of the body.
00:02:50:19 – 00:03:15:12
Ariel Garten
So when in the case of the heart, the brain can help to determine and the muscular movements of the heart, the opening and closing of the aorta. But that is also determined by other information in the body, like how much oxygen you might have the activity of your vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve is actually one of the things that helps tie the brain to the heart, to the gut.
00:03:15:18 – 00:03:35:22
Ariel Garten
It is the largest nerve in your body, and it’s responsible for a lot of what we’re going to talk about in meditation and how the body relaxes. So the brain is the system in the body that actually has the most terminal end points for all of the other systems in our body. Your sight, your smell, your hearing, your thinking.
00:03:36:08 – 00:04:11:07
Ariel Garten
And as we put together the totality of those experiences, there is a consciousness or an awareness that arrives in the brain, in the mind. The heart is a pretty good localization center in that we can feel things in our heart. We have emotional experiences that definitely involve the systems of the heart and how fast our blood is pumping. Do you know how how much we feel the tightening of our chest and the stomach is another phenomenal system that has a ton of innovation through the vagus nerve from the brain and the rest of the body?
00:04:11:19 – 00:04:44:10
Ariel Garten
And we also feel sensations in our gut, what we eat and the microbiota affects our entire body. So these systems certainly work very symbiotically together, but I tend to, as many scientists do. But the locus of our experience into the brain, because it has most of the juice that goes there, if you want to talk from a spiritual level or an additional level, you may be able to think about different energy centers in the body and how those may tie together or relate to the body systems.
00:04:44:10 – 00:05:00:17
Ariel Garten
You know, there are many other different systems of understanding how the body may work together to create an experience of life or soul or consciousness. But when we kind of dive right down to the scientific one, we’re talking about all the bits and pieces that speak together in the organ in our head.
00:05:01:20 – 00:05:06:03
Nathan Crane
So as a scientist, how do you personally look at spirituality?
00:05:06:18 – 00:05:39:23
Ariel Garten
Oh, I love that question. So I look at it openly and lovingly as well as skeptically. So I, you know, embrace the idea that there is far more beyond what we can know. What we currently know is incredibly limited, particularly when you talk about organs as complex as the brain and, you know, phenomena as complex as humans. We go well beyond what we can possibly grok with our current tools and techniques and understanding What we know is a tip of the iceberg.
00:05:40:14 – 00:06:12:23
Ariel Garten
And I certainly myself have experienced energetic phenomena and energetic healing. And one of my good friends, Dr. Simone Jain, has a whole really school of research on bio energetics and how that may actually affect our health and our well-being. So I’m very, very open to all of the ways that we as humans may connect within ourselves, connect to one another, connect to something greater, whether it’s energetic, physical, or metaphysical.
00:06:13:19 – 00:06:30:03
Ariel Garten
We just haven’t quite from a Western scientific perspective, understood what those ways may be. Although other cultural lenses have helped us touch it, understand it, feel it, know it from different methodologies and vantage points for years.
00:06:30:22 – 00:06:58:05
Nathan Crane
Yeah, I’m reminded of something I remember hearing when Dyer, Dr. Wayne Dyer, speak about years ago, which was he was talking about, you know, this idea that a human being, you know, all of this that we experience is kind of by accident. You know, it’s just this all-accidental kind of evolutionary process with no outside intelligence that helped to determine the formation of what we experience today.
00:06:58:05 – 00:07:14:08
Nathan Crane
And he said the odds of that happening. Right. I mean, think about the intricacies of the human body, the brain, the heart, the digestive system, you know, the trillion, the 50 trillion cells that are in the body that are, you know, replicating and dying off and cancer cells are being formed in our lymphatic system and our immune system.
00:07:14:08 – 00:07:48:24
Nathan Crane
They’re killing these cells, removing them all the, you know, thousands actually millions and billions of processes that are happening in the body every single day in harmony with nature, with plants and animals in the water, the soil, everything, all just working synergistically and symbiotically together. It’s like the odds of that happening accidentally are like if a tornado went through a junkyard and took all of the junk that’s there, the cars, the engines, the tires, everything, throw it all up in the tornado.
00:07:48:24 – 00:08:29:05
Nathan Crane
And when it left and it finished in its path, what it left was a perfect Boeing 747 airplane. Like, that’s literally the odds that all of this is an accident. If you look at the odds of one in 100 billion, trillion, gazillion, whatever the number would be, and I like that because that analogy is something that you can kind of grasp on to relate to, to recognize that, hey, there is some higher intelligence or whatever we want to call it, God, spirit, source, creator, universe, whatever we want to call it, but some higher intelligence that is animating and breathing through our experience.
00:08:29:05 – 00:08:45:05
Nathan Crane
And I think most of us have felt that, especially if you meditate. Right? And so you have a strong background in meditation. And how did neuroscience lead you to meditation, to meditation lead you in neuroscience? Where did that connection come from?
00:08:45:22 – 00:09:08:22
Ariel Garten
Meditation even came out of neuroscience for me. I was training as a neuroscientist and I was practicing as a psychotherapist and as a psychotherapist. One of the things that you learn as a front-line intervention for things like anxiety and depression is meditation. And so I would be teaching my patients to meditate and doing a terrible job because I was a terrible meditator.
00:09:09:06 – 00:09:33:00
Ariel Garten
And as a neuroscientist, I would be reading all the papers at that time. You know, it was in the order of hundreds or maybe just less than a thousand papers talking about the value of meditation for the brain in a range of ways. Now it’s on the order of 10,000 plus papers talking about the value of meditation. And so would reading these papers, I’d be knowing that it was great for your mind and body, both spiritually and physically.
00:09:33:10 – 00:09:53:00
Ariel Garten
And I looked at meditation and so it was really through the process of trying to teach my patients who would go home. And it was like, Did you meditate? I think so. And then trying to figure it out myself that I ended up building news of my team. And it was in the course of building news that I actually figured out how to meditate.
00:09:53:10 – 00:10:14:23
Ariel Garten
And from there it was like, Oh my God, you know, the 2000 years of history that I’d be reading because I was reading all these books and, you know, waiting for this wisdom to hit me in the teeth and, you know, intellectually knowing all these things. But it wasn’t until I actually engaged my meditation practice and figured out what I should be doing, and I sort of like felt it.
00:10:14:23 – 00:10:31:12
Ariel Garten
And that was the moment that opened up the 2000 years of history. It’s kind of like your first kiss. For me, it was totally like my first kiss. I remember being a little kid and listening to the radio and they were always singing about love. And I was like, Why are there so many songs about love?
00:10:31:12 – 00:10:47:07
Ariel Garten
Like, you know, why is this the thing that everybody sings about? And I was like 14 and I hadn’t been in love. And then I was 16 and I had been in love and I had my first kiss and I couldn’t stop thinking about, you know, the guy in the thing and all the things. It was like, so overwhelming.
00:10:47:07 – 00:11:22:05
Ariel Garten
And I listen to a song on the radio and they’re talking about like love in this thing. And I was like, finally get mean something. Yeah. Now I know why everybody talks about love. And so my meditation experience, when I finally got it, it was like that that was my first kiss. That was like, Oh, now I understand when, you know, they talk about being in a place of equanimity, what that can feel like, you know, when they talk about being able to be in oneness or have a sense of awareness or have awareness beyond awareness, that’s what they’re starting to talk about it.
00:11:22:05 – 00:11:23:10
Ariel Garten
It finally made sense.
00:11:24:06 – 00:11:55:12
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s what a great experience, too, to relate it to. You know, I can kind of relate as well, where early on meditation was kind of this sporadic, ethereal, kind of, you know, intangible thing that I was trying to grasp until I started to understand it more. And I think that’s for me, that’s what was really helpful, was understanding, you know, what is meditation actually in and what are the different types of meditations and what kinds of meditations can you do?
00:11:55:12 – 00:12:13:07
Nathan Crane
And it’s not just one thing, it’s not just what I thought. And I think a lot of people think when they first hear meditations, Oh, you just have to shut all your thoughts off, right? Which is impossible, really. I mean, it’s impossible. And that’s not really what meditation is. But somehow that in the Western world, like that’s what most people think of as meditation.
00:12:13:07 – 00:12:44:20
Nathan Crane
For whatever reason, you have to just, you know, shut up all you’re thinking. And there’s so it’s it couldn’t be further from the truth, right? And there are so many different ways of meditation, but the benefits are are clear, as you said. Now, there are literally thousands, if not tens of thousands of papers on meditation. You know, all of the cancer patients that we work with and patients that are dealing with chronic diseases, even heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, we highly, highly recommend everybody start a daily meditation practice and there are a million ways to do it.
00:12:44:20 – 00:13:10:05
Nathan Crane
And I encourage people to try different forms of meditation because for me it was experimenting with it. I started meditating back in around 25, 26, I think was when I formally sat down cross-legged on my bed for the first time, was like, I’m going to meditate, you know, like, I just had that. And I was, I think 19, 18, 19 at the time.
00:13:10:14 – 00:13:35:09
Nathan Crane
And I just knew that’s what I needed to do. And so I just started sitting quietly and didn’t know what I was doing, but I stuck with it and I kept learning and I started listening to guided meditations and then affirmations and then, you know, all different kinds chanting with heart Krishna’s and sitting and meditating for hours on the beach and sitting at the feet of master Buddhist monks and sitting and meditating with Zen masters.
00:13:35:09 – 00:14:06:06
Nathan Crane
And, you know, there’s so many ways to meditate. Some of my best meditations, I think, have actually just been out in nature, just sitting quietly, observing the ocean or sitting by a fire. Right. Or sitting I mean, like a fire to me is one of the most powerful forms of meditation. It’s like it’s like hypnosis. If you just sit and observe a fire, your thoughts kind of start to quiet themselves and you can like really get into the flame and all of a sudden you get into an almost transcendental state.
00:14:06:06 – 00:14:26:10
Nathan Crane
And so, you know, people have probably heard of transcendental meditation people, you know, there’s so many forms. But what were what are some of the meditation forms or practices that you discovered that you think have been instrumental in, in your own, in your own life and in the work you do share?
00:14:27:03 – 00:15:00:21
Ariel Garten
Oh, I’m taking myself out of a little trance here as you were describing the fire, like I could see it. And I found myself, you know, imagining the fire and feeling the fire and the warmth of it in the stillness. And what you’re really describing there is the experience of mindfulness being singularly engaged in a thing that’s in front of you and feeling it and seeing it and being so absorbed in it that you, in a sense lose yourself, that your own thoughts quiet down and settle because you are just in the present moment with the thing in front of you.
00:15:01:14 – 00:15:22:17
Ariel Garten
So a lot of people have heard this term mindfulness, but it’s not really obvious what it means and what its differentiation for meditation is. So meditation is the practice that you do the thing that you do, and I’ll describe some different forms of meditation. And then mindfulness is the skill that is built from it that you take throughout the world with you.
00:15:23:01 – 00:15:55:14
Ariel Garten
So you can be mindful of your thoughts, feelings, sensations, environment and the world around you. And so for me as a practice, my meditation, which started really with focused attention, meditation allowed me to build my mindfulness in the world. And I think it’s really worth delving into focused attention at meditation, because that’s typically the first form of meditation that people learn, and it’s the easiest one to understand and understand how this whole notion of quieting your thoughts is actually not really the goal or the point.
00:15:56:20 – 00:16:18:00
Ariel Garten
So in a focused attention meditation, what you do is you focus your attention on a single object. It can be something visual like a candle or a fire. Often it’s the breath because it’s there. So you focus your attention on your breath. Just on this one thing that’s in the here, in the now and eventually your mind will wander away from your breath and on to a thought.
00:16:18:15 – 00:16:45:24
Ariel Garten
And once you realize you have a thought, it’s your job to instead of following that thought, like we all do, just let go of the thought, let it pass, and just bring your attention back to your breath. So meditation is not about having no thoughts. And frankly, I laughed when you talked about having no thoughts because I think levitating is probably almost as unlikely as having absolutely no thoughts for a beginner meditator.
00:16:46:20 – 00:17:08:07
Ariel Garten
So, you know, it’s not the goal. It is the process of learning to observe your thinking that is mindfulness. The observation of your thoughts, feelings, environments, observe your thinking, and rather than getting caught up in those thoughts and following them about, you know, the anxious thing or the traffic or the thing that you forgot, or the person who might not like you or whatever it is.
00:17:08:19 – 00:17:38:21
Ariel Garten
You instead allow yourself to move your attention elsewhere back to your breath and when you’ve done that, you have successfully, quote-unquote, engaged a focused attention meditation. And as you do that over time, and as I did that over time, it allowed me to become far more aware of my thinking. And instead of going through the world on autopilot with a whole bunch of thoughts in my head, that I’m just thinking because they’re there, I began to realize, Oh, I’m having that thought.
00:17:39:06 – 00:17:59:16
Ariel Garten
Is that serving me right now. Is it useful? Is it even true? And once you’re able to have that separation or that metacognition, the ability to see and think about your thinking analyzer and thinking, you can then say, hey, that thought has rolled around in my head four times now. It’s not actually helpful at that moment.
00:18:00:00 – 00:18:20:10
Ariel Garten
I don’t need to be thinking it. I can shift my attention elsewhere. And when you do that, all of a sudden in that moment, I changed my relationship to my thinking. It was no longer something that just happened, but something that I could then have a choice about. And, you know, it was like I could tend to the garden of my mind in a different way.
00:18:20:18 – 00:18:42:12
Ariel Garten
It wasn’t just like a downpour all the time. I could choose the weather. I could choose what was going on in there. And from there it allows you to let go of those negative, anxious thoughts. It allows you to unhook from those stories that you tell yourself all the time. It allows you to, you know, every time that inner critic goes off for me, I would allow myself to go like, Oh, my inner critic just said something.
00:18:42:12 – 00:19:01:17
Ariel Garten
I don’t need to believe that that doesn’t have to be true. You know, it might have told me that my hair looks stupid or, you know, that I screwed up this thing and I you know, I’m bad because of it. But actually, I. I don’t need to listen to that story again. I can change that. And that was the beginning of a massive shift in my own life.
00:19:01:17 – 00:19:30:09
Nathan Crane
Yeah. That’s so powerful that you’ve done that in your own life and you just reminded me of because I was thinking, you know, when did I have that first major shift? Because, you know, you practice this for so long, it becomes automatic, right? And it’s like you just get so used to being primarily in control of your thinking after years of practice of it that it’s like that.
00:19:30:15 – 00:20:04:05
Nathan Crane
What you’re describing before. I’m like, Oh yeah, what was that like? What was that like to have all of these incessant negative thoughts, you know, spinning around all the time that I really didn’t have a lot of control over. And I remember the first one of the really first like kind of awakenings to that, and I was probably 28, maybe 27, and I was going through a rough patch and I was sleeping on a mattress in the living room of my ex-girlfriend’s apartment in Oceanside, California, had no money, had no job, had like no gasoline to put my car.
00:20:04:05 – 00:20:21:18
Nathan Crane
It was a pretty rough time. And the cat didn’t you know it was a male cat and didn’t like another male in the house. The two ladies. So would come over and pee all over my bed. And it wasn’t a very pleasant experience that I, you know, the only job I got at the time was like selling t shirts down all the way.
00:20:21:18 – 00:20:39:04
Nathan Crane
I had to go all the way down the Embarcadero, San Diego from north to south, kind of take the train. And basically I would make enough money to like, just pay for my train ticket to go back and forth. So it was like pretty pointless. And I remember I was doing a lot of meditating and a lot of deep thinking at the time.
00:20:39:04 – 00:21:01:23
Nathan Crane
And I started reading the and I started chanting with Hari Krishna. And I just I’ve always had this kind of openness to all kinds of spiritual traditions. And so I started reading the Bhagavad Gita, and I remember one time I was reading it before bed and meditating, and then I woke up the next morning and I woke up and saw my thoughts upon waking for like the first time, I think probably ever in my life.
00:21:02:03 – 00:21:24:15
Nathan Crane
And they were very negative. You know, they were very complaining. They were complaining about, Oh, I’m laying on this bed. It smells like piss cats peeing all over me and I have no money and and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. All the poor me, poor me, poor me, which is understandable. It was a pretty rough situation, but I woke up with just these automatic negative thoughts focusing on all the negative things in my life at the time.
00:21:24:22 – 00:21:50:16
Nathan Crane
And I immediately caught it in that moment. I caught it and then decided, No, I don’t want to have those thoughts. I don’t want to wake up and have thoughts of negativity. It’s that first awareness of it and catching it and stopping it, right? That starts to give you back control. And then from there it’s practice, practice, the practice of, okay, now what do I want to focus on?
00:21:50:16 – 00:22:09:14
Nathan Crane
Let me focus on the things I’m grateful for. Let me focus on Look, I’m I’m alive, I’m healthy. You know, I have the opportunity in front of me. You know, I’ve got I don’t know where my next meal is going to come from, but I know it’s going to come like just the small things I go outside and breathe fresh air and so start focusing on gratitude.
00:22:09:14 – 00:22:29:05
Nathan Crane
And it wasn’t too long after that that opportunities did come and I did pull myself out of that. And I did start, you know, down a continue forward into a good path. But, you know, taking in at the same time, it was like doing the dishes and catch the thinking, Oh, I hate doing dishes. This is terrible. I don’t want to wash dishes and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:22:29:05 – 00:22:46:20
Nathan Crane
And they said, Oh, no, I can I can stop that and just be like, I don’t have to enjoy washing dishes, but I can wash dishes and at least be at peace, right? I’m doing something productive. I don’t have to be upset about it. And it’s those little things you catch yourself. Would you agree with that, that it’s like one?
00:22:46:20 – 00:23:12:07
Ariel Garten
Hundred percent you can’t see, you know, you’re listening. You can’t see. I’ve been nodding and smiling the whole way along because that is so fundamental to this practice of meditation. It’s the ability to understand that, oh, I don’t need to create the suffering in my own mind that I am creating. Like dishes is one that’s actually near to my heart because I hated doing dishes like vitriolic.
00:23:12:07 – 00:23:32:16
Ariel Garten
I hated them. And so there was the point in time when I realized, Hey, I’m going to have to wash these dishes. I can just think about this differently. And, you know, you can be mindful about it and, you know, classic mindful dishwashing. You’re feeling the sensation of the soap in your hand against the dish and you’re like, Oh, this feels so good and becomes almost sensual.
00:23:32:24 – 00:23:48:03
Ariel Garten
You’re like, you know, in the water. And maybe you’re feeling all the different textures of the things in there rather than the food being super gross and grossing you out, which it used to do, like the floating bits, you’d be like, Oh, that’s just a sensorial experience. I’m not eating it. You know, There’s no reason it has to make me feel sick.
00:23:48:03 – 00:24:22:08
Ariel Garten
It just it’s what’s there. This food nourished me. It’s still sitting there and being nourishing like I entirely flipped the script on the experience and it changed my experience of this basic thing, at which point you realize you can change your experience of almost anything. And yes, as your story suggests, we can be in some pretty unfortunate scenarios in our life with chronic illness, you know, in the hospital, with people who are sick around us with, you know, very difficult scenarios.
00:24:22:08 – 00:24:58:20
Ariel Garten
And you can make the choice in those scenarios to allow this shadiness of the situation to overwhelm you or and it takes a lot of strength and a lot of, you know, perception to do it. Or you can begin to shift that narrative and accept what is that you can’t change at that moment and start to be grateful and aware of that which you can shift, which is the way that you see the world around you and this has an extraordinary physiological benefit at times when you do it right.
00:24:59:05 – 00:25:26:05
Ariel Garten
So there’s amazing research out of Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn’s lab. She is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, and she and Alyssa unfolded some of the first real research on the cellular impact of meditation. And they took a cohort of mothers who were caring for chronically ill children. So these are moms who are super stressed, caring for their kids, really worried about them, worried about their futures.
00:25:26:19 – 00:25:50:17
Ariel Garten
And they taught half of them a meditation practice. And the other half where the controls. And then they measured their cellular markers, particularly their telomeres, which is the length of your DNA. And some of you may have heard about this in relation to meditation because it became a very groundbreaking insight that meditation can actually change the length of your telomeres.
00:25:50:17 – 00:26:11:15
Ariel Garten
So for those women that they had taught the meditation practice, you know, they asked them their perceived stress scales, you know, their level of anxiety in their life, etc. and the women were significantly less stressed. They felt more in control of their own lives, even though nothing had changed in their kids care. But they felt a greater measure of control.
00:26:12:11 – 00:26:42:05
Ariel Garten
And when they looked at their cellular markers like their telomere length, they actually saw an improvement in cellular aging, like an improvement in the cellular milieu. That’s how Dr. Blackburn describes it of those women. And the conclusion was that simply our thoughts, whether they be positive or negative, can actually have an impact on the cellular makeup inside of your body and the health and well-being of those cells.
00:26:42:18 – 00:26:47:19
Ariel Garten
So you’re thinking really can affect your body and your physiology and your health.
00:26:48:07 – 00:27:18:01
Nathan Crane
Hey, I just want to take a quick second and thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you’re enjoying it so far as a special thank you for tuning into this episode. I want to give you my number one Amazon bestselling book, Absolutely Free. You can go download it right now at Becoming Cancer Free NBC.com. If you want to learn evidence-based strategies for helping your body become a cancer-fighting machine for not only cancer reversal but cancer prevention, go grab a copy of the book again.
00:27:18:01 – 00:27:43:18
Nathan Crane
I’m just giving to you for free. You can go download it at becoming cancer free dot com. All right, let’s get back to the show. It’s so true. And thank you for sharing that study. I mean, there’s there’s so many fascinating studies out there, right, about meditation and our biology and our physiology and how it impacts and helps improve our health, our performance, our mindset, our literally the activation upregulation of our immune system.
00:27:44:04 – 00:28:09:00
Nathan Crane
I know there was a study I wrote about a little while ago that followed, I believe as eight people is a small study, but it was a good one who meditated an hour a day and they saw a 65% increase in dopamine through one hour a day. Meditation. Now, dopamine is essential as a not only a feel-good hormone molecule, but also a motivation molecule.
00:28:09:00 – 00:28:31:17
Nathan Crane
Right. It actually motivates us to keep doing good things because we feel good after like after an ice bath, you might take an ice bath for a few minutes and feel terrible if you’re if you’re not used to it. But shortly after you start to feel amazing and you have this growing release of dopamine that happens 4 hours after the ice bath, well, meditation does a similar thing and increases dopamine.
00:28:31:17 – 00:29:06:10
Nathan Crane
Well, dopamine is a precursor to activating the immune system. And for all the people in our community who are dealing with cancer or have cancer in their family or their interest is cancer prevention or cancer healing, we know the immune system is essential for helping the body fight against cancer. So, you know, that’s, I think, a really fascinating study as well, that meditation and however you do it, having a practice can lead to, you know, tremendous physical benefit as well as mental benefit.
00:29:06:21 – 00:29:16:06
Nathan Crane
What have you seen directly with meditation in the brain? What’s happening to the brain when you meditate?
00:29:17:13 – 00:29:55:00
Ariel Garten
So there are an extraordinary number of physical physiological changes that actually happen to the brain during meditation. So one very famous study comes from Dr. Sarah Lazar out of Harvard, and she looked at the prefrontal cortex of meditators and non-meditators. So the prefrontal cortex is part of the front of your brain that’s responsible for your higher order processing, your attention, your planning, your organization, your inhibition of actions, all of the things that make us the quote unquote, higher beings, end quote, that we are.
00:29:56:01 – 00:30:20:11
Ariel Garten
And in average individuals, as you age, your prefrontal cortex thins just like the various muscles in your body weaken. Dr. Lazaar was able to demonstrate that in long-term meditators, they were able to maintain the thickness of their prefrontal cortex even as they aged. And so she had one study participant who was 50 years old and he had the prefrontal cortex thickness of about a 25-year-old.
00:30:21:03 – 00:31:04:16
Ariel Garten
So this idea that, you know, meditation can make real change in your body also extends to the brain. There’s another amazing study out of Australia, and it shows that a long-term meditator is brain can look on average 7.5 years younger than a non-meditator’s. So when the study one day when the researchers looked at the brains of these long-term meditators, which they defined as somebody who meditates for five years or more, they were able to see changes like thickness of the prefrontal cortex, increased density of gray matter, increased size and volume of certain areas of the brain.
00:31:05:00 – 00:31:30:19
Ariel Garten
And those brains looked on average like somebody who should be 7.5 years younger than they actually were. So meditation really makes a range of changes. Other changes you see are increase in the size of the hippocampus as you age. So the hippocampus is a part of your brain associated with learning and memory. And as you age, it tends to shrink and cortisol stress hormone can hasten, increase the shrinkage of your hippocampus.
00:31:31:03 – 00:31:37:08
Ariel Garten
And it seems that meditation may have a protective effect and reduce the amount of shrinkage of your hippocampus as you age.
00:31:38:00 – 00:32:03:21
Nathan Crane
Now, that makes sense because, you know, the more we’re stressed out, especially this chronic stress we’re dealing with today of these fast-paced lives and people working jobs that they hate and out in traffic and road rage and, you know, add to it a bad diet that also makes you feel bad, you know, lots of grease and lots of sugar and lots of processed food, you know, add, you know, the stress, the financial stress, inflation, the government stress.
00:32:03:21 – 00:32:28:03
Nathan Crane
You add all this. I mean, it’s amazing that we’re even alive, right? The amount of stressors that we experience every day at all that stress and compounded together and, you know, every time we’re stressed out, we’re releasing hormones that are down, regulating our immune system and increasing a cascade of inflammatory responses, hormonal responses in the body. One of those is cortisol.
00:32:28:03 – 00:32:56:19
Nathan Crane
Now, cortisol gets a bad rap. It’s actually a really important hormone for a lot of reasons. Right. But when it is released too often continuously at a chronic level, and then, you know, it’s and then we’re having other hormones that are like Galectin three, which is actually not a hormone, it’s a protein, but it’s a precursor, it’s an upstream protein that then, you know, connects to it’s like a bus driver for like interleukin six and other inflammatory markers that then drive the inflammatory process we’re living in.
00:32:56:19 – 00:33:25:22
Nathan Crane
We’re bathing in a sea of chronic inflammation every single day with cortisol constantly released in the bloodstream and what happens is the immune system is downregulated. No wonder cancer is skyrocketing and type three diabetes, which is also known as neurodegenerative disease, like Alzheimer’s, for example, is skyrocketing. No wonder these chronic diseases are just totally out of control because we are so stressed out.
00:33:26:04 – 00:33:52:08
Nathan Crane
And if meditation reduces the amount of cortisol that’s released. Right, which we know it does because it helps to release dopamine and helps to relax the autonomic nervous system. So parasympathetic is upregulated, which means that the nervous system is relaxed, we are relaxed. Then it would make sense that the hippocampus actually does not get affected negatively. So I think that’s really fascinating.
00:33:52:08 – 00:33:58:06
Nathan Crane
And so many benefits of a meditation practice when we.
00:33:59:04 – 00:34:19:21
Ariel Garten
So you were talking about the downregulation of the parasympathetic nervous system, and I kind of want to dive into that for a second and explain a little bit more fully what’s happening there. So when you have a negative thought, there’s a part of your brain called the amygdala. So the amygdala is the fight or flight response center of the brain.
00:34:19:21 – 00:34:53:19
Ariel Garten
It’s the part of your brain that’s always scanning for danger. And as you’re looking around for danger, your amygdala will look at something that actually is really dangerous, like a fire or is scary. But not actually dangerous to you like a picture of a fire or something that’s not even real in your head. Like a thought of a fire that causes your amygdala to fire and that sends messages down your access to a very athletic adrenal axis that signals for cortisol to run through.
00:34:53:19 – 00:35:14:15
Ariel Garten
The cortisol rushes through your body, which, you know, gets you ready to deal with whatever that stressor is, want to run away from the fire, etc.. But often those fires are not real fires. And so the thought of fires your amygdala, which makes your body feel kind of anxious, which then gives you the reinforcement that, oh, something must be wrong.
00:35:14:15 – 00:35:36:09
Ariel Garten
You know, I’m feeling that like ramped sense. My heart is racing. Wow. Like something must be wrong. Which gives you thoughts that are that something is wrong which fires your amygdala more in this feedforward cycle. What meditation does is it’s been demonstrated to downregulate the activity of the amygdala. So it goes right to the source of the issue.
00:35:36:21 – 00:35:58:09
Ariel Garten
And rather than priming the amygdala to have more anxious thoughts, it’s been shown to downregulate the amygdala, and in MRI studies you may able to see may be able to see that people who have a meditation practice have activity in their amygdala and people who have a long term meditation practice. Some have even been shown to have a smaller size of their amygdala.
00:35:59:07 – 00:36:23:22
Ariel Garten
And there’s another interesting angle to this. If you remember, I talked about the prefrontal cortex, which is kind of the organizational center of the brain. It’s kind of the parent. If you think about the amygdala as the child, the child that’s always freaking out when there’s a shadow on the wall, Oh, no, it’s a monster, you know, And the prefrontal cortex, being the parent who can come in and say, Oh, that’s just a shadow on the wall, everything’s okay.
00:36:24:05 – 00:36:47:18
Ariel Garten
You know, remember we talked about having this metacognition, this ability to look at your own thinking. That’s part of the domain of the prefrontal cortex. So your amygdala can be freaked out and your prefrontal cortex can come in rationally and say, Hey, actually, everything’s fine. Calm down. It’s all good. And in brains of people who have a long-term meditation practice, what you actually see is a strengthening.
00:36:47:18 – 00:37:27:00
Ariel Garten
You can see a strengthening of the relationship between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, such that the prefrontal cortex is more readily able to calm the amygdala and down and regulate it. So right from the neural level. You’re able to intervene with these tools that you’ve learned to go It’s all good, which then leads to the cascade of the amygdala quieting, you know, reduction in the triggering of the HPA axis, reduction of the cortisol in your body, reduction of the inflammation and all of the downstream effects of having heightened stress or anxiety and a, you know, highly overly primed, vigilant system.
00:37:28:03 – 00:37:59:02
Nathan Crane
Yeah, beautiful. Thank you for going deeper on that and I think it’s very helpful and I think it’s also helpful to talk about the difference between the experience of, okay, yeah, whatever. Just do it your way kind of thing where you don’t really have the ability to let go of whatever that, that that situation is and you bottle inside versus, okay, that’s fine, no problem.
00:37:59:02 – 00:38:31:07
Nathan Crane
Right. You get it right like, oh I get it. Yeah, yeah. It’s a totally different thing And it takes and meditation helps you get to that point where and I bring this up because of what you just said, I remember like if, if I got into an argument with my wife, you know, ten years ago or whatever it was, that was, you know, early on in my meditation practice, it might take me hours or days to to really come to grips with whatever it was and let it go and be okay with it.
00:38:31:07 – 00:38:45:15
Nathan Crane
Like, okay, that’s okay. I let it go. I don’t need to be right. I don’t need to be the one who is winning here. I don’t need It’s like, it’s fine. I can let it go. It might. It might have taken me a long time then. Now, if I get into an argument with my wife, it. I can let it go literally in seconds.
00:38:46:00 – 00:39:08:04
Nathan Crane
Now, sometimes it might go few minutes. And that’s a really long time for me, and it’s pretty rare. It has to be something I’m probably like pretty passionate about or really triggered about, but I can get into that kind of energy of, you know, that negative energy or whatever. I got to be right or I got to, you know, be the one who’s winning or whatever that subconscious thing might be.
00:39:08:16 – 00:39:31:23
Nathan Crane
And I can literally see it and go, Oh, no, that’s not what I want. It’s okay. I let it go and I can let it go literally in seconds. Most of the time. And so the beautiful thing I’m sharing here for everyone tuning in, it’s not to, you know, toot my horn about this. It’s because of having a meditation practice for years that I have very few stressors than I used to.
00:39:32:05 – 00:39:52:19
Nathan Crane
I have way less stress in my relationships than I used to. I have, you know, way less things that trigger me and cause me to get outraged than I used to. But they still happen from time to time. I’m not levitating yet, you know, I’m not enlightened yet, you know, maybe one day, but no, certainly not yet. But I have way less than I used to.
00:39:52:19 – 00:40:14:16
Nathan Crane
And I can overcome them almost instantly. Most of the time. And the power you have for yourself through this practice is so amazing because you don’t get stressed out very often. And because of that, you’re going to be healthier, you’re going to think better, you’re going to be happier, you’re going to have more peace in your life.
00:40:14:23 – 00:40:33:22
Nathan Crane
You’re going to have an upper-regulated immune system more often, your brain, just as you talked about all the scientific studies, is going to be younger. Telomere length, you know, can increase. You know, chronic inflammation can be reduced. All of these things can happen. But on a day to day basis, it’s like, hey, I just things just don’t bother me as much as they used to.
00:40:34:05 – 00:40:36:10
Nathan Crane
Did you find that yourself as well?
00:40:36:10 – 00:41:05:06
Ariel Garten
100%. So as you were sharing about your moment of revelation when you woke up on that coat and that mattress, it smelled like pee and you had that moment of like, ooh, like I can see my thoughts. What I recalled was the first time I had the experience you just described of being with my husband and him mad at me and rather than just jumping in to like, be right and be filled with ego could stand back and say, Oh, you are right.
00:41:05:06 – 00:41:24:12
Ariel Garten
And I could like, see all of the ego rising. I could feel all of the like, you know, the tension that starts to build as you’re like, oh, you know, it’s so stupid. It’s usually a better dishwasher. This is like early in our marriage, 80% of the arguments. And it was like, why do you need it so specific?
00:41:24:12 – 00:41:45:06
Ariel Garten
This is driving me crazy. And he’d be like, Put the dish this way, and I’d be like, Are over. Hurry. And, you know, totally tense about it. And in my meditation practice, as you know, I talked about being able to observe your thoughts and not get caught up in them and let them go. After you build that facility, you can then move on to experiencing your emotions in the same way.
00:41:46:01 – 00:42:11:11
Ariel Garten
So I would see the emotion of tension rise and I would see the emotion of resistance rise. And I remember like the time so viscerally when I could see that rise and I could be like, Why am I resisting? Like, why is it so important that I put the dish in my way rather than his way? Does it matter now?
00:42:12:07 – 00:42:36:02
Ariel Garten
Do I lose anything? No. Whoa. And I like it was like a revelation. Like literally a revelation that this resistance that I carry to for so long for no reason. Because I never stopped to think about it, to experience it, to realize that I could do something about it. You know, it used to just rise and overtake me and I’d be stuck in that state.
00:42:36:15 – 00:42:56:16
Ariel Garten
And now I could see it rise. I could say, Oh, I can just like, move aside because you’re just a feeling, you know, the feeling rise, the feeling would fall and be like that was actually useless. And I don’t need to get caught in that emotional trap any longer. And it’s the process of meditation that teaches you both observation, as well as equanimity.
00:42:56:24 – 00:43:26:01
Ariel Garten
And the idea of equanimity is being okay with what is not resisting the world around you. Because there’s so much in our world that we either can’t change or it just doesn’t serve us to spend time changing. Yet we continue to resist against it. And as we resist, we create emotional tension. We create, you know, an urge and a need, a holding, a clenching, a holding on to, you know, I must be right.
00:43:26:02 – 00:43:55:14
Ariel Garten
I and when you accept that the thing just is and that you don’t need all of that holding and clenching intention, it just that’s what it is. Then you can let all those feelings just pass through you, and all of a sudden the world becomes so much calmer because you’re not in an internal battle in resistance with, you know, the meaningless thing is constantly like, Wow, does a sense of peace just arise when you accept what is when you step into equanimity?
00:43:56:20 – 00:44:21:24
Nathan Crane
Yeah, it’s so powerful. And I’m I remember conversations I’ve had I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds of cancer patients directly and ask them questions like this to to try to understand their mindset better. When someone tells me that cancer is the greatest thing that ever happened to me, I want to understand why. And someone else tells me cancer is the worst things ever happen to me.
00:44:21:24 – 00:44:42:11
Nathan Crane
I want to understand why. And so when I ask them why, it’s so, so fascinating to see the difference, right? Somebody who says cancer is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. Why is that? Well, because, I mean, you know, I’m in pain. I my medical bills, it’s just my life. I don’t know, you know, the fear, the anxiety.
00:44:42:11 – 00:45:02:21
Nathan Crane
I don’t know what’s obviously I absolutely feel for somebody in that situation. It’s I mean, I have so much empathy, compassion. It’s just it’s it’s heartbreaking. And then I talk to somebody stage four, you know, cancer survivor or stage four, cancer patients still have cancer, but they say it’s the best thing that’s ever happened. Me, I say, why?
00:45:02:21 – 00:45:25:05
Nathan Crane
Tell me why. You know, it’s to help me connect deeper to my own purpose in life. It’s helped me get out of my own ego and focus on what can I do to help others. It’s helped me to take better control of my health, my diet, my nutrition. I’ve changed everything about eating and I exercise. Now. I do so and I do all these things where I actually feel amazing and oh, in fact, actually the cancer stopped growing as well, by the way.
00:45:25:05 – 00:45:43:07
Nathan Crane
And I’m starting to feel better and I have a better relationship with my parents or my, you know, my children, whatever it might be. And so and I’ve heard that over and over and over again where cancer is actually a wake-up call. And cancer is a blessing. And so it’s not easy for somebody with a new cancer diagnosis.
00:45:43:11 – 00:45:57:03
Nathan Crane
Oh, yeah, it is. A wake-up call is a blessing right there. Like, oh my God, this person’s ever happened to me. Especially when you walk into an oncologist office and they say you have cancer, you have three months left to live. We’ve got to rush into chemotherapy, radiation surgery right away, you’re going to die. And so I was like, Oh, my God, what do I do?
00:45:57:03 – 00:46:15:23
Nathan Crane
Right? And that’s why having a meditation practice is essential, because you can actually step back and go, hmm, okay, let me let me sit with this for a little bit. Let me really process this and meditate on this and ask good questions and not act out of fear. And let me act out of a place of of empowerment.
00:46:15:23 – 00:46:40:08
Nathan Crane
And how do you get empowered? We’ve got to educate ourselves, get a second opinion, a third opinion, talk to a functional medical doctor, an integrated medical doctor, a holistic doctor. I mean, learn more about this, you know, before I take any actions that could directly impact my physical body and my life for the rest of my life, something that may be irreversible, like surgery or chemotherapy or radiation in many cases.
00:46:40:08 – 00:47:17:09
Nathan Crane
So let me, you know, take a step back. And that’s where that meditation practice comes in. And many of the cancer patients that I’ve worked with, I’ve coached I’ve consulted with one of the things that they attribute as part of their healing journeys, people I call Cancer Conquer Stage two, Stage three, stage four, all kinds of cancer that they’ve reversed using a holistic approach or an integrated approach, meditation, some form of meditation or qigong, some form of of mental emotional practice, and usually multiple practices.
00:47:17:09 – 00:47:23:01
Nathan Crane
They claim it was essential to their healing, and I believe it 100%, 100%.
00:47:23:17 – 00:47:53:18
Ariel Garten
The Mayo Clinic started a study in 2014 looking at women with breast cancer. Waiting at the Mayo Clinic in 2014 began a study back in the early days of Muse using Muse for women with breast cancer. And what they did was they gave me used to, I believe, 30 women who are waiting surgery for breast cancer. They used it for some weeks before and some weeks after their surgery for a minimum of 3 minutes a day.
00:47:54:01 – 00:48:16:13
Ariel Garten
And what they saw was an increase in quality of life and a decrease in the women’s stress and fatigue during the entire cancer care process. And the women continued to use the device like after their cancer care was finished because it continued to give them benefit and give them improved QOL.
00:48:16:13 – 00:48:22:02
Nathan Crane
So Muses, is your company you started your co-founder CEO, right?
00:48:22:22 – 00:48:25:21
Ariel Garten
The former CEO has stepped down at my first maternity leave.
00:48:26:01 – 00:48:50:14
Nathan Crane
Oh, you did? Okay, so I know it’s a hugely successful company and you guys have some really cool devices meditation devices and a pretty amazing app. I’ve actually been experimenting with it the last couple of months. I have tried both of them. This one. What’s this one called? Just the muse.
00:48:51:07 – 00:48:52:19
Ariel Garten
Needs two and the muse.
00:48:52:19 – 00:49:12:09
Nathan Crane
Two. And then I have the muse is. Yeah. And I like the muse as the best just because it’s like it’s super comfortable and you can use it for everything, right? If you want to use it for sleeping if you want to use it just for regular meditating. I really like this one. And the app is pretty like the meditations.
00:49:12:09 – 00:49:33:13
Nathan Crane
The guided meditations on the app are pretty amazing. So talk about, you know, how does how does this technology work? It basically is a brain scan. It follows your heart rate. Can you talk about the technology behind the device? And then you know, how you’re using it to support people with their meditation?
00:49:34:04 – 00:50:02:14
Ariel Garten
Sure. So Muse is a brain-sensing headband that helps you meditate and sleep. And it is in the same way that a Fitbit sits on your wrist and it has sensors that track your steps. The muse sits on your forehead and it has EEG sensors that track your brainwaves. So as you think, whether you’re in meditation state or a nonmeditation state, the muse can pick up that difference in brain state and actually turn it into guiding sounds.
00:50:03:00 – 00:50:32:20
Ariel Garten
So Muse is actually guiding you during your meditation with real-time feedback from your brain so that you know when you’re meditating and when you’re not, when your mind is wandering. In addition, it has a heart rate sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes to create a whole range of different kinds of meditation experiences from the focused attention meditation that we talked about earlier, where you’re focusing on your breath and your mind is wandering to heart-based meditations, breath, meditations, body meditations and more.
00:50:33:19 – 00:51:03:07
Nathan Crane
Hey, I just want to pause a second, ask you, are you enjoying this episode so far? Are you getting good value from this content? If so, then I know you’re going to absolutely love healing life at Healing life dot net. You get exclusive and premier access to hundreds of the top world’s doctors, experts, cancer conquers and survivors exclusive interviews that I have done with all these experts and doctors that are not available for free online.
00:51:03:07 – 00:51:25:09
Nathan Crane
They’re only available at healing life dot net. So not only do you get access to all of those, but you actually get to speak with these doctors and experts and ask them any question you want about health and healing. And this is available exclusively to healing life members. You can try it out for free. Go to healing life dot net, and you can start your free trial there.
00:51:25:17 – 00:51:50:22
Nathan Crane
And whether you’re interested in learning more about detox or cancer, diet and nutrition and nutritional science, about diabetes, about heart disease, autoimmune disease, anti-aging longevity, all of these topics are covered in-depth, and more are continuing to be added at healing life. And again, you get to talk to these doctors yourself. So I invite you to set up a free trial at Healing Life dot Net.
00:51:50:22 – 00:52:07:03
Nathan Crane
And I hope to see you over there. Now let’s get back to the show. So why would somebody use this rather than just sitting down and meditating or just sitting and like putting on a YouTube meditation or something like that?
00:52:07:03 – 00:52:21:01
Ariel Garten
So as we talked about in those beginning times when you’re trying to learn how to meditate, it’s very difficult to actually know what to do. Like you’re sitting there alone with your thoughts. You’re like, Is my brain supposed to go quiet? Like, What am I doing here?
00:52:21:04 – 00:52:23:13
Nathan Crane
Plenty, plenty of those experiences for sure.
00:52:24:16 – 00:52:50:18
Ariel Garten
Myself as well. And so Muse actually gives you real-time feedback to know when you’re meditating. And so what it does is it translates your state of meditation into sound. The metaphor we use is your mind is like the weather. So when you’re thinking or distracted, when you are mind wandering, you hear it is actually stormy. And as you come to quiet focused attention on your breath, it quiets the storm.
00:52:50:18 – 00:53:16:10
Ariel Garten
You hear it nice and calm and quiet. And so you’re literally hearing when you’re meditating and so it guides you to know when you’re doing it right. And it reinforces you to stay in that meditation state because you hear like the chirping a little birds which will ramp your dopamine and you have all sorts of motivational architectures and structures around it to help you both start and continue your practice.
00:53:16:10 – 00:53:26:06
Nathan Crane
That’s pretty cool. And so you invented this or what? I know you had some previous experience that kind of led you to starting this. You talk a little bit about that.
00:53:26:19 – 00:54:02:05
Ariel Garten
Sure. So I started working in a research lab back in 2001 with Dr. Steve Mann. He is a professor at the University of Toronto who is one of the inventors of the wearable computer. And he had an early EEG interface that we had been using to transform your brain activity into sound. And so we would have people come in, slip on an EEG electrode, and by shifting their brain state, by focusing or relaxing, we could program that to shift the music that they would be hearing or the lights around them.
00:54:02:22 – 00:54:26:01
Ariel Garten
And so from there I stood back and said like, Wow, this is extraordinary. I was studying neuroscience, and the idea that you could actually have a tangible interaction with your brain was mind-boggling. And so I got together with Chris Emery, who is one of Steve’s students in the lab, and Trevor Coleman, and they became my co-founders. And the three of us really took the technology out of the lab.
00:54:26:09 – 00:54:48:04
Ariel Garten
And when we thought about what is the best use of this, like what is the highest use for humanity of this technology, we recognized it was to help people meditate, to really be able to answer that question of like, how do I meditate? Am I doing this right? Like, is this thing working? And if we could just get more people meditating, we would make the world a better place.
00:54:48:16 – 00:55:19:02
Nathan Crane
Oh, 100%. I mean, we got to get every politician wearing this and meditating every day right now like we. All right. Oh, my gosh. But I mean, for athletes, for, you know, whether you’re dealing with a chronic disease or just trying to live longer and healthier, whether you’re, you know, wanting to have a guided practice or lots of different meditations, I think what I like about the app, so it just it’s super easy connects to the app on the phone.
00:55:19:02 – 00:55:52:09
Nathan Crane
Right. And the app has like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of meditations, whether it’s like just nature sounds. I was doing one the other day that was like rainfall. It was really beautiful or like an actual voice or voice guiding you. You know, that that just voice-guided meditations on different kinds of things, whether it’s like reducing stress or it’s improving performance at work or, or, or as an athlete or so many different kinds of guided meditations, which I think is great.
00:55:52:19 – 00:56:11:19
Nathan Crane
The one thing I didn’t see and maybe I just missed it was like I saw most of the meditations are shorter and is that because it’s more for like beginner meditators? Like I saw they’re like 3 minutes, 5 minutes, 15 minutes? Because for me, like to my experience, the meditation is now I just, I kind of do that throughout the day.
00:56:11:19 – 00:56:31:14
Nathan Crane
I do like five-minute meditations, like in the morning at night, all throughout the day before meetings, interviews, and things like that. But when I started, I would meditate for sometimes hours at a time, but starting at like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and then work up like an hour or 2 hours. And for me, it was really profound and really helpful to go into deep, long meditations.
00:56:31:14 – 00:56:49:02
Nathan Crane
And I most people will not do that. They just won’t do it for time sake or desire or whatever. But is it also good for, you know, kind of experienced meditators is a primarily focus for kind of new or beginner meditators.
00:56:49:15 – 00:57:09:10
Ariel Garten
So Muse has a range of different ways that you can use it and has been very successful for beginners as well as expert meditators. So we have settings where you can turn off all of the sounds and just use it to track your meditation and you can go for 3 hours with the muse simply tracking your brain.
00:57:09:10 – 00:57:13:11
Nathan Crane
State Oh, I got a point. I got to look that up. I didn’t know did that. That’s really cool. Yeah.
00:57:13:22 – 00:57:40:15
Ariel Garten
You can do it in the timer function. You can do it under Muse mind. You can customize any of the sounds. So if you like just the chirping of the birds. When you’re in focused attention, you can hear just that. You could have voice guidance, turn the voice guidance off. And so what we find is beginners love it because they can finally figure out how to meditate and then more advanced and even extremely advanced meditators love it because it’s a whole new way to see your mind.
00:57:40:15 – 00:57:50:04
Ariel Garten
You know, as a meditator, part of your job is learning to observe your thinking. And here is something that is like shining a meteor in a whole new light on your brain. It’s extraordinary.
00:57:50:23 – 00:58:12:21
Nathan Crane
Well, I love it and I recommend it. We share it with our community. You know, we’ve we’ve partnered with Muse because I think it’s a great tool for people wanting to meditate or deepen their meditations. I’ve been using it. I’ve been experimenting with it. So we do have a discount for everybody is 20% off. If you want to go check it out for yourself, we’ll put a link below in the show notes or just go to Panacea Muse.
00:58:13:02 – 00:58:31:20
Nathan Crane
Panacea News.com. That’ll forward you to the Muse website where you can check it out for yourself. I do highly recommend it. I think it’s pretty awesome. A pretty awesome tool. Something amazing you created and I love that you said, you know, what’s the highest good we could do with this technology for the world? And it’s teaching people how to meditate.
00:58:31:20 – 00:58:47:01
Nathan Crane
You could probably, you know, do some nefarious things with it. And as unfortunately, some people do when they discover new technologies. So I’m glad that you can use it for meditation. So how is Muse being used for helping athletes?
00:58:47:21 – 00:59:07:05
Ariel Garten
So there are actually a lot of athletes that use Muse. You know, it’s been used either by a coach who brings it into a team who’s not ready to meditate, and they say, you know, here’s this cool technology that’s going to help you up your game or they come into athletes who are already really deep in their meditation practice and they give the muse to help them track and hone their skill.
00:59:07:15 – 00:59:41:00
Ariel Garten
So we’ve had Olympic athletes that use Muse many different teams the Kansas City Royals, the L.A, Galaxy, Raptors, that team that won a lot of the NFL’s super bowls multiples, they’ve used it. We also had a number of basketball players. We even have ambassadors who just started using these on their own. Loved it so much that they came to us and said, you know, hey, can we tell everybody about this because it’s helped me win whatever trophy or whatever performance field they’re in.
00:59:41:15 – 00:59:56:16
Ariel Garten
So it’s it’s quite a I don’t know where I’m going with this. And so it’s really quite a useful tool to help you hone in on your sports practice.
00:59:56:16 – 01:00:05:17
Nathan Crane
What kind of for the athletes do you know which meditations they were they were using was just all different ones. Do you know much about it?
01:00:06:13 – 01:00:28:10
Ariel Garten
So it depends on their goals. In the guided meditations, we have a baseball collection and that came out of our work with some different Major League Baseball teams. We also have a sports performance collection, so that’s good both for athletes as well as people who are the gym and you want to, you know, push past and you feel the sensation of the burn.
01:00:28:10 – 01:00:50:10
Ariel Garten
And how do you relate to that burn in a new way? A lot of the emotional regulation and stress sections are also used by athletes because it helps them manage the stress of, you know, the crowd and the stress of being in the moment, having to perform at their top. And it really depends on what their coaches think they need at that moment.
01:00:50:10 – 01:01:18:14
Ariel Garten
For other athletes, they focus on the sleep and they’re using the muse to track their sleep through the night. They’re using it with their coaches to help them understand, you know, what are the triggers that led to poor sleep and, you know, they use like our digital sleeping pills and other sleep interventions to help improve their sleep so athletics can come at it from all sides because it becomes both a game of, you know, focus and mental skill of emotional self-regulation and of rest and recovery.
01:01:19:08 – 01:01:23:22
Nathan Crane
And what about for someone dealing with like a chronic health condition?
01:01:23:22 – 01:01:48:22
Ariel Garten
So we actually have a number of different hospitals and institutions that use MUSE. There are thousands of doctors and natural paths that both recommend Muse and use it themselves. The Mayo Clinic, as I said, they did their first study in breast cancer in 2014. Since then, they’ve had probably six different studies running with Muse. Their doctors in their emergency rooms use Muse to deal with burnout.
01:01:49:06 – 01:02:16:21
Ariel Garten
They’ve looked at fibromyalgia, and chronic pain. We have other clinics that specifically focus on the pain that have run studies with Muse, demonstrating that Muse can help manage your emotional self-regulation, improve your quality of life through Pain Bay Crest, which is a facility that looks at geriatric care and cognitive function. They use Muse with older adults to help manage age-related cognitive decline.
01:02:17:15 – 01:02:38:19
Ariel Garten
We’ve had other institutions use Muse with OCD, ADHD, so it’s really across the board because there’s so many ways in which simply managing your emotional state and decreasing your stress as you’ve talked about so many times, can help a range of different conditions.
01:02:39:14 – 01:02:58:11
Nathan Crane
That’s awesome. Well, like I said, for anyone that wants to check this out for our podcast listeners, you can get 20% off. Muse Go check it out for yourself. Panacea, Muse, Tor.com and we’ll put a link below. Personal question for you is What is your personal meditation practice look like today?
01:02:59:10 – 01:03:19:11
Ariel Garten
Oh, it looks like so many things. I Love that question. So when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I take a moment before I do all of things to just sit there and be grateful to get in touch with myself, my day, to set my intention. Sometimes I will be awoken by my little son coming in.
01:03:19:11 – 01:03:38:13
Ariel Garten
He’s currently six and, you know, looking me right in the face, asking some kind of question like, what can I have for breakfast or what can I do? And so I just take a moment with him from there. I typically do a more formal practice in the middle of the day using often muse-focused attention, because that’s kind of my go-to.
01:03:39:16 – 01:04:05:10
Ariel Garten
And then things come up in the day. I’ll bring in a meditation practice to help me deal with whatever is arising. So, you know, I might feel my shoulders increasing in their tension. I might, you know, be triggered by my husband. And then I will bring in those practices and tools that you and I have talked about as you train in, you know, as you sit there and train on the mat, you don’t have to be sitting cross-legged when you do your meditation.
01:04:05:10 – 01:04:33:01
Ariel Garten
But when you sit there and train, you have those resources at your ready. When You need them when you’re about to get angry at your kid, when your husband in noisy, when whatever it is, and then in the evening I will do a formal practice as I lay in bed and then I’ll often do a muse meditation to help me fall asleep, just to kind of cap off the day in the most delicious of ways.
01:04:33:17 – 01:04:44:02
Nathan Crane
Do you actually wear the device when you sleep or do you just listen to it on the app from your phone? How do you do it to help you go to sleep?
01:04:44:23 – 01:05:13:18
Ariel Garten
I go back and forth, so I’m actually a very, very good sleeper and I don’t typically need help falling asleep. I just listen to it because I love it. So sometimes I will just listen. Sometimes I’ll wear it and track my night sleep because it’s wonderful I went through a period of waking up in the middle of the night and for that, wearing my muse throughout the night was invaluable because when I would wake back up again, the muse would wake up with me and then bring back in the same meditation that helped me fall asleep in the first place.
01:05:14:04 – 01:05:27:20
Ariel Garten
And so, you know what should have been a miserable period of being awake in the middle of the night just became like a lovely wake up, listen to some audio, magically fall back asleep. It was incredibly powerful.
01:05:28:11 – 01:05:51:15
Nathan Crane
Mm Yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, sleep, I’ve only. Yeah, we could talk for hours and hours on sleep and I teach a lot about sleep in my master classes to cancer patients. The importance of a good night, high-quality sleep, especially getting into that deep sleep state. I mean, majority of the studies show you know, we should be getting at least 7 to 9 hours of sleep.
01:05:51:15 – 01:06:08:01
Nathan Crane
That’s kind of a sweet spot, right? For mental health, for physical health. You know, we got to get to that deep state, deep sleep state, which is where autophagy happens. And, you know, we can actually clean up some of the cellular waste that’s going on in the body and clean up the cancer cells. So, like, sleep is essential.
01:06:08:01 – 01:06:38:23
Nathan Crane
And I know so many people struggle with sleep as I used to. I didn’t take it very serious until probably the last seven or eight years, maybe maybe a little longer. Now I’ve taken a more seriously and made like created a you know, a routine. Right. And it’s getting that routine dialed in. And I know if I do that routine every night, I’m most likely 90% of the time I’m going to sleep good.
01:06:39:10 – 01:07:00:18
Nathan Crane
Let’s say 80% of the time is sleep good. You know, 10%. Some things might come up. I might wake up a few too many times and, you know, 10%, who knows? You never know what happens. Sometimes they get just amazing sleep. But I say it’s a good, good practice, good quality sleep, roughly seven half hours every night. Right now it’s like, what?
01:07:00:18 – 01:07:21:22
Nathan Crane
My my, because I track it with the WOOP. So it tells me actually how many hours I get every night, not how many hours you’re in bed. That’s totally different, right? I’m in bed 9 hours most nights. And 9 hours gives me seven and a half hours of sleep. So one distinction think is important for people to understand that just because you’re in bed for 8 hours, that you might be getting 6 hours of sleep.
01:07:21:22 – 01:07:53:04
Nathan Crane
And actually, the studies show if you have less than seven on an ongoing basis, you’re all cause mortality risk goes up like significantly. So it’s important to track it with something like Muse or or whatever device you’re using. But you know, the thing for me with like the, the, the sleep using this to help people sleep, I think is is a great tool because you know, you want to use whatever can help if you struggle with sleep like me because I have such a routine for so long.
01:07:53:04 – 01:08:09:21
Nathan Crane
I tried sleeping with it and it actually disrupted my sleep so I can’t sleep with it or else I’d have to like add it into my routine, you know, every single day until it became part of my routine. But like, if if you already have a really good routine, you already sleep really good. And then I added in, it actually messed up my sleep.
01:08:10:02 – 01:08:13:02
Nathan Crane
So I just, you know, that’s kind of what happened to me, unfortunately.
01:08:13:14 – 01:08:38:02
Ariel Garten
Yeah. So if you for those who have poor sleep already, it can be incredibly helpful to help you sleep. If you already have great sleep, you don’t need it to help the sleep function. We did a study with Dr. Adrian Owen and he’s a famous British neuroscientist and he showed out of a population of 150 people with sleep who suffered from poor sleep.
01:08:38:12 – 01:09:04:10
Ariel Garten
They had a 20% increase in quality of sleep wearing the muse overnight. So they fell asleep faster. They tend to stay asleep and even have reported better dreams. So, you know, Muse is very customizable, so you can use it in the way that works well for you, whether it’s just listening to something to help you fall asleep or wearing the band to really kind of supercharge your ability to sleep well when you have poor sleep to begin with.
01:09:04:24 – 01:09:15:11
Nathan Crane
Yeah, that’s awesome. So what what’s next for you? You stepped down from CEO of Muse and what are you what what’s, what’s on your horizon?
01:09:16:10 – 01:09:45:14
Ariel Garten
Oh, I might have stepped down as the CEO, but I’m still very deep in the muse. So my life’s mission is to help people understand that the things that go on in your head, the negative stories that you tell yourself, the stress, the anxiety, the frustration, they don’t need to determine your life. You can actually change those narratives and change your relationship to your thoughts and your thinking to help you live far more freely and far more healthily.
01:09:46:04 – 01:10:01:07
Ariel Garten
So my my main mission is to teach people how to shift their internal dialogs with tools like meditation. The Muse to help live a deeper, more flourishing lives. And it’s incredibly gratifying that it’s working.
01:10:02:05 – 01:10:15:01
Nathan Crane
Hmm. That’s beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Erielle. Thanks for taking the time. Thanks for being here. This is I. I had a great, great time talking with you so. Appreciate it.
01:10:15:18 – 01:10:28:10
Ariel Garten
Oh, it was a joy and a pleasure and so fun to find the moments of meditation that you know, that you describe that I’m like, yes, I know that moment. Yes. My flashbulb memory, the when that happened to me.
01:10:28:20 – 01:10:48:17
Nathan Crane
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s so many, you know, it’s like when you meditate for years, years, it’s like you have so many experiences and moments that, I mean, there are literally hundreds that I could share that are just like life changing, life literally life changing moments. Right. I mean, we’d need I’m sure you have hundreds as well. We need a few more hours just to talk about it.
01:10:48:17 – 01:11:12:11
Nathan Crane
But for those tuning in, if you don’t meditate yet and you’ve already listened to this entire podcast, I encourage you to start a meditation practice, even if only for a short time each day. Try it with muse, try it with whatever you want, but have a meditation practice even if it’s 10 minutes in the morning, 15 minutes at a time, 5 minutes, whatever.
01:11:12:11 – 01:11:35:04
Nathan Crane
Ideally is better in my experience, 20, 30 minutes to start really getting into it, but at least get some kind of practice going with some of guided meditation. I think that’s a better place to start for people is a guided meditation and and then experience it for yourself. Right Experience it for yourself. You already have a meditation practice.
01:11:35:05 – 01:11:58:10
Nathan Crane
Awesome. Let us know in the comments below. Have you use music? Do you like it? What do you think about it? And Also, if you have a, you know, advanced meditation practice, what do you do? What are some of your favorite meditations? I’d love to learn from all of you who are tuning in. What you’ve learned from meditation, what it’s done for your own life, and how I can learn from you about meditation.
01:11:58:10 – 01:12:05:10
Nathan Crane
So let us know in the comments below. So I appreciate you all tuning in. Appreciate you, Earl and everybody, take care. Be healthy.
01:12:06:04 – 01:12:10:13
Ariel Garten
Be well.