My year of living mindfully
[Music]
i’d like to tell you that my latest epic
experiment started because i wanted to
tackle
a big problem namely the global
mental health crisis
after all the leading medical science
journal
the lancet has declared that every
country
in the world is facing
and failing to tackle a host of mental
health problems
but although that would have been a
worthy motivation
for any unshrinking journalist like
myself
the inspiration for my latest deep dive
was also
very personal for me like so many others
the wounds of mental illness run deep
throughout my childhood i witnessed the
devastating effects of severe depression
and addiction first hand when i was 24
years old
i was diagnosed with an incurable
autoimmune disease
which causes chronic pain and arthritis
throughout my body
and has a terrible tendency to flare up
during times of stress
but it was perhaps my insomnia that was
most troubling of all
one or two nights a week ever since i
was a teenager
like many of you here today i would lie
awake in bed and i wonder if any of you
can relate
to the feeling of obsessing about an
upcoming
event or exam or with thoughts churning
about somebody you care about
and unable to sleep fast forward into
my adulthood and i still hadn’t learned
to tame my monkey mind
and it wasn’t just my future that i was
thinking about i wanted to be able to
teach my kids
how they could protect and nurture
and nourish their mind
now although lifestyle choices such as
eating a healthy diet or exercising
regularly
are all recommended for good mental
well-being
i was really surprised that when i
searched
and searched for the mental equivalent
of a 30-minute workout
or the mind’s equivalent of eating five
fresh fruit and vegetables
a day when i searched
there was nothing
i knew that any realistic solution
needed to
meet some key criteria it needed to be
free
or at least affordable it needed to be
available to anyone anywhere regardless
of their education
or life circumstances it needed to
flexibly
fit into different schedules
and it needed to be based on scientific
evidence which was
a lot to ask for in my search
for a mental health eating plan
[Laughter]
but there was one thing that fit the
bill
mindfulness meditation
a meta-analysis which means a study of
all the available studies
had just concluded that a particular
eight-week
mindfulness program was equal to
medication
for preventing recurrent depression
here’s why that matters to the young
people here today
we know that mental illnesses like
depression
have a tendency to begin sometime
in our mid to late teens and professor
willem kaiken who’s from oxford
university
and the lead author of that
meta-analysis
explained to me that there’s a 50
percent
chance that if you’ve had depression
once
you will get it again and an 80
chance that if you’ve had depression
twice
you’ll get it a third time
so the idea it
seemed completely absurd to me that in
our current healthcare system we wait
until we’re at the equivalent
of stage four cancer before we think to
intervene with our mental health
and the idea that something like
mindfulness training
could prevent us from developing an
illness like depression in the first
place
is really significant game changing
actually on top of that
there were also clinical trials
demonstrating that mindfulness training
could help people
with chronic pain stress anxiety
and even some addiction so
given this mental health crisis i
wondered
if mindfulness could really be
the solution should we all be practicing
mindfulness in the same way we should
exercise regularly
and eat our vegetables or was this
evidence too good to be true
more importantly what would happen to my
health and well-being
if i committed to meditating every day
for a year asking those questions
is what led to my absurdly elaborate
hair-brained and world-first experiment
which became known as my year
of living mindfully
but there was a really big problem i
had no idea what i was supposed to be
doing
with a hundred thousand products
capitalizing on the word mindfulness for
sale
on amazon including my personal favorite
the mindful pets tear stain remover
combs for dogs
it was very difficult to know who to
trust
and where to turn
on top of that there was also evidence
demonstrating
that mindfulness training doesn’t
actually always
work that it can be dangerous
and that some of the science was being
overhyped and
oversold in the popular media
i wondered if the first person who
developed mindfulness training a man
named
siddhartha gautama aka the buddha
if he were around today whether he would
recognize his systematic method for
relieving mental suffering
in a jar of mindful mayonnaise
i knew i needed expert guidance
so i set up interviews with 18
of the world’s leading mindfulness
scientists
and i recruited a team of six australian
scientists
who would track me throughout the year
and with their help i would find out
once and for all
if daily meditation was worth putting on
my to-do list
now i don’t want to give away the ending
for those of you who haven’t yet seen
my resulting film or read the book
but i will tell you this at the
beginning of the experiment
my subjective well-being score was just
below
average by the end
i was well above average
i suspect that had a lot to do
with working up the courage to attend
a 10-day silent meditation retreat
we’re talking no netflix no
phone no email no social media
no talking just
me and my mind
and it turned out to be one of the most
profound
experiences of my life
all of that fretting about my past and
worrying about my future all those
telling of stories to myself
a hundred thousand million times a day
all that made way for moments
of deep absorption a sense of inner
peace
and a feeling of connectedness to the
world
around me it was as though
i had learned to take a holiday
from myself and it was life-changing
neuroscientists told me that this might
partly be explained because of something
called
my default mode network
this is a network in the brain that was
actually discovered by accident
when the scientists were asking their
subjects to not do anything in
particular
and they noticed the same areas in the
brain were lighting up
in everyone what we now know is that the
default mode network
is programmed to automatically take over
when there’s
nothing more important happening it
functions
to help me make sense of everything
related to me myself
and i and although it can be
super handy to know exactly who i am
when i wake up in the mornings
there can be a huge downside to having a
default mode network
mother nature didn’t intend for me to be
happy
all the time she wanted me to
force me to mull over my life to ensure
that i get along better with other
people
for the good of the tribe and the
survival of the species
so whenever i catapult myself into
horrible
hypothetical futures whenever whenever i
rewrite my verbal blunders or obsess
over what to wear for my upcoming ted
talk
that is all my default mode
network kicking in and
we now know that having an overactive
default mode network
is linked to excessive worry rumination
self-criticism and loneliness
and those things are also linked to a
whole range
of mental health disorders
and so enters mindfulness
one theory is that mindfulness training
is a little bit like doing mental
push-ups
so the instruction involves focusing
on an object such as the feeling of your
breath
or the sounds in the room around you
noticing when you’re distracted or when
your default mode network has come
online
and then returning back to observing
that object
so as to how these mental push-ups
affected my life
by learning to strengthen my ability to
intentionally switch away from my
overactive inner me network
i experienced a greater sense of
well-being and a feeling of greater
connectedness
and that’s why this story doesn’t end
with me because at the end of the day i
am a white woman and i live in a
peaceful country
and i have been blessed with an
excellent education like so many of you
guys
here today and the fundamental questions
still remained could mindfulness
training
really be part of the solution
for the global mental health epidemic
and could it
really make a difference for anyone
anywhere in any life circumstances
and that’s how i found myself traveling
to
the front line of the global
humanitarian crisis
where more people have now been
displaced by war and famine than since
world war
ii when you consider the scale
of a refugee camp like this one that i
visited on the border of syria
and jordan one-on-one therapy
just isn’t a viable solution when we’re
facing
mental suffering on a mass
scale but i did find
hope because i also traveled to israel
where i met
a team of psychologists led by professor
amit bernstein from the university of
haifa
who have developed something called the
moments of refuge project
they’ve been teaching a particular kind
of mindfulness training to groups of
east
african asylum seekers who have
experienced
more pain and torment than any of us
can even imagine in their tens
of thousands they fled a brutal
dictatorship
and a civil war only to fall into the
hands
of criminal bedouin gangs
who turned torture into a profitable
extortion
industry and although the data shows
that these people
are among the most traumatized people
on the planet the nine-week mindfulness
intervention
is being proven in clinical trials
to not only be safe but to also be
transformative
as one former child soldier named darwit
said to me
if somebody offered him either 10
000 israeli shekels to make his problems
go away
or the mindfulness training he would
take the mindfulness because it’s the
only time
someone has ever taught him how he can
heal himself
so as i boarded the plane bound for my
own peaceful country
my husband and kids it was an old
expression
turning over in my mind give a man a
fish
and he will be hungry tomorrow teach
a man to fish and he will be fed for
a lifetime
so i know many of you young people
feel that you are facing a very
uncertain future and there’s a lot of
pressure that comes with that
you are about to come of age in the wake
of
a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic
and by the time you’re my age in about
the year
2050 there are some predictions
that up to 1 billion people will be
forcibly displaced by climate change and
war
unless we change course
i don’t think for one second that
mindfulness training is going to
solve all of the world’s problems
but i do find hope in the stories of
some of the people that i’ve told you
about today who are now
investigating if teaching mindfulness to
teenagers in their school years
can prevent them from developing
depression later in life
and whose programs for traumatized
refugees
have the potential to transform tens
of thousands of lives
i don’t think for one second that
mindfulness is a quick fix
and as we face all of this
together there is one thing that i can
tell you
for sure as every good flight attendant
will tell you
if the plane is going down it is best to
put on your own
oxygen mask first i know that my own
life would have been
monumentally different if i had known
from a much younger
age that my mental well-being is
just as important as
eating a healthy diet and getting enough
sleep
and exercising regularly
mindfulness is not a quick fix but it is
a very simple skill that teaches us to
understand how our minds work
and that makes all the difference
[Music]
you