Voiceover (00:00):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast, the weekly podcast where Dr. G gives you the tools you need to boost your health and live your healthiest life.
Dr. Gundry (00:13):
Welcome to the Dr. Gundry Podcast. What ancient practice adds years to your life and takes just minutes a day? Think about that: meditation, of course. Thanks to my guest today, it’s easier and more effective than ever. I’m welcoming back. Ariel Garten neuroscientist, inventor, and artist turned entrepreneur. As the co-founder of Muse, the brain sensing meditation headband, Ariel has helped people across the globe reduce their stress levels, sleep better, and improve their overall health.
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Today, she’s here to help you do the same. In just a moment, Ariel and I will reveal what really goes on when you lay your head down at night and how the latest device from Muse can help you get the best sleep of your life. We’ll also share the shocking research on the benefits of meditation, including how it can physically alter your brain, build resilience, and even tack years onto your life. Don’t go away, we’ll be right back.
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The Dr. Gundry Podcast is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Most of you listening right now are probably multitasking while you’re listening to me talk, you’re probably also driving, cleaning, exercising, or maybe even grocery shopping. If you’re not in some kind of moving vehicle, there’s something else you can be doing right now. Getting an auto quote from Progressive Insurance. It’s easy and you could save money by doing it right from your phone.
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(02:22):
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates national annual average insurance savings by new customers surveyed who save with Progressive between June 2020 and May 2021. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, again, and that usually means more socializing and more traveling. Although, being with friends and family is rewarding, there’s no way around the greater exposure pathogens to your immune system.
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Here’s the good news, the healthier your gut is, the stronger your immune health is. Of course, I recommend upping your vitamin D and timed-release vitamin C during the holidays. I also recommend Pendulum single strained Akkermansia probiotic. You see this good bacteria strain Akkermansia muciniphila is really one of the magic bullets of gut health and immune health. It works by blocking those nasty lectins from the food you eat by creating more mucus in your gut lining and mucus in your gut lining is a good thing, folks.
(03:31):
It really has a two for one benefit, both a lectin blocker and a gut health supporter. Finally, it’s available in supplement form. Give yourself the gift of a supported immune system this holiday and stock up on Pendulum Akkermansia. For listeners of the Dr. Gundry podcast, you’ll receive 20% off your first month of a monthly subscription. Go to www.pendulumlife.com and use my code GUNDRY20 at checkout.
(04:01):
That’s P-E-N-D-U-L-U-M-L-I-F-E.com and use my code GUNDRY20 for a 20% discount on your first month of membership. Ariel, welcome to the Dr. Gundry podcast. It’s great to see you again.
Ariel Garten (04:20):
It’s a pleasure to be here with you, Dr. Gundry. Great to see you.
Dr. Gundry (04:25):
For listeners who aren’t familiar with Muse, tell us what it is and why it was designed to do what it does? It’s a fascinating story.
Ariel Garten (04:34):
Thank you. Muse is a brain sensing headband that helps you meditate and sleep. For those of you on YouTube, I’ve got one right here. It’s a slim little device that sits on your head and it has sensors on it just like a Fitbit, but on your wrist. It’s able to track your brain during meditation and sleep and give you real time feedback to help you start or enhance your meditation practice and to help you sleep better.
Dr. Gundry (05:02):
This actually is measuring EEGs of your brain.
Ariel Garten (05:06):
Exactly, EEGs are the electrical signals that go back and forth inside your brain. Use is able to measure it and then determine if you’re meditating and how to do it better, and what stage of sleep you’re in and how to fall asleep faster.
Dr. Gundry (05:22):
Can you actually feel Muse working? It’s not going to shock my brain, is it?
Ariel Garten (05:27):
No, it’s passive. It’s just reading the brain’s electrical activity and from there, giving you audio cues and audio signals that help you do what you want to do better.
Dr. Gundry (05:40):
I know your device, I have your device, you’re using sound to help me and you really want to help sleep, how does this different than just buying a sound machine to help me sleep?
Ariel Garten (05:57):
This is really different, this is personalized feedback. When you’re using Muse to help you fall asleep, you slip on your Muse, you choose some beautiful content to listen to, which might be a meditation or a bedtime story or a soundtrack. Then, Muse actually shifts and changes that content to help you fall asleep faster. Sometimes people listen to audio to help them fall asleep, but that audio is just playing at one speed, and you wake up half an hour later and the audio is still playing.
(06:31):
With Muse what it’s doing is it delivers something called the digital sleeping pill, which is actually able to shift and change the content depending on your level of wakefulness in a way that’s designed to walk your brain into sleep even faster. Once you fall asleep, the audio shuts off. Then, if you wake up in the middle of the night and then you’re still wearing your muse, then the Muse automatically wakes up with you and brings in the same beautiful experience to help you fall back asleep in a way that’s designed to help you fall asleep faster.
Dr. Gundry (07:03):
Wow. Wait a minute, we know from experience with our children or even being children that a bedtime story is quite useful to help a child go to sleep. Are you telling me that I can get a bedtime story on Muse and help me fall asleep? How does that work?
Ariel Garten (07:26):
In the same way that when you’re a kid, you have an adult there who is reading you a bedtime story and they can understand your sleepy cues. They can see when you’re starting to close your eyes and yawn and they’ll slow down the story as they see you get sleepier. As you close your eyes and begin to fall asleep, they’ll move into a whisper and then they’ll shut the book when you’re asleep and silently walk out, and then you’re beautifully asleep.
(07:52):
Well, Muse in essence, can do the same thing because it’s tracking your levels of wakefulness, your level of stage one sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, et cetera, as you begin to move from wakefulness into sleep, the Muse automatically starts to change the bedtime story. It becomes quieter and easier for you in a way that cues your brain that more sleep is coming. As you have fallen asleep and you move into deep sleep, stage two sleep and deep sleep, the audio actually shuts off so it doesn’t wake you back up again.
(08:27):
Then if you do wake back up again, it’ll pick back up the story to and do the same thing to lull you back down into sleep a second time. Muse really is working personally with you in a way that helps you fall asleep more effectively.
Dr. Gundry (08:42):
Do most people utilize the bedtime story feature or do most people use music? What’s been the experience?
Ariel Garten (08:55):
We have a wide range of content. Some people like to fall asleep to bedtime stories and we have ones like Sherlock Holmes and sleepy stories like lavender fields. We also have beautiful guided meditations because some people want to deep breathe their way into sleep or release anger or tension and that’s more useful. We have soundtracks like gentle sounds of rain and ambient sounds. Each person is really different and how everybody likes to fall asleep is a little bit different.
(09:26):
Some people want to be told a story and just let their mind wander. Some people feel better really working with their body and relax in parts of it to float themselves into sleep. What we’ve seen is that people find the thing that works for them and then stick with it, and that really becomes a cue every night to help them sleep. Then, when they’re no longer using Muse after a period of time they understand, “Hey, I can fall asleep.” When you’re an insomniac, when you really don’t sleep well, you end up becoming really anxious about sleeping.
(10:00):
The process of falling asleep becomes uncomfortable and scary because you’re lying there going like, “Oh God, when am I going to sleep?” Once you spend some time with a tool that allows you to fall asleep far more easily and make the process much more pleasant, bring over time, also learns that it can sleep itself. The entire process, the stress, the anxiety, the frustration starts to dissipate and you become a better sleeper.
Dr. Gundry (10:26):
Now, I have a lot of patients and I’ll count myself in that, who we have four dogs and usually we have a new rescue dog as one of our dogs. This new rescue dog seems to get up at about two o’clock in the morning. Luckily, it wants to go out, but I find that I’ve taken the dog outside, blah, blah, blah, and then I’m awake for maybe a half hour, 45 minutes, and I can track it with my Oura ring or a WHOOP band. Can this device, if I had it on, will that get me back to sleep faster than me just laying there waiting?
Ariel Garten (11:11):
Yep, it’s designed to get you back to sleep faster because the same technique that it used in the first place, the same bedtime story, et cetera, will automatically come back in when it’s time to fall back to sleep after you’ve woken up. For a lot of people you wake up, you open your eyes, you look around, and then you’re like, “Oh geez, I’m asleep.” Then you’re like, “Oh geez, I’m awake again.” Then, the device automatically turns itself on because it can detect your state of wakefulness and then guides you back into sleep.
(11:43):
In a recent study with Dr. Adrian Owen’s Lab, we found that people using Muse were more effective at falling asleep and falling back asleep, leading to a 20% improvement in sleep quality in the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, which is like the gold standard.
Dr. Gundry (11:59):
Wow. How about for new mothers? Has it been tried on new mothers? Obviously, there’s a lot of wakeful nights and new fathers for that matter.
Ariel Garten (12:10):
You’re looking at new mother right here.
Dr. Gundry (12:13):
Congratulations.
Ariel Garten (12:14):
Thank you. I have a six-year-old and a six-month-old. We’ve just moved out of the intensive non-sleeping period of early infancy. Muse has been invaluable because of course, kids wake up in the middle of the night, they need, you get up, you settle them, you lie back down. Sometimes as a new mother, you’re so ridiculously exhausted that you’re going to do anything to help you fall asleep you just crank back out.
(12:42):
Sometimes your daughter wakes you up at three in the morning and then you are still up. Muse has been key in helping me fall back asleep. Also, at the end of the day, tracking my sleep and making sure that even though I’ve had multiple awakenings throughout the night, I’ve been able to get enough sufficient sleep of deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep in order to be functional the next day.
Dr. Gundry (13:05):
Now, I would think that EEG would be definitely the gold standard for determining light sleep, REM sleep, deep sleep. We had the science officer Laura [inaudible 00:13:25] on a few weeks ago, how do these guys compare because there’s a lot of subtle differences between devices like an Apple Watch or an Oura ring, how does Muse track with all these?
Ariel Garten (13:39):
Oura is definitely a great device. What Muse does is a little bit different. Oura is measuring your temperature and your heart rate, which are both a proxy for how well you’re sleeping. It’s EEG that really is as you say, the gold standard for measuring sleep. If you go into a sleep lab and you want to really find out how well you’re sleeping, they’re going to put EEG sensors on your head and then they’re also going to track your heart and your breathing.
(14:07):
With Muse, what you’re getting is essentially sleep lab quality data. We have a number of sleep labs that use Muse and the results have come out looking shockingly similar. You’re really getting the experience of being in a sleep lab, but in this super cozy little headband that you’re wearing comfortably in your own bed night after night. Muse doesn’t just track your sleep amazingly effectively, including really telling you the level of deep sleep that you’re in.
(14:39):
Not just how much deep sleep you had, which some of the other devices can do, but it can actually tell you the level of deep sleep, how much deep sleep you’ve had within that time, the depth of it. Then, not just tracking it gives you interventions. Tracking device like an Apple watch or if Fitbit can say, “This is how long you slept. What do I do with that?” Muse actually gives you the intervention to help you fall asleep.
(15:05):
While it’s tracking your brain, it’s using that to give you real time feedback from your brain and your bio signals that helps you fall asleep in a way that’s designed to be faster. Designed to help you sleep more deeply and help you fall back asleep when you wake up. No other device can do that.
Dr. Gundry (15:25):
Let’s go deeper into sleep, excuse the pun. People know that sleep is important. We’re beginning to convince people that we actually should have good sleep, that it correlates with a lot of things. It’s not just recharging the battery and these stages of sleep are really important. You want to take our listeners and viewers through these stages and what happens during those stages briefly?
Ariel Garten (15:57):
Absolutely, when you first lie down, your mind’s probably racing and you’re now in wakefulness. When you close your eyes, you immediately have an increase in alpha waves and you start a little bit of the relaxation process. Then, as you fall asleep, you enter into stage one sleep and you get some particular sleep characteristics that happen there. You’re going to see as you move from stage one to stage two sleep, you’re going to start to see things called sleep spindles.
(16:23):
These are little bursts of brain activity about 13-15 hertz, and they are indicating that you’re starting to fall asleep and they’re helping with memory consolidation. You’ll also get something called K-complexes, and those spikes of activity actually shield your brain from the sounds around you in order to shut you down and help you fall asleep. Then you move into stage two sleep and then REM sleep. REM sleep and deep sleep are the most fascinating parts of sleep.
(16:56):
Deep sleep happens in the first part of the night, typically the first half of the night. When I said as a new mom it’s actually important for me to know how much sleep I got of the different stages, I’ve been able to using Muse, make sure that my first five hours of sleep I get really good deep sleep because deep sleep you shouldn’t interrupt. REM sleep in the second half of the night, you can interrupt with less negative effects on your body.
(17:23):
Knowing when you’re sleeping, how much is key and planning around that. When you get into deep sleep, you’re doing things like memory consolidation. Your brain is going through the events that you saw during the day, the things that you heard, the things that you learned, and associating it with other information and deciding whether to keep that memory or toss that memory out. Believe it or not, that forgetting that your brain does during the middle of the night is important.
(17:50):
Deep sleep has another amazing effect, which is to help your brain actually move out the toxins that are in it. There’s a fascinating study that was published in June 2021 demonstrating that Alzheimer’s patients may have impairment in the cleaning of their brain during deep sleep. In deep sleep, your brain flushes out things like amyloid beta whose accumulation could lead to Alzheimer’s. The next phase that you typically go through for the second half of your night is REM sleep.
(18:24):
Your brain goes in cycles throughout the night with the second half is dominated by REM sleep and that’s the dreaming stage. That’s when your brain is associating all of the things that you did in the day with images and emotions and experiences. That’s why you get these crazy amazing weird dreams. Then, towards morning you wake up and hopefully your brain returns to alertness and awareness and you’re ready for the next day.
Dr. Gundry (18:48):
Now, there’s the phase of light sleep. Many people go, “Light sleep’s not important.” There’s actually a lot of mitochondrial repair work that happens during light sleep. Light sleep’s not bad for you, right?
Ariel Garten (19:06):
All stages of sleep are important. People tend to focus on deep sleep as being really important and it is. Deep sleep is essential for maintaining your cognitive function in a host of ways. Each stage of sleep actually has its own function. Ideally, you really want to progress nicely through each stage of sleep multiple times throughout the night, get enough deep sleep, and enough REM sleep in order to function effectively. Some people who go to bed chronically late, maybe short-changing themselves on their deep sleep.
(19:39):
Some people who are getting up too early to go to a basketball practice in the morning, “I can get up early and go to the gym.” They’re short-changing themselves on their REM sleep, neither of which is good. You want to make sure that you’re getting in your seven to eight hours every night and not cutting off on one end or the other.
Dr. Gundry (19:56):
Are we finally getting to the point where this argument of, “Well, I’ll sleep when I die and I can do fine on four hours of sleep a night. I’m a type A, hard charging American and sleep can wait until I get older.” What say you?
Ariel Garten (20:16):
I say, well, you’re going to get older much faster. If you want to sleep when you die, that might happen sooner if you sleep less. Sleep is essential for every system of your body. Sleep is important for your cognitive function, for your emotional function. When you don’t sleep well, you become cranky just like a child does. It’s interrupts your emotional self-regulation. If you get only six hours of sleep per night for a period of time, your cognitive function, your IQ drops 10 points.
(20:48):
It’s like you’ve just aged your brain in quite a number of years. Your insulin functions get disrupted, your body’s hormonal functions are disruptive, it become harder to keep off the weight. Your cardiovascular risk goes up dramatically if you sleep for less than six hours a night, as does your immune system crash. Sleep when you’re dead, if that’s the way you want to do it, don’t worry, you’ll get there much sooner. For the rest of us, sleep now. It’s really helpful.
Dr. Gundry (21:19):
You brought up an important point. We know that shift workers who have horrible sleep patterns and horrible circadian rhythm disruption. Also, I can say personally as a surgical resident where it was normal to get maybe eight hours of sleep, I mean four hours of sleep, it changes your hunger patterns and you crave sugar, you just crave sugar to keep going. We’d hit the vending machines at all times during the night just to stay awake.
(21:56):
We were looking for a Hostess Cupcakes and Ding Dongs and candy bars. It’s amazing how sleep deprivation will drive people putting on the pounds. I see so many of my patients who are bad sleepers that if we can change their sleep pattern, we can really make a big change in their insulin levels, in their hunger levels. You can prove this from tracking studies, right?
Ariel Garten (22:25):
There’s a lot of studies that have been done that demonstrate the impact of sleep on weight loss or lack thereof. Sleep as you mentioned, disrupts your insulin, it disrupts your leptin, it disrupts a lot of your hormonal signalings that tell you when you are full. Your circadian rhythm is often set by food. If you get into the pattern of eating at two o’clock in the morning, for example, or waking up in the middle of the night to eat, that sets your circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm that governs both your sleeping and your eating.
(22:56):
That sets your circadian rhythm to say, “It’s 2:00 AM let’s wake you back up again tonight because you did it last night to eat.” You end up in this repeated pattern of waking up hungry to eat, eating, disrupting your signaling again, gaining the weight, and disrupting your sleep. It’s a really unfortunate feed forward, which you can break yourself out of once you realize that you can actually change your sleep and you can change your sleep and hunger patterns.
Dr. Gundry (23:25):
How does the Muse headband train you to be a better sleeper besides what you’ve just told me?
Ariel Garten (23:35):
There’s a number of different ways that it works. One, it uses a tool both for meditation and for sleep. We actually started using Muse as a meditation tool back in 2014 so it’s been in the market for many, many years. It’s used by hundreds of thousands of people to learn to meditate or enhance their meditation practice. We started to hear from people that they were using their Muse just before they went to bed to help them fall asleep.
(24:02):
When they did that, they seemed to be sleeping better. We really dug into that and started to create Muse S, which is the tool that’s really purpose built to help you sleep. It gives you beautiful guided meditations that you during the day, and as you learn to meditate, you learn how to shut down that racing mind that you have. The reason a lot of people can’t sleep is because you lie there and your brain is racing, and you’re like, “I can’t sleep. I have all of these thoughts.”
(24:31):
Well, meditation really teaches you how to let your mind go from those thoughts, let go of them, focus on your breath and your body, and shut down your mind so you can sleep. That’s the first level, we have meditation training. Then, we have the guided meditations and sleep stories that help you fall asleep. We then pair that with the digital sleeping pill, which is the real time biofeedback from your brain and body that’s designed to help you sleep better.
(24:57):
Then you have the tool that tracks you through the night so that you can really see your sleep patterns and what you’re doing so you can start to realize how you can change and shift or how you are changing and shifting. We have the tool that helps you fall back asleep after you’ve woken up in the night. Then, we have broad range of content that really teaches you sleep habits and hygiene, it teaches you what to do to sleep better. There are guided meditations to help you let go of the stress that you might have during the day.
(25:30):
A range of meditations to do things like help you wake up with morning joy to greet the day bright and sunny and happy, and to deal with any of the things that come up during the day with greater grace and calm and ease, so that you can also sleep better the next night.
Dr. Gundry (25:47):
Now, wait a minute, you said digital sleeping pill. I don’t want a sleeping pill. How does a digital sleeping pill with Muse work?
Ariel Garten (25:56):
Exactly, it has nothing to do with a real pharmacological sleeping pill. The digital sleeping pill is the name that we have for the guided content that shifts and changes to guide you into sleep. We are not into physical sleeping pills either. Taking prescription sleep medications or non-prescription sleep medications actually gives you potentially really poor sleep that can interrupt your delta waves. There’s all sorts of reasons not to use them.
(26:22):
The digital sleeping pill is guided meditation content that actually works with you to teach you to fall asleep more effectively.
Dr. Gundry (26:31):
I see so many patients who are addicted to prescription sleeping pills and it’s one of the worst things you can do for your brain health. It does not promote normal sleep, as you and I both know. It’s very difficult to get people off of these. I think a Muse prescription maybe a good start to get them a digital sleeping pill instead. That’s a great idea.
Ariel Garten (27:01):
Thank You. We have a lot of doctors that recommend Muse to their patients both for sleep and for meditation to help deal with poor sleep, stress, et cetera. We’re actually seeing Muse prescribed in that way, prescribing meditation and good sleep habits and hygiene and tools and techniques and biofeedback as a replacement for pills, which has been very rewarding.
Dr. Gundry (27:23):
You mentioned meditation and we’ve had you on before really to talk about the benefits of meditation. I write about it in all of my books, both as a brain tool, but also as a longevity and immune support tool. As a very poor meditator, I have a monkey brain. My wife is a great meditator. Tell people who go, “I can’t meditate, I can’t shut my brain off.” Why meditation and why Muse? What is it doing that’s going to help a monkey brain quiet down?
(28:11):
Putting the right foods into our bodies is extremely important to prevent disease and live long. One thing we put in our bodies even more frequently than food is water. You see, water makes up about 60% of our bodies, which is why drinking water is key to staying hydrated and healthy. Sadly, not all water is the same. According to extensive research by the Environmental Working Group, virtually every home in America has harmful contaminants in its tap water.
(28:38):
That’s why I highly recommend every family get a water purifier and I especially like AquaTru. AquaTru purifiers using four stage reverse osmosis purification process and their countertop purifiers work with no installation or plumbing, and it removes 15 times more contaminants than ordinary pitcher filters. By removing over 80 of the most harmful contaminants, including chlorine, fluoride, arsenic, PFAS, known as forever chemicals, nitrate, and many more, you no longer have to worry about putting your family in danger.
(29:16):
It’s the same technology used by all the major bottled water brands, but now it’s available for your home and without the plastic waste. The best part is in addition to drinking water, you can use it for your coffee, tea, and all your cooking needs from boiling pasta to veggies to making stocks and soups. AquaTru comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and even makes a great gift. Today, my listeners receive 20% off any AquaTru purifier.
(29:44):
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(30:22):
Do you do the same type of vetting when it comes to finding a quality doctor that listens to your concerns? If not, you should. With Zocdoc, you finally can. Zocdoc is a free app that shows you doctors who are patient reviewed, take your insurance and are available when you need them. You can find just about any specialist for any need you have, whether it be to straighten those teeth, fix an achy back, get that mold checked out, or anything else Zocdoc has you covered.
(30:51):
They not only help you find a doctor, but also help you find an appointment as soon as possible, which I know has become quite a hassle these days. Simply go to zocdoc.com, find the doctor that is right for you, and book an appointment in person or remotely that works for your schedule. Go to zocdoc.com/gundry and download the Zocdoc app for free. Then, start your search for a top rated doctor today. Many are available within 24 hours. That’s Z-O-C-D-O-C.com/gundry. Zocdoc.com/gundry.
(31:31):
You probably heard me speak about the importance of protecting your eyes from blue light. It’s so important that I’ve even created an entire video on the Dr. Gundry YouTube channel about the dangers of blue light exposure. You see, the problem with blue light is that it’s everywhere emitted from screens, light bulbs, electronics, and more. Since most of our days spent using some type of modern day technology, all this blue light can have serious impacts on your health, from headaches, sore eyes, poor sleep, weight gain, and much more.
(32:03):
Because of this, I urge you to get yourself a pair of Bon Charge glasses, formally known as the brand BLUblox to where every time you’re using your phone, computer, or watching TV, especially right before bed if you’re going to use any kinds of screens. Luckily, Bon Charge now offers two other lenses that can help you mitigate eye strain in any setting. They now offer clear lens computer glasses and yellow light sensitivity glasses.
(32:31):
They offer prescription blue light blocking glasses, I wear my computer or light sensitivity glasses during the day depending on what type of lighting I am in, and then pop on my trusty blue light blocking glasses before bed to ensure I don’t mess up my circadian rhythm and my sleep by watching the news. Aside from blue light blocking glasses for both adults and kids, Bon Charge offers a huge range of evidence-based products like total blackout sleep mask, Red Light Therapy devices and more.
(33:02):
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Ariel Garten (33:40):
First of all, I’m sure I’m preaching to the converted when we say everybody should be meditating, but I also recognize that it is incredibly hard to do. I too had one of those monkey brains before really building Muse, I was a psychotherapist. I would be recommending to my patients that they should meditate. I would be teaching them to meditate even though I sucked at it myself because my mind would bounce all over the place, and then I’d be frustrated at myself because I couldn’t meditate.
(34:09):
In the process of doing that, I recognized with my team that we could build Muse as a tool to help you actually meditate more effectively. What Muse does is it tracks your brain during meditation and gives you guiding sounds to let you know when you’re meditating and to keep you there helping when you’re doing it right. Most of us sit down to meditate, our brain bounces all over the place. We get really frustrated and we get up and we go away. We’re like, “Forget this.”
(34:39):
With Muse, however, you slip on the headband, you sit there, and as you focus on your breath, there’s a beautiful soundscape that gets quiet when you’re meditating. Then, as your mind wanders onto a thought, the sound picks up and lets you know that your mind is wandering and gently guides you back to your breath. When you’re back on your breath, the sound gets quiet and pleasant again, which reinforces to your brain that you’re doing the right thing.
(35:06):
Then eventually, your mind wanders as all of our minds due and the sound guides you back. With Muse, you’re getting instant feedback during your meditation to actually know what’s going on in your brain, to actually show you what you’re supposed to be doing during a focused attention meditation and to really make it rewarding both to your brain and your motivation systems to do it and stay there.
(35:28):
Then after the fact, you get data charts, graph scores, things that actually show you what your brain was doing and become highly motivating to keep you engaged in the practice day after day. What we hear all the time is I tried for years to meditate and I couldn’t do it. It’s Muse that helped me start my practice. Then it’s Muse that helped me go deeper into it. It’s been amazing to actually get people to do this thing that’s so good for you that so many people resist through the Muse.
Dr. Gundry (35:59):
I was realizing a couple days ago, my car has a lane departure feature that I don’t use that once you leave your lane, it starts vibrating and doing all these crazy noises. It just so happened it was on and it started doing that as I was just changing lanes and I said, “What the heck? My lane departure feature is on.” Then I thought about Muse because muse basically is a lane departure feature that, “You just left your meditative state and you’ve crossed over the line and pull yourself back in.” I want you to build that into your advertising and give me full credit.
Ariel Garten (36:46):
I absolutely will, that’s really funny. Trevor Coleman, who is one of the co-founders in Muse and really responsible for guiding the initial product, he actually used to describe it it’s like rumble strips for the road. Now, this was back in like 2012 before lane departure features were very common, but it was like old school, you’d drive off the highway and there’d be the rumbly pattern on the side of the road to let you know with the cue, “You’re going off the path. Come on back gently. You’re going off the path, come on back gently.”
(37:16):
You nailed it. It’s the lane departure feature with rewards and encouragement for staying in the right lane and getting to your destination. We can keep going with this metaphor.
Dr. Gundry (37:27):
We give a lot of lip service to the benefits of meditation and that I think people in general know that it should be a part of their hopefully daily practice. Take us through why meditation is probably, not probably is a really good idea.
Ariel Garten (37:49):
Meditation has by now tens of thousands of published studies behind it demonstrating why it is good for your brain, your body, your relationships. It improves your attention, it can decrease your stress, it can help improve your mood, depression, anxiety. Meditation’s been shown to improve your sleep. It’s been shown to improve school testing scores, workplace wellness. You name it, meditation can have benefit in it.
(38:20):
Diving into it a little bit more specifically, when we look at how meditation helps you in your life, what it’s really doing is it’s teaching you to not become so caught up in your own thoughts. Now, most of many of the thoughts that we have are thoughts that are stressful and anxious, some of them are not useful and repetitive. Some of them cause us anxiety and frustration. We’re just used to thinking those thoughts and being carried wherever the thought takes us.
(38:54):
With the meditation practice, what you’re doing is learning to observe your thoughts and rather than being caught up in them and thinking about that fight you had with your boyfriend over and over and over again and just thinking that’s what’s supposed to happen because that thought is in your brain. With meditation, what you learn to do is notice that you’re having that thought and then exercise the skill of moving your mind away from that thought and onto something that’s more important to you or something that’s neutral that you want to focus on.
(39:24):
Over time, as you do that more and more, you begin to recognize, “I don’t need to think about that fight with my boyfriend, or I don’t need to think over and over again about the cookie that I really want to eat, but I’m not supposed to, or the stress that I have over this thing that I need to do that I can’t handle.” You learn to really manage your mind and your body’s reaction to your mind. With better choices about where your mind and your attention go. That allows you to do things like listen to your wife when she’s arguing with you.
(40:00):
Rather than just reacting on something that she said and being like, “Well, you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” You can listen, you might notice that I’m feeling a little tense about this. You can step back, you can take a deep breath and then you can just continue to listen and not react badly where you can recognize, “I have this intensive craving and you know what? I don’t need to act on it.”
(40:21):
If I just move my attention elsewhere and I do what I know is good for me, I can get myself out of this loop of these bad thoughts or feelings or behaviors that I engage in. In doing so, it can dramatically improve multiple parts of your life.
Dr. Gundry (40:37):
As you know, I’m very interested in longevity. The older I get, the more interested I am in longevity. There are actual physical things that happen to meditators that promote longevity. Give me an example about telomere length and talk about brain changes that are observed in meditators. I think this to me, rather than arguing with my wife, which I don’t do, I learned years ago never to do that. If I can promote longevity health span, that’s a winner for me. Tell us about that.
Ariel Garten (41:16):
It’s phenomenal the cellular changes that meditation has been demonstrated to make. There’s an amazing set of studies that demonstrate that meditation can actually impact your cellular aging. These come initially from Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, she is a Nobel Prize winning scientist. She looked at mothers who were very stressed in caring for their kids and she gave half of them meditation classes.
(41:42):
She went back and then she looked at their markers of cellular aging and she saw that those mothers that had taken meditation classes and were actively meditating had cells that were demonstrating themselves to be significantly younger than those who didn’t meditate. Now, she looks specifically at the telomeres. Your listeners might know about telomeres. Telomeres are the little ends of your DNA, the little pieces of plastic, [inaudible 00:42:11].
(42:13):
As you age, they start to degrade. They’re there to protect your DNA, so your telomeres will begin to degrade. First, get shorter and shorter as your cells replicate as time goes on. What meditation seems to do is actually increase the length of those telomeres. As you age, rather than the telomeres getting shorter and shorter and shorter until there’s none left and your DNA starts to unravel, the telomeres with meditation seem to be getting longer and maintaining their length.
(42:42):
Telomeres really are marker of cellular aging, so you can look at one instance with a shorter telomere, one instance with a longer, and a scientist would say, “Well sadly, the one with the shorter telomeres is more aged.” In this way it actually seems that meditation is slowing cellular aging.
Dr. Gundry (43:02):
That sounds good.
Ariel Garten (43:02):
Now, let’s talk about the brain because this one’s just as cool. Meditation has been shown to make real structural change inside the brain, and it’s even been shown to stave off aging of the brain. In the work of Dr. Sarah Lazar, she’s shown that meditation can maintain the size of your hippocampus. As you age, your hippocampus can shrink with stress, meditation can maintain that size. Meditation has been shown to maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex as you age.
(43:31):
Bad news as you age, your prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain in the front that’s responsible for all of your higher order processing like your thinking, your planning, your organization as you age, that thins, but if you’re able to maintain a long-term meditation practice, in her study she showed that individuals were able to maintain the thickness of their prefrontal cortex disease like reduce the aging of it.
(43:53):
There was one subject who was 50 years old and he had the prefrontal cortex thickness of a 23-year-old. Thanks to meditation. Now in the work of Dr. Eileen [inaudible 00:44:04], what she did was she just looked at an overall map of the brain of meditators and non-meditators to see what the difference in brain age looked like. She looked at long-term meditators who she defined as meditating as five years or more. On average, those long-term meditators brains looked 7.5 years younger than the non-meditators.
(44:29):
That’s a pretty amazing investment when you sit there and think, “Why am I wasting my time? What’s this 5 or 10 minutes a day of meditating every day if I just use that time for something else.” Well, here, just five years of meditation can lead to a brain that may look on average 7.5 years younger. That’s a pretty great investment of your time.
Dr. Gundry (44:48):
Well, you bring up an important point. I don’t have an hour every day to go to my quiet place and quiet my monkey brain. What’s the evidence that you mentioned? Five to 10 minutes? Is five to 10 minutes going to do it for me? I probably have 5 or 10 minutes that I’ve wasted every day. Is that going to do it for me?
Ariel Garten (45:18):
That’s going to help. With meditation, more can be better, but even five minutes a day can be impactful. In a study that was done with Muse at the Mayo Clinic, they used Muse meditation to help women with breast cancer. These women were told to meditate with Muse for a minimum of three minutes per day. They did so over three months and at the end of that time, they saw a decrease in their stress, improvements in their fatigue and improvements in their overall quality of life during cancer care process.
(45:53):
Now, a lot of these women obviously meditated more than three minutes, but the only instruction was just minimum of three minutes a day and they liked it so they continued on and some of them did more, some of them stayed at three minutes. Even a small amount of meditation is better than none. As you do the practice, it ends up being something that is rewarding and is engaging.
(46:15):
You start with three minutes, you move to five minutes, eventually you’re up to 10 minutes every day. If you meditate for 10 minutes each day, you will begin to see the benefits. It’s significant.
Dr. Gundry (46:27):
That brings up the next question, this strikes people as a really good training device to learn how to meditate, almost like training wheels on a bike. Once you know how to balance on a bike, you throw away the training wheels. Is Muse something that you should always use? Is it a way to train you to learn what meditation is? Is it there’s a whole spectrum?
Ariel Garten (46:54):
Muse can be used in many different ways. We have people who have never meditated before and they use Muse to learn how to meditate. Muse has so many features that it can be used throughout your journey. Once you learn the practice of meditation, obviously you’re going to go throughout your day and then practice that meditation without your Muse. Muse is a tool to teach you, it’s not a tool to do it for you so that when you’re in that meeting and feeling stressed, you apply what you’ve learned.
(47:22):
When you’re in that argument and feeling ramped up, you apply what you’ve learned, but then you can go back to your muse and engage in any of the content. We have meditations for the brain, the heart, the breath, and the body. It teaches you different breathing exercises. It teaches you to sense your heart rate when it’s rising in, when it’s falling. It has literally hundreds of guided meditations on basically any topic that comes up in your life. We say if there’s something that’s come up in your life, we have a meditation for that.
(47:55):
Going into an interview and work, wanting to perform better in the gym, anxious about college, frustrated, standing in line, we have meditations for all of these things that really meet you where you’re at to help you gain new perspective on whatever challenges arise in your day. It becomes this buddy that you can really turn to increase your own internal resources and wisdom, and help you become your best person during the day in your best sleep at night.
Dr. Gundry (48:24):
Have you considered doing a study with politicians using Muse?
Ariel Garten (48:31):
We have considered, we haven’t had any volunteers quite yet, but the world may be a better place if they would.
Dr. Gundry (48:38):
We need maybe the federal government could fund that, either the Canadian government or the US government. Anyhow, one thing you brought out all these benefits of meditation. Does science yet understand what’s happening at the cellular or organ level with meditation that’s producing these observable changes in telomere length or hippocampal size? That’s the memory center folks, that’s a good thing to have. What? What’s happening at the cellular level?
Ariel Garten (49:16):
There’s a number of different ways to look at this. One way we can look at this is from the top down from the brain. What Elizabeth Blackburn showed is that negative thoughts actually impact your cellular physiology. The way that we are thinking then creates a sense of stress in the body, which ramps your cortisol system, which leads to a host of negative changes inside your physiology in your body.
(49:44):
With meditation what you’re doing is you’re both learning to disengage the negative thoughts which trigger the stress, and you’re breathing deeply, which trigger your vagus nerve to bring in a rest and digest response. As you breathe deeply, there’s a little nerve that runs up even down into your gut from your head to your gut. It’s called your vagus nerve and it becomes stimulated with meditation to bring in relaxation to your body, to dilate your blood vessels, to slow your breathing, to slow your heart rate.
(50:20):
This then brings on a positive cellular milia, a positive set of cellular interactions to do things like reduce aging. When we look into the brain, we see some really fascinating things happening. The work of Dr. Sarah Lazar also showed us that even a short-term meditation session like eight weeks of meditating, is able to increase the number of connections in your brain, your amount of green matter. Then when you look at the parts of the brain that seem to be affected, meditation seems to be down regulating your amygdala.
(50:55):
The amygdala is the part of the brain that’s associated with fight or flight. It’s a thing that’s causing the stressful experience. It seems to down regulate the amygdala and it seems to be strengthening or increasing the prefrontal cortex. It’s like the amygdala is the child who’s scared of everything and can be freaked out by a shadow on the wall. The prefrontal cortex is the adults, that’s the person who’s able to come into your bedroom, look around to the child and say, “It’s not a monster, it’s just a shadow. It’s okay.”
(51:28):
In some meditators, it even looks like the amount of projections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala have increased, so it’s easier for the prefrontal cortex to talk to the amygdala and downregulate it and quiet it. For the parent of your brain to go, “You can relax, it’s okay.” To the child. There’s a host of other changes also going on in meditation, but those are just some big ones in the few minutes that we have left.
Dr. Gundry (51:54):
Well, I actually have written about meditators having much more diverse gut microbiome than non-meditators. From my standpoint, all disease begins and ends in the gut. Meditation will give me a more diverse gut microbiome just by meditating, so bring it on. This has been a fascinating discussion. It’s always great to have you on. Where are you going next with this? Sleep is obviously your big concentration now, what’s next?
Ariel Garten (52:31):
From here, we’re really moving into building out more of the content and programs in Muse. You can come in with a particular thing you’re looking to do. I want to sleep, I want to meditate, I want to eat better. Come into a program and experience along with a community around you to really support you in your journey to that pathway. We’re working right now on building out programs.
(52:56):
For things like pain so that you can come into this journey with another group of people with a community, and together tackle this problem and make real change in your life because all of these tools are amazing, but what really matters is that you use them. We’ve really been focused on creating the right context, the right motivation, the right feeling of membership and belonging community to get you over all of the hurdles in your life.
Dr. Gundry (53:26):
I understand you have a special offer for our listeners and viewers today to try Muse.
Ariel Garten (53:32):
Yes, we do have a gift for your audience. Thank you for asking. It is 20% off of Muse just for the Gundry audience. If you want to check it out and explore more about Muse, you can try it actually risk-free. You go to choosemuse.com, C-H-O-O-S-E-M-U-S-E.com. You use Dr. Gundry’s special coder Gundry, G-U-N-D-R-Y.
Dr. Gundry (53:59):
Well, that’s great. It’s so exciting to watch you and your company through the years and where it’s going, and how you’ve helped so many people. It’s a remarkable device, folks. It particularly for folks with monkey brains, you just have to sit there and let your mind go blank, that’s not the whole idea I can guarantee you, but this is a really great way to teach you how to bring that focus and focus your attention, focus your breathing. You’ve actually made it quite enjoyable to meditate. How’s that? I guess that’s the most important thing.
Ariel Garten (54:40):
The things that you enjoy are the things that you do in life. If we’re going to be spending time on anything in our lives, we might as well be enjoying it.
Dr. Gundry (54:48):
Might as well.
Ariel Garten (54:49):
Thank you.
Dr. Gundry (54:50):
Thanks for joining us, Ariel and we look forward to learning more about Muse and your new project.
Ariel Garten (54:57):
My joy and pleasure, thank you.
Dr. Gundry (54:58):
We have an audience questions that I’m going to invite you to answer first. I’m going to spring it on you. Cheryl [inaudible 00:55:10] from YouTube says, “What about oversleeping? My 77-year-old husband sleeps 12 to 13 hours a night.” Ariel does he need Muse band to wake him up?
Ariel Garten (55:26):
For somebody who is sleeping 12 to 13 hours a night, that would technically be fined as oversleeping. Oversleeping can be as bad for your brain and body as undersleeping. We want to be trying to fit into that seven to eight-hour night sweet spot. If somebody’s oversleeping, I’m not a doctor, I’d of course first recommend, go talk to your doctor and check out what else might be wrong.
(55:51):
There’s a host of things that you can do like bringing in more exercise practices during the day, bright light in the morning, and of course, positive healthy brain practices like meditation that can help conditions like that.
Dr. Gundry (56:05):
I agree with you, that is absolutely as detrimental as not getting enough sleep. Certainly, you do need to look into whether sleep apnea is a part of this, whether he actually has narcolepsy as a part of this. These studies can be easily done. A lot of them now can be done at home. Yeah, you’re right, this is something to be worried about and needs further investigation. We’ll let you go on that. Don’t sleep too short, don’t sleep too long, and check out the new Muse S, it’s cool stuff.
Ariel Garten (56:42):
Thank you, that was great. Always a pleasure to see you.
Dr. Gundry (56:46):
You did great. Now, we’re going to move on. Take care.
Ariel Garten (56:49):
Take care, bye-bye.
Dr. Gundry (56:52):
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(58:10):
It’s time for the review of the week. Travel with Love from YouTube says, “Thank you very much for sharing your insights and beautiful videos. Intelligent and wisdom-filled, excellent stuff! Greetings from California. I wish you and everyone good health success and happiness, much love.” Well, thank you very much, Travel with Love. We try to make this informative, we try to make it fun.
(58:40):
If we can bring a little fun and information into your life in a good way, that’s what keeps us going. If you like what you see, please rate us wherever you get your podcast. Who knows, I’ll be reading your note next week. Thanks, everybody. This is Dr. Gundry, I’m always looking out for you.
(59:03):
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Dr. Gundry podcast. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you want to watch each episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast, you could always find me on YouTube at youtube.com/drgundry, because I’m Dr. Gundry and I’m always looking out for you.
