Does the very thought of meditating make your brain hurt? Well, You're not alone. Even though meditation is scientifically proven to boost emotional wellbeing, slash stress, improve sleep, and enhance memory, so many of us still struggle to actually do it. Myself included. I've said it before on this podcast Meditation, and I just don't seem to click no matter how
badly I want to do it. That's why I was genuinely excited to sit down with Ariel Gartens, neuroscientist, psychotherapist, entrepreneur, and absolute trailblazer in the world of brain tech. Ariel is the brilliant mind behind Muse, the EEG powered headband that helps even the most distracted minds learn to meditate and sleep better. Her work has been featured in Forbes, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal, and if anyone can make
meditation work for the rest of us, it's her. In this episode, we explore what to do when you can't sit still for even one meditation session, and how meditation can finally help you beat procrastination. Plus, Ariel shares her simple strategy for balancing big goals, family time, and work without burning out. Welcome to How I Work a show about habits, rituals, and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm
your host, doctor Amantha Imber. You may or may not have heard of news, but if you haven't, I wanted to start with Ariel explaining exactly what it is.
So MEWS is a brain sensing headbound that helps you improve your brain health. It comes with a sweet of experiences that you use to improve your brain health, like meditation, sleep and neurofeedback training and also tracking the oxygenation to your profrontal cortex.
Something I was so excited to ask you is to understand what is your specific routine using MUSE And I want to get specific on it. So tell me what does a typical day look like?
Oh that's a fun question, Okay. So mus has evolved a lot over the years. We first came out in twenty fourteen, and then at that point it was a meditation tool that could track your brain during meditation and give you real time feedback to help you meditate. So that's actually how I learned to meditate in the first place. I was somebody who tried meditation, knew it was good for me, sucked at doing it because my brain bounced
all over the place. And it was through the process of building news and using it that I finally was able to establish my practice. So that's kind of like stuck with me. And as mus has evolved into multiple forms of different meditators, so there's a heart, brain, breath, body, I've continued to explore them. For me. My current meditation practice is waking up in the morning and starting with
a guided meditation. We have hundreds of guided meditations and I do that super early before the kids come in and wake up and jump on my head and all those things, all those delightful things which I love. And then we have this new feature with the f Year's device, which is tracking the prefrontal blood flow and it allows you to actually train your prefrontal cortex to use more oxygen and engage more strongly. So I've been doing our
Athena session. So Athena is our latest device. We have this awesome experience with an owl where you focus on it and up regulate the activity of reprefrontal cortex and it makes the owl fly faster. So that's what I've been doing in the afternoons. And then I'm a super good sleeper, so I don't tend to use our go to sleep features because I just close my eyes and
I fall asleep. But in the evening I'll often do a meditation, sometimes even with my kids, and it is a beautifully lovely day to wind down, beautifully lovely way to wind down the day.
So how long are you meditating for in each of these sections of your day? If you like?
Yeah, so it varies. In the morning, it really depends on how much time I have before the kids wake up, So like at seven am, I know the day is no longer my own, So it might be five minutes, it might be twelve minutes, it might be seventeen minutes. That's usually the longest because they're going to jump on my head pretty soon. In the afternoon, the athena sessions are actually really short. At the provincial cortex ne our feedback,
it's just five minutes. And then in the evening, if I'm doing something with the kids, it'll be five minutes because that's all they can handle. And if it's me on my own, I might even like dig into a good fifteen twenty thirty minute meditation session where I can go nice and deep.
Someone me. I have always struggled to have any kind of a meditation habit, Like, where do you stop? Because to me, I'm like, man, that's three sessions in a day. I can't even manage one. So where would someone like me start?
Okay, so let me start by saying, you don't have to do more than one meditation in a day. You know, this is what I do for my business and for my life, and so I'm like super invested in it. Any average person, if you can get in one meditation session in the day, you are flying, and you want to try to be consistent with it. So you can start with as little as three or four minutes if you want to just get started. Choose any time in the day that works for you. It really doesn't matter when.
Just try to be consistent with it so that you can build a routine. So that's why doing it, for example, every morning or right before you brush your teeth, right after you brush your teeth, or after your snack break, you know, whenever is going to fit for you. So the first thing to remember is that meditation is not about your mind going blank. You're gonna have lots of thoughts that come up, and that is a Okay, that's how meditation works. That's how our brains work. So in
the simplest meditation, you're just going to sit there. You're going to have a thought that comes up, or a feeling that comes up. You're going to notice it, and you're going to be like, yep, that happened, and then you're going to bring your attention back to your breath. So you sit there and you focus your attention on your breath. You might have another thought that's okay, you notice it, and you just bring your attention back to
your breath. And as you sit there with your attention back to your breath, you are training your body in multiple ways. You're training your mind to be able to observe what's going on, and you're training it to redirect and put it onto an object of focus that you care about. In this case, it's your breath, which is neutral. In the case of work, it might be you know, the priority that you need to do. It might be the task at hand, it might be the meeting that
you need to remember about that's coming up next. And as you do it, you train your brain and body to learn to be calm and self regulated in the face of these funny urges, these funny motions, these funny thoughts that happened to us as humans. You need any more inspiration as to why you should meditate? A couple things. So one study with doctor Eileen Luters looked at people
as they age. She looked at their brains of meditators and non meditators, and people who meditated had brains that, on average look seven point five years younger.
Wow, that's nuts.
Yes, totally, And muse is used by the Mayo Clinic for multiple different conditions. They published a study in twenty seventeen with breast cancer pations awaiting surgery and improved their quality of life and decrease their stress during the cancer
care process. They've published work in multiple different domains, including super busy doctors using MEWS in the middle of their day at Mayo, improving their cognitive function, improving their sleep, and their latest study on long COVID demonstrated that it reduced brain fog and improved symptoms in long COVID. So
meditation's really good for you. And whenever you have that like nagging, like I don't know if I should do it, just remember all the benefits and that aging brain and what it may look like if you meditate.
Can you tell me more about the athenus session that you do in the afternoon and what the purpose of that is.
Okay, So we have a brand new device that's come out called Athena and it has both EEG sensors that measure the electrical activity of your brain as well as sensors frontal near infrared spectroscopy, and that is using optics and red and infred light to actually track the amount of blood flow to your brain. So in the same way that a functional MRI is looking at the amount of blood flow in various areas of your brain to see how it's consuming oxygen and whether it's active during
an activity. The f NEARS also, instead of using a big machine and complicated electromagnetics, FNEARS is using light to look at the blood flow right at the blood brain barrier and to see how much oxygen your brain is using and how much oxygen your brain is demanding. So this is a brand new feature that we have in this new device, and it actually allows you to track the blood flow to your performtal cortex as well as
train it to upregulate its function to work. More so, in the same way that you go to the gym
to work your muscle. It's an activity that works your prefrontal cortex to enable it to strengthen its capabilities and perform more effectively, which is cool because your prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain associated with your attention, your inhibition, your planning, and so these kinds of neuro feedback sessions have been demonstrated to significantly improve your cognitive function and inhibition and attention.
Okay, so it's kind of like you're taking your brain to the gym in the afternoon, yes, okay, and how long does that gym session last?
For so the athena sessions are short through just five minutes, because it's like it's quite a demanding to to do, just like you don't want to do squats for you know, more than two minutes. You do your little dose and it really is effective and it builds over time.
Like I'm imagining your workday, like you're obviously very busy, wearing a number of different hats. What do you do throughout the day, Like if you can feel your focus whining for example.
Yeah, the most interesting part of having a good meditation practice is not what you're doing during your meditation, but what you actually then do throughout the rest of the day. So in meditation, what you train your brain to do is to notice when your mind is wandering, notice the contents of that mental cogitation, and then be able to change your attention to where you want it to be, or change your attention onto the kinds of thoughts that
you want to be thinking. And so throughout the day, I'll start to notice if I'm feeling stressed, if something happens and leaves me with an un pleasant feeling, like you get an email that makes you feel uncomfortable or makes you upset. In a meditation practice, you learn to
observe your emotions. And so I've now become pretty a depth throughout the day of feeling when something's happening, whether that is stress, whether that is unpleasant emotion, and then being able to distance myself from it and to breathe deeply recognize that you know, that emotion that I felt about that email doesn't need to move into my next conversation, or if it starts to move into my next conversation because I'm feeling kind of, you know, crappy about it,
I can have the self reflection to like to say so, like, hey, I'm coming in. I just had something hard to happen, Give me a minute, and then refocus and reregulate. And it's been an incredibly powerful tool to use both when I'm feeling emotionally justsregulated and when my attention to starts
to flag. You know, you've been working on something for a while and you lose interest in it, or you notice that you're just checking emails repeatedly, and so I can catch myself stop and say, hey, what are we supposed to be doing? Back to task?
Do you have certain triggers or flags that your brain is used to noticing to get you back on track?
Okay? So one is the uncomfortable emotional feeling that often sometimes happens from like a colleagues's interaction, where I might feel like I've been left out of something, or you get an email about someone being mad because you didn't do something properly or something didn't work properly. And then what I do is I very quickly like kind of
compartmentalize it and understand what that was. I'm actually like, this is what triggered me, And then I call myself, take a deep breath, you know, reregulate and say Okay, let's move to the solution. So how do we solve this? At take perspective, I, you know, try to understand how the other person was feeling or thinking. I then recognize that whatever I'm thinking they're thinking probably wasn't correct to
begin with. But at least, you know, gets me outside of myself and gives me an insight into what might be going on. And then I try to work towards solution and propose solution.
How about when you're feeling yourself procrastinating or checking email more often than you need to, or scrolling on the socials again, like, do you have methods or triggers that you use when you feel yourself straying from the task at hand.
Email checking is a big one for me. When I get off task, I just go back to checking the top of my email, and then I'm only dealing with the things that are on the top of my email and not the actual things I need to work on. And so I break the habit by as soon as I notice that I'm in like mindless email mode, It's like, stop,
what are you supposed to be doing? I go to the list of items that I have that I actually need to accomplish, and then I dig into the items that I have to accomplish, or I leave open emails that I know I need to respond to, and I go back to those emails. So it's the action. What I know is my bad habit. Me noticing my bad have a state is then the trigger for the change. And you need to know in advance what it is
that you're going to switch to. So I recommend, you know, having a list of the important things you need to do, or having you a list of your alternates to that stupid Scully task, so that you don't even have to think about how you get out of it. You're just like, oh, doing the stupid task. Come to the alternate.
I'm curious about your list and what that looks like, how you film it, where it sets. Tell me about that.
Yeah, so it sits in a notes document. I just use the notes on my mac os. I've tried various task and productivity software notes, but I don't find them any more effective than just using the notes. And so I have a to do list. It tends to be like a running to do list for the week, because tasks carry over from day to day, and then when I get to the end of the week, or unfortunately, when I have an evening work session because I've gone over what I need to do in a day and
I have to catch up at night. Then you know, is eating into the meditation time. Meditation does not happen at night when I have night work sessions. Nobody's perfect. I just have to balance your time. Then I use that night session to get the things off my list.
I'm curious about your language there night work session. It sounds like you're clocking on for night shift, Like is that something that you're super conscious about, Like if you are having to work at night, I don't know, compartmentalizing that in some way? What does that look like?
So when I was younger and didn't have children, the night was the most productive time for me, and I would just relish working from kind of nine pm till midnight or one am, because that's when I was my most creative. That was like pure flow. It was amazing. And then you have a life in kids and obligations and you can no longer work till one in the morning without being a miserable person. And I really value my sleep, so you know, I go to bed at eleven, wake up at seven, go to bed at ten thirty,
wake up at six thirty. That's the way it is. I get eight hours. It's beautiful and clean and so so if I'm doing a night work session, that means I'm saying good night to the kids at eight thirty, and instead of doing a meditation or cleaning the kitchen or whatever else I might want to be doing with that free time, I'm on my computer chugging through as much work as I can until lights out at ten thirty. And because I'm a good sleeper, I can kind of
work till ten thirty. It becomes a little harder to fall asleep because I've had You know that I'm wound up with work and I have the light in my eyes, so it takes me like an extra four or five minutes, five minutes to fall asleep. This is not normal. Most people with native lights in their eyes don't fall asleep so easily. So you know, I can manage it. If I was not a good sleeper, I would want to stop that much earlier to make sure that I got a good night sleep.
We will be back soon with Ario, and when we return, we'll discuss her simple strategy for balancing big goals family, time and work, and how she overcomes the fact that she is actually very bad at prioritizing. If you're looking for more tips to improve the way you work can live. I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com.
How do you go about setting boundaries for yourself, particularly from the transition from not being a mother to being a mother where you know it's like your time and the decisions that you have around how you use your time, particularly like with just the demanding role that you have, How do you set boundaries and rules for yourself?
It's really hard, And you know, initially in the transition from being a you know, soul body that could do whatever I wanted with my time to then being in a marriage where you know your partner needs things from you and being a workaholic is not really appealing in the really, you know, that's the first transition. When it was just me. You know, you can dive into work as much as you want, and if you're passionate about
what you do, you can just do that. For many many, many hours straight, and you can no longer do that once the obligations of life come in and I have two children, and it becomes very challenging to make the right boundaries having the proper support. In my case, I have an afternote school nanny that picks up the kids at three thirty till five, so I get that extra time. There are times when I didn't and had to be like, three thirty is it? And so we're done with work.
The workday ends early, but it means that every single night I'm making up that extra hour and a half from eight thirty to ten. It also means that I don't get everything done in my workday that I want to, and so I have to let go of some items and understand how to prioritize and prioritization in terms of which client is the most you know, is the highest priority, which task is the highest priority, knowing some of them just might not get done, which when you're dealing with
client relationships is really really difficult choices to make. And you know, in your own work you can say, hey, I didn't get this done. It's fine, you know it's only good enough. It's fine, but you can't let a client down, and so those are the times when it becomes much harder to set boundaries and I end up working many, many more hours than I probably should.
Can you tell me about how you approach prioritization. I find that it is such a hard thing for so many leaders, and I'd love to know how do you think about it? You know, I guess from like a macro view, like you know, the year or the quarter, and then more of a micro view in terms of today. How do I actually distinguish between the thing that's going to shift the dial and the thing that maybe I feel like I need to do but it's going to make me work night shift.
That's a tough question. So as an organization, we actually set out an annual plan and we start that process in October. We do our annual planning, We publish what we're going to do for the year, and then we try to keep ourselves to that. And there's obviously going to be a lot of shifts that happen, and part of it is response to market demand or response to you know, buyer is the most important thing that we
have to deal with. I am actually very bad at prioritization because I want to do everything, and so I will often push myself to do more rather than drop something that I think is important, which can then lead to a lot of difficulty prioritizing family, the other things in your life. And so often that prioritization goes in two places. One is who is the pain customer? Who is most likely to be the pain customer, and so
we need to serve them. And two is how is this going to do the most good, the most good for the organization, the most good for myself, the most good for my family, the most good for the customer, the person using the device. And so it is a question of you know, what's going to be financially most rewarding because it's going to allow the sustenance of the business, and what is also going to achieve the highest good for these groups of stakeholders, And often those groups of
stakeholders are in conflict with one another. You know, what's the most good for my family is not the same as what's the most good for my company. Obviously they both want my time, and so that's when it has to really be a value based prioritization.
It sounds like really tough decisions to make. How have you found yourself making them, you know, day to day or in the moment, because I'm imagining that this is probably a daily reality for you in terms of making those choices around who gets your time.
So I mean, sometimes you don't even make that decision. The decision is made for you. The kid comes in in the middle of your zoom meeting and she really wants breastfeed, and like, sorry, it's just what's going to be happening, Sorry, zoom meeting. You know, sometimes you just can't. The nanny calls them sick and so sorry, meetings have to cancel and family gets your time. Sometimes it almost feels relieving when you don't have to make the decision
that's made for you. Sometimes you really do get the luxury of making your own decisions. And it's a very good question how that decision is really made day to day. You know, I could give you an answer like, oh, I do it intuitively, but I think really what that means is I try to do the best I can, and then stuff is just going to fall into line and whatever gets done gets done. You know, we're really imperfect when it comes to managing most aspects of our humanity.
Stuff just happens. Time goes on, People make choices around you, They impact you. You react in some way, and we try to put a little bit of guidance towards what we hope will happen along the way.
I appreciate your honesty. It is sorry hot, you know, and I think particularly is a busy founder. It's so easy to feel torn between the business and clients and then what your family needs. I definitely experience that, you know, many many times, and I still don't quite know how
to navigate it. I think something I do reflect on, and I think it helps me procrastinate less, is that the time that I've got, and typically my work time is it's in front of a computer, or it's in front of clients or with my team, and I think about how do I really make those hours count, particularly when if I don't make that count, there's going to be some sort of a trade off that I'm going to have to make later in the day when you know,
I'm with my daughter. I'm curious, like if you can relate to that, or if you've kind of got similar mental processes or awareness of you know, particularly when your mind is drifting or you're you know, processing emails in a way that's not the most productive. What does that look like for you?
So I absolutely resonate with this, and even as you say it, I feel this sense of pressure, and I think what you have to do is recognize that it's okay to have limitation, and it's okay to only do so much in a day, and it's okay to only be able to accomplish so much in a work session,
and then to make your choices accordingly. You know, I used to want to say yes to everything because everything brought such amazing opportunity, and now I unfortunately have to say yes to a lot less things, but I continue to find that those bring richness an opportunity. Yeah, I'm not good at saying no to things, and so I think for me, it's more about what gets my attention to say yes to it, and honestly, some of it is just luck.
I would love to know you've hosted the podcast Untangled for I think you're like over five hundred episodes in or something like that, and you've had so many amazing guests. Like the risk of asking a very cliched question, I would love to know what are some of the strategies that you've heard from guests that you have applied and that have stuck with you and improved your life in some way.
One and this is this is a surprise question that I'm like thinking about it in real time. So one was bj Fog, so talking about habits. Bj Fog is a habit forming specialist. He has a book called Tiny Habits and Whole Methodology. He recommends that we change our habits bit by bit in tiny steps, and you celebrate each tiny step. The most obvious examples if you want
to go to the gym. Going to the gym can feel really overwhelming, so you put on your shoes and you know, once you got your gym shoes on, you celebrate it. And for most people it can feel kind of cheesy to celebrate your winds, but there's a neural reason to do that. So you know, you do something, you establish the habit, and you want to go, yes,
you know I did that. That's great because then you get a flood of dopamine, oxytose and serotonin that's actually going to encourage the way that your neurons wire together and help you learn fast. Another one is David Eagleman. So, David Egleman is a neuroscientist. He's a sensory perception neuroscientist,
and he talks a lot about creativity. And one of the things that I always remember from him is teaching you how to rewire your brain and to make new neural connections and to do everything with the left hand. So brush your teeth with your left hand, open the door with your left hand, and as you do these things, you train your brain to think and act in new ways.
That is very cool. I'm going to try that left handed thing.
It's a funny one, but it is kind of fitting into the scheme of how do we optimize ourself? You know, how do we become our best selves? The practical thing is you're moving your left hand. But the extension to that is what are the things that I'm not good at that I should start doing. They might be uncomfortable, they might feel weird, but when I do them as a practical thing to do regularly, I increase that skill. So, you know, exercise is one of those things for me,
exercising a new muscle. You may not want to do it. It might feel awkward, it might feel terrible, but it's like I do it because I know it's strengthening that part of my body. If I can't remember a word, instead of like braiding myself for it and thinking about perimenopause or aging or whatever it is, I stop and I try to remember the fact, because forcing yourself to do something that you're not good at trains you to just do it better each and every time.
And in terms of the future of wearables and particularly ones that have brain sensing capabilities, what does that look like over the next three to five years.
So I think we're going to see more and more brain sensing devices on the market. We're already seeing these things is they get integrated into headphones and into kind of aspects of our daily life. I think there's more and more use cases for the use of EEG to help you focus at work, to help you manage your sleep, and you know, we're seeing more and more devices coming out with more and more functionality. So I think the next three to five years are going to really be
an inflection point. Whereas with the fitbit, for example, you know, back in twenty ten, very few people had a tracker, and now they're everywhere. We're at the beginning of that inflection in brain sensing devices.
Amazing Ariel. It has been so great to talk to you learn about how you use the muse that's now going to impact how I use mine. Thank you so much for your time today.
Oh it's my pleasure.
I hope you love this chat with Ariel. And if you are king to get your hands on a Muse, Ariel has kindly given listeners of the show a fifteen percent discount off MEWS. Just go to choose Muse MusB dot com, forward slash how I Work and enter the code how I Work at checkout, and those details are also in the show notes. If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow on your podcast app to
be alerted when new episodes drop. How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of the Warringery people, part of the Cooler Nation.