#705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More

This episode is brought to you by 8 Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and seat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades, tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device, it was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by 8 Sleep. The pod cover fits on any mattress, and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature

that gets you the best night's sleep. With the pod covers dual-zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees, or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side, and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting this helps.

Based on your biometrics, environment, and sleep stages, the pod cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wakeups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the pod cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable.

Until November 30, my listeners can save $350 on the pod cover. Go to 8 Sleep.com slash Tim, all spelled out, that's 8 Sleep.com slash Tim for these exclusive holiday savings. One more time that's 8 Sleep.com slash Tim for these exclusive and very special holiday savings. 8 Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia.

This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the number one selling fish oil brand in the US. More than 80% of Americans, that's probably a lot of you listening, including me, because I do measure my omega-3s, do not get enough omega-3 fats from their diet.

That is a problem because the body cannot produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor recommended, and in fact, this brand was recommended to be by one of my doctors. Ultimate omega fish oil formula. The ultimate omega fish oil formula for heart health brain function, immune support, and more.

It's incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. I have been taking Ultimate omega for the last two months or so, and this fishy aftertaste issue has been a problem for me, and it's actually with other brands, induced some nausea after a few days. Ultimate omega has been as clean as a whistle. I've had no issues whatsoever. If you are vegetarian or prefer to alternate, I ended up alternating two products.

That is number one, the ultimate omega fish oil formula, and also the algae omega, which is plant-based EPA and DHA. That's also from Nordic Naturals. I end up getting both of those products, and it has improved my recovery from workouts, it's improved my sleep, it has improved my mood, and I know that because I pulled out a lot of other variables.

In any case, back to the read. All Nordic Naturals fish oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form, the form naturally found in fish, and the form your body most easily absorbs. Their ultimate omega fish oil is offered in soft gels, liquid, and zero sugar gummies. Nordic Naturals fish oils are a friend of the C certified and sustainably made in a zero waste facility powered by biofuel.

They're also non-GMO and third party tested, surpassing the strictest international standards for purity and freshness. On proof, you can visit their website where they provide certificates of analysis for every one of their products. So go to Nordic.com, N-R-D-I-C, Nordic.com, and discover why Nordic Naturals is the number one selling omega-3 brand in the U.S.

And while you're there, use promo code Tim, T-I-M, for 20% off of your order. That's N-O-R-D-I-C.com, and code Tim for 20% off of the fish oil with no fishy aftertaste, all upside, no downside, try it out. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I think this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

I'm a cybernetic organism living to show a metal-hinted skeleton. Hello boys and girls, ladies and gyrms. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show. And it is my pleasure today to have Will Be Britain PhD on the podcast.

She is a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University Medical School, and the director of Brown's Clinical and Effective Neuroscience Laboratory. And that is A-Fective with an A. Her clinical neuroscience research investigates the effects of contemplative practices, i.e. meditation, or certainly one example being meditation, on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other conditions.

She is especially interested in which practices are best or worst suited for which types of people, or conditions, and why. She is probably best known for her research on adverse effects, why they happen, and how to mitigate them. And we'll be doing a very deep dive on this, certainly.

Dr. Britain is the founder of Cheetah House, as in the large and very fast cat Cheetah House, a nonprofit organization that provides evidence-based information and support for meditators in distress, as well as meditation safety trainings to providers and organizations. You can find Cheetah House on Twitter, at Cheetah House, org, Facebook. You can find it Cheetah House.org, and on Instagram, at Cheetah.house.

Dr. Britain, thank you for making the time today. Nice to see you. Thank you so much for having me. There are many reasons that I wanted to have a conversation with you, and one certainly was due to my own experience at a silent retreat, and having a flooding of traumatic memories, and everything that that led to it was overwhelming to an extent that I could not have imagined, and certainly had not been prepared for.

Secondly, is a mutual acquaintance. I won't mention his name because he is one of the more private people in the world, so I would always want to double check. He had suggested that we talk because there might be some mapping, or some similarities, at least, between meditation-related adverse events, and how symptoms present, some of the dissociation, et cetera, that you can observe in some people, and some of the adverse effects that you can see, some persistent effects after psychedelic use.

Eventually, we'll get to that, but let's start at the beginning, or at least with the Genesis story of Swords. How did you first become interested in meditation? I think, like many people, I had a life crisis that precipitated the need for something really different in my life. One of my childhood friends committed suicide when I was in college, the summer between my junior and senior year. It was devastating and completely dysregulating to see a person just disappear from the world.

It wasn't in my repertoire of possibilities that somebody could just not be there anymore. I had probably diagnosable PTSD at that point. I really didn't want to take medication. I was only 20. My dad sent me a path with heart by Jack Hornfield, and that became my Bible for the next probably decade.

For those of you who don't know, Jack Hornfield is a very famous meditation teacher, and he's written many books in this particular one, like many of them, start off with just what the mind can do and how to work with it. It was a very practical way to manage all of the emotions that were happening.

It was great because it was allowing them to be there too. It wasn't suppressing them. Ironically, that particular book that he wrote, I only got about halfway through it because the whole second half, I just could not relate to because it was like the spiritual roller coaster and like Kundalini Awakening, and I was like, I don't know what that is.

I'll just put that down, just take what you need, whatever. Then that came back fast forward 15 years. I was like, oh, right. That second half of that book, let me go back and read that. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So going into graduate school, I was also very, very interested in consciousness always and always interested in just what are we doing here? What's going on? What's looking out of my eyes and like just very curious.

So that was already happening. Then I had this experience. It culminated in my graduate career looking at altercates of consciousness in a clinical psychology program at the University of Arizona, which happens to be at the time, the only place in the world that had a consciousness study center.

So I was doing that and actually my sort of professional life, I actually studied near death experiences for my master's thesis and my own personal trauma and meditation practice was something I was doing on my personal time. It was not part of my scholarship.

But I think at some point during graduate school, like those two lives were so divided that I needed to combine them just to be like an integrated human being. And so for my dissertation, I did a study on the effects of mindfulness training on sleep.

I was working in a sleep lab and sleep is illegal, altercated consciousness and it's linked with every type of possible health issue. And so if you want to study altercates of consciousness, it's a good one to study because it's not like psychedelics that get banned.

And you know, it's everyone does it happens every day hard to bad sleep. Yeah, so it was a good one. It was a good one to choose. And you know, at the time, this is tooth around 2000. There really wasn't great research. A lot of the meditation research was on self reports. There wasn't a lot of brain data available.

And so I was going to be one of the first people to record overnight sleep polysomnography. So this is brain based sleep and prove that meditation was improving sleep because of course it was. I mean, it's relaxing, you know, it's et cetera.

So that was my dissertation and I spent like 200 nights watching people sleep. And at the end of the day, the hypothesis was not at all what I expected. So we actually found that no matter how you measured arousal, cortical arousal, brain arousal, meditation was associated with increasing it, not decreasing it.

So it was causing insomnia and people. And we looked at percentage of slow wave sleep that went down. We went looked at how fast the brain waves were those went up. And the correlation was with the amount of practice was 0.8.

So like no matter where you went, there it was. And this is my first confession is that I didn't publish the data. You know, I was like an evangelist for meditation because I this is something that had really helped me. And I really wanted to like use my science and my position as a scientist to promote this thing.

And so I didn't publish the data at some point when I was coming. I came to Brown to do my residency. A couple years later, I was on a meditation retreat. And I mentioned the data that I had found, which is basically that it was causing cortical arousal and insomnia.

And the meditation teacher sort of chastised me and said, I don't know why all you clinical psychologists are always trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows that if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping. And I was like, what?

You know, yeah. And so that was kind of like a wake up call literally. And I thought, OK, well, what other assumptions are we making? I was definitely pretty emblematic of a lot of people who go into meditation research or the average meditator, which is like, I didn't really know my Buddhism. I didn't really know my history. I just kind of signed up for whatever was around and believed everything that people said in the way that it was marketed as a sort of health promotion.

Tonic. I believed all that. And I didn't do my homework, which is pretty terrible as a meditation researcher. And so I was like, OK, looks like I need to do some history homework. And really look at the background of what kinds of assumptions we're making as health providers and like really look at the translation process of how these practices, like where they came from, what kinds of changes they made, what was the journey, like to get here into the west.

And really unpack that process. And then the second question was, what other little nuggets of knowledge do these meditation teachers have that they're not telling us. And there's a follow on part of the story, which is when I came to brown to do my clinical residency, you have to do a year of internship to see clients basically to get your license. And I did an inpatient psychiatric hospital and during that one year, there were two yogis who came off retreat.

Completely psychotic. And I thought like wow, two in one year is kind of a lot seemed like a lot to me. So I went back to this same teacher. And I said, well, have you ever seen this before. And I remember like distinctly that there was no actual verbal reaction, but there was this this look of like, oh shit. And I was like, oh, wow, like there is a story here. There is a knowledge that this can happen. And meditation teachers are sitting on this just a ton of information that needs to be mined.

And then I was like, okay, we need to start asking these questions. So that whole story is the beginning of the varieties of contemplative experience study, which was the simplest study that I've ever done the hardest with simplest. And basically just going to meditation centers and teachers and saying what types of challenges have you observed in your students. How do you make sense of them? Like what are they? How do you interpret them? And then very practically what do you do about them?

Very straightforward set of questions and that took 10 years. It's 3000 pages of qualitative data. And I don't even know how many papers we've written. We're still writing papers based on that data. I think we're like over 10 now. It's really just a wormhole, which we're going to go down together.

Oh, we are go arm and arm down the wormhole. So let me pause for a second. I want to make a promise to folks and I'll give you a heads up also we will come back to the near death experiences. I'm going to leave that as a scubi snack at the end for people. So I do want to talk about that. However, I want to dig into the sleep for one second.

If people stop sleeping period full stop eventually they die. So the restorative functions of sleep as it is still poorly understood but are critical to human functioning and survival. So how would you explain?

If it is indeed true that if people meditate enough that kind of stop sleeping or they start sleeping very minimally, how would you explain that is it that the meditation practice itself provokes a state that is restorative and therefore the sleep is less necessary or is there something else that you would put as the front runner for explaining that.

We can point readers to various papers. There is a paper that was called awakening is not a metaphor. I had to fight hard to keep that title. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. But it's a review of different studies across different types of methodologies looking at how meditation affects the wake sleep system. It's not as straightforward as stop sleeping or you sleep less. It's going to be dependent on many factors.

I will say that in the study that I was just talking about my dissertation study, we found a non monotonic, nonlinear relationship. So people who are meditating less than half an hour and less than every day, they actually had an increase in sleep quality. But people who are meditating more than that, that's when it switched and turned into they were prone to being more awake, more insomnia, more cortical arousal.

So it's a sort of bifasic nonlinear relationship. So just a recap, it's not going to give you insomnia, probably. Automatically. Yeah. Because when we talk about meditation, it's like, oh, you do meditation. It's kind of like, oh, you do sports or you exercise. It's like, well, there are a million different parameters and types and so on.

And I think one of the other papers that I wrote, which is called, can mindfulness be too much of a good thing, introduces this idea of at a small amount or an optimal amount, can do exactly what the hype and the promotions and the advertising says. But there is a lot of truth in the advertising and the positive reports, but there's also, there's another side of the story, which often comes with, you know, sort of higher doses.

So one of the ways to understand this particular finding and actually a lot of the other ones that are on the hyper arousal spectrum, would be if you think about meditation as a attention enhancing product. It gets often compared with or sort of marketed alongside riddle in and medallion and coffee and caffeine and, you know, all these stimulants that help attention.

And so if you think about meditation as one of those, I mean, think about what happens when you're not sure what medallion, which is an anti-narculepsy drug for people who don't recognize it. Okay, if you think about any of the consequences and many of us have personal experience with a lot of these substances taking too many of them, just drink too much coffee, what happens? You have a panic attack and you can't sleep.

You take amphetamines or cocaine or, you know, whatever, whatever the stimulant is, you take enough of it and it's going to be on the fear spectrum. And some of them, if you take enough of it, it's going to be on the psychosis spectrum, especially if you have sort of tendencies in that direction. So it doesn't seem like a huge leap to think that like here's another attention enhancing product that with certain people and certain types of doses, it's going to lead to a hyper arousal syndrome.

And that's pretty much exactly what we're seeing. So that is one of the potential mechanisms. So what I might do for folks who just don't have the personal context on me that I alluded to earlier, so I'll tell if it's okay with you, a bit of my story, which in some ways led to this conversation. And certainly it sounds like based on what we were discussing before recording that people have mentioned this to you.

And it's been a match made for many reasons. So I want to give folks sort of a contrast by giving present day and then the story of what happened to me at my silence retreat, which was a passenger retreat. So if we look at, for instance, the last two weeks, I have meditated twice a day, 20 minutes a day, very straight forward, transcendental meditation.

And there's lots of wacky weird stuff if you go deep enough and weird enough with TM. But if you're taking it for the off the shelf offering and following the basic guidelines, I find it incredibly therapeutic. And I find also difficult to disambiguate. I haven't had any caffeine whatsoever in two weeks. So the combination of those two for I suppose a lot of sensible reasons seems to really help having getting some of the best sleep in the last 10 years, probably in the last one or two weeks.

I'm sure the abstinence from coffee and caffeine, no small part of that. And I've seen no adverse events whatsoever. And I've done a lot of TM over the years and other types of meditation, but TM I find to be the easiest life raft of sorts. However, if we flash back and sort of alludes to the paracelsus, the dose makes the poison, I approached my meditation retreat. And this was at Sparot Rock, which is a beautiful, beautiful facility, beautiful campus really run by excellent people.

And ended up being very fortunate that the author of the book you mentioned, a path with heart that Jack Cornfield was at Sparot Rock, he ended up being the person who effectively triaged and helped address the situation I found myself in ultimately. But I've approached the silent retreat with the wrong mindset and the wrong set of expectations. I thought to myself, I've done lots of meditation.

If you add up all the time that I've meditated, it's quite a bit. I've spent time by myself. And I've also done ABCD and E really not recognizing that they are too different for me at least. And for many people, two different species of experience.

And since I had heard that it was the last time Jack would be leading a retreat, I'm not sure if that ended up being the case or not. I decided that I wanted to get absolutely as much out of it as possible. I'd seen benefits from fasting before. I'd seen benefits from lower doses of psychedelics before.

So I thought to myself, this is probably aggressive, but why don't I combine all three and that ended up being incredibly problematic, but not immediately. I'd done the fasting. So I fasted going into this week long retreat. And then after a few days of establishing my baseline, let's call it three days, I started adding increasing doses daily of blended like homogenized dried salicybium mushrooms.

People might know these better as magic mushrooms starting at about 100 milligrams and then slowly working up to about, I want to say it was 600 or so milligrams, which is reasonably high. It's far above what one would consider a microdose. Microdose, let's just call it 50 to 100 milligrams. And simultaneously, I'm having this first experience of being silent for effectively the entire day, maybe outside of asking a question or two at a Dharma talk at night.

This is brand new and what ended up happening just to jump to the punchline is I was having difficulty with the meditation to begin with. I was very physically uncomfortable. My mind began to accelerate in terms of just rumination, the velocity of thought and velocity sort of implies a direction. It was more like a ping pong ball bouncing around or a pinball bouncing around in a machine at increasing speed, sort of nonlinear, exponentially growing speed.

It was very uncomfortable. And then I want to say around day four or five, I had this flooding of memories of childhood abuse. And it wasn't just snapshots, it was like being stuck in a fully immersive VR experience that was as convincing as this reality whenever I closed my eyes.

So whenever I close my eyes, that's what I saw. It was a re-experiencing of this traumatic, these traumatic experiences from age two to four. And if people go to Timed-Uplog, such trauma, they can listen to a podcast about this and certain modalities that have helped me. But nonetheless, I did not expect this and I was utterly incapable of stopping it. I could not stop it. And this went, talk about not sleeping anytime I close my eyes. So I couldn't sleep.

So now what do you have? You have compounding lack of sleep. And I had never heard of this before. I didn't think this was a possibility. I certainly thought it was a unique experience unique to me. I should be able to figure this out.

But eventually got so desperate, I was like, I'm not going to be able to function. I mean, I am able to navigate my day to day here right now with extreme pain. But I've no confidence I'll be able to go back to normal life and make decisions, manage my business, interact in all the ways that are necessary.

And that's when I said I'm eating with Jack. And thankfully, he had the experience. He has a lot of experience, also as a clinical psychologist with cutters with people who have been abused with veterans who have lost limbs and have moral injuries and PTSD. He has a lot of mileage with many different patients and clients and meditators.

So he was able to thank God. Provide a safety net and provide me with recommendations to clinicians and so on therapist I could meet try to address this. But if he had not been there, I shoulder to think what would have happened. So that's the story and ultimately was able to sort of pull out of it and manage life, but not everyone has access to Jack and the contrast and I'll shut up in a second between my day to day over the last two weeks all upside.

And that experience are just black and white. I mean, there's there's really no comparison. Interestingly, and I'll add one more thing. I recently spent a week in isolation in the wilderness fasting for that entire week. And it was not nearly as challenging, but I did see some similar symptoms, let's say in terms of that increased speed of the pinball bouncing around in my head, as did another person I was with. So two for two without any attempt to meditate, which raises all sorts of questions.

So it's hard for me to parse what caused what I experienced, but I know that it was terrible and without Jack, I would have been fucked for lack of a better technical term. How common is that kind of experience, I guess, and certainly feel free to start wherever you'd like or pick that apart in any way that makes sense, but it was a disaster, unmitigated disaster.

And I'm very fortunate I had someone like Jack because I'd actually spoken with one other junior teacher at the time, and she was unequipped. She was not equipped to handle what was happening, but Jack was. Yeah, so many different thoughts. Thank you for coming to my tent duck. I mean, one is just, wow, wow, and so many ways like wow that that happened to you and to that you're talking about it publicly. That's amazing. So thank you, because I think it's going to be really helpful to people.

Maybe a second thought is you're definitely not alone, you're definitely not the only one, there were probably other people on your retreat. This was happening to and that in my work at Cheetah House, I see someone like that every day, I try to see at least one person every day. I'm seeing someone later today actually.

So this to me is like my bread and butter, I see it all the time, like it's so common, but what are the actual percentages is that's where we get into the rabbit hole of research and frequency research, which is actually quite complicated because it's about like, what do you mean by this? And like frequent among who? And so it becomes more complicated. And I guess one other question is given what I do that I'm an expert on meditation related challenges and neurobiology.

Is there anything that we can talk about that would be useful to you? Do you have any lingering questions that haven't been answered yet or I'll just put that out there. And then another thing is let's create a public service announcement for people like you because let me tell you, males 18 to 30 who think that combining every possible powerful tool.

All it wants to break on through to the other side is a story that I see again over and over and over again doesn't always turn out all your saying. No, it's more like a risk factor. And so at Cheetah House, we have a program called letters to my former self where people come on who did stuff like that. And then they're like, honey, let me tell you like what I wish I'd known when I was your age, you tell your former self advice. I would love you to do that.

It should also be a letter to your future self. So you don't do the same thing again, I do have a couple of questions. And well, a few observations and a couple of questions. So looking back at that experience separately prior to that experience and afterwards I had a lot of experience with fasting, including extended fasts and a lot of experience with psychedelics. And that was premeditation retreat and certainly post based on my last experience over the last three weeks where I was in isolation.

In isolation, the wilderness fasting and so on. I tend to wait in this particular case, the fasting as an exacerbating factor more than the microdosing of psychedelics, which is not to recommend to anyone that they combine things on their first meditation retreat.

There are lots of meditation retreats. Do it the plain vanilla way first would be my strong recommendation. It's going to be hard enough. Don't worry would be recommendation number one. There are some people and this is going to lead to my question like you've all know Harari who wrote Sapien, so I've had on the podcast who does a silent meditation retreat for a month every year as far as I can tell and handles it like a champion. It is like a warm bath for his mind.

I found it much harder. I'm sure there are people who find it harder. My question is this. What are the not necessarily exclusionary criteria, but what are some of the characteristics or profiles that make someone more vulnerable or likely to have this type of experience?

For instance, if you look at classical psychedelics and we could spend a lot of time defining what that means, but broadly speaking, let's just say with the usual suspects that a lot of people would recognize, let's say LSD, Solosybin, etc.

There are certainly others, Iawaska could be thrown into this for NNDMT, that if you have a family history of schizophrenia, it is likely a bad idea for you to engage with using these things simply because not to say that it will make you schizophrenic in a lifetime where you would otherwise not become schizophrenic, but it could expedite the onset of symptoms.

There are many documented cases of this. In a case that you have family history of schizophrenia, maybe you should not consume these things. I'm wondering how you would paint what the intake form should look like. What does the intake look like for a meditator treat so that a facilitator could say, you know what? I think maybe you should do 20 minutes a day or 30 minutes a day, but not do 7 days silent because that would be like taking Iawaska first schizophrenic.

How would you think about the things that make it more likely? This is a very natural place to start, which is sort of, you know, screening out. People who shouldn't meditate. And now I'm going to unpack why that's a very difficult thing to do. I conducted a epidemiological study with Vitchie Davidson and Simon Goldberg looking at meditation related adverse effects, how often they happen in risk factors.

And so statistically speaking, there is an increased risk factor for a large range of variables that would be considered stressors, adversity. So trauma history, psych history, being a some kind of minority group, you know, whether it's racial minority or sexual orientation minority, something like that is going to be a chronic stressor, and that's going to be, you know, heightened the risk for adverse effects.

And so it's very easy to just sort of well, but those people shouldn't meditate, you know, it's very easy to kind of do that. Well, first of all, more than 90% of people have exposure to a criterion a stressor. So that would be like almost everyone gets ruled out, except for the extremely sheltered and privileged, which would be not what we're trying to do with, you know, meditation is just limited to those people.

And then in our varieties of contemplative experience study, we found that a lot of the risk factors that were the most obvious ones to consider like psych and trauma history, they didn't know what they were doing incorrect practice, that kind of thing that none of those actually panned out to be true.

And so in our study, 60% of the people who had meditation related challenges were themselves meditation teachers. So they were getting correct practice instructions, they were meditating correctly, they had good supervision, they had good knowledge about what to do. And there were a number of people that did not have psychiatric or trauma histories. And so while those are risk factors, it doesn't mean that if you don't have them, that you're safe.

So the sort of take home message from me is, I'm not a big fan of screening people out. The other side of this is that there are a lot of people, and this might be not as true for psychedelics as it is for meditation, but meditation is being marketed for schizophrenia, for psychosis, for bipolar disorder, for all the things that you might as a retreat manager want to red flat.

It would be just a strange thing to start saying, oh, you can't, those people can't have access to this technology. And I've gotten letters from people that say, like, please don't just rule us out. People with what would be considered serious mental illness. So please don't just rule us out because we seem like it would be a bad idea for us.

Well, let me pause for one second and just say, it seems to depend on the type of meditation we're talking about, right? For meditating 20 minutes in the morning, there might be one intake, but for doing a seven day silent retreat, there might be a different intake. So I don't know if you're able to speak to that because those two things had about as much in common for me is like playing with a hot wheels car on the top of your kitchen table and like driving an F1 car around a hairpin.

Like they were about there. Yeah, they both involve cars. Okay. Right. I guess my point is is that I think that the action item here is not screening people out as much as being much more informed about how to monitor them closely and how to have more offerings as part of the retreat.

Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by momentus momentus offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance sleep cognitive health hormone support and more.

I've been testing the products for months now and I have a few that I use constantly personally. I've been using momentus mag three and eight, L. Thienin and Apigianin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep.

Now the momentus sleep pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients, momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world class products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly star.

Their products contain high quality ingredients that are third party tested, which in this case means informed sport and or NSF certified so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. So check it out visit live momentus dot com slash Tim and use code Tim check out for 20% off that's live momentus LIV E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash Tim and code Tim for 20% off.

I want to give people just so not everyone is like oh my god the next time I meditate is my my going to have a psychic implosion and end up in a straight jacket just to put some numbers to things. I want to read something here and just have you fact check this so people have some numbers on prevalence and also just a comparative sort of parallel of sorts that will spend a little bit of time on then I want to talk about safety training, monitoring and off ramps and things like that.

So this is from mindfulness exercises dot com, which is pulling from an interview with you with a more clear definition of adverse effects and hand will be in her team set out to research the true prevalence of life impacting adverse effects following meditation. The first surprise and result was that their epidemiological sample indicated nearly half the US population is meditative at least once I'm sure that's higher now of these people 6 to 14% had lasting negative effects.

So that's what I wanted to bring up a number that closely mirrors the adverse effects of psychotherapy 5 to 13% is that roughly accurate, would you say. Frequency research is very challenging and so I do think that the epidemiological study is probably the most valid research, but somehow that the data that they're citing is actually from combining two different studies.

So the epidemiological study, the denominator was anyone who's ever meditated even once so that's like kind of the lowest common denominator so like the lowest possible chance and within that study we found that people who had tried meditation even once half of them would have at least one negative effect and it could be extremely brief no big deal.

More concerning is that 10% so one in 10 people who had tried meditation even once would have a meditation related adverse effect that was associated with impairment and functioning and so we can go down the rabbit hole of definitions if you want, but I think that for me like having a negative experience during meditation, which I call negative valence, I don't consider that an adverse effect.

I think that if you don't have some kind of negative experience in your meditation at some point you're probably sleeping because it's not a warm bath for the mind it can be challenging so I'm not worried about that part, but I'm more worried about if it has a negative impact on your life and functioning off the cushion then I'm like, OK, that's when we need to start talking about whether there's maybe alternatives.

And so one in 10 is really the number that is jumping out of that paper the other paper, which was a clinical trial that I did much smaller trial, very selected sample of people who have kind of clinical to subclinical anxiety and depression that came up with the 5 to 15% which is still you know they correlate with each other.

What are some things that we can do to risk mitigate in terms of and you can pick whichever makes sense to start with but training for instructors or monitoring I'm actually pretty interested in the monitoring I'm interested in all of it and then off ramps what to do if somebody does have a break I suppose like I did I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a psychotic break but I felt out of control right I felt like I was not able to I would not be able to.

I would not be able to function normally had I returned to normal life without some intervention what we do to make things safer I suppose. I think it helps to start with we created a taxonomy of 59 categories of meditation related challenges and it wasn't until many years later that I went through the somatic experiencing trauma training that I started to actually see a lot of those.

59 categories in terms of trauma symptoms and in terms of symptoms of the way that the body tends to react to extreme stress and these are not necessarily so altered states but things that might be somewhat recognizable to people so one of the ways that I think is the most efficient way because we can train meditation teachers and me like I have you know online courses where you're like you have quizzes on.

The head quizzes on the 59 categories and you know there's all this content that they need to learn but I actually think that the best way to do it is to train each individual person to be like Tim how do you know when you're getting outside of your window of tolerance how do you know when you're feeling quote unquote out of control like what is your indicator for that when I seem incapable or maybe when I am incapable of stopping.

I'm not stopping very high speed negative remination I suppose it would be like perseverating on either a real event like a memory or a perceived threat like a hypothetical worst case scenario and I just loop and loop and loop and loop and loop and I'm further more aware of the looping there's part of me as the observer that's like holy shit I can't believe I seem incapable of stopping this I know it's not productive.

I know it's not productive I know it's not helping me and yet it just goes and goes and goes that would be my canary in the coal mine or maybe a flock of canaries in the coal mine. So is there anything that is an earlier indicator than that before you get there.

You know I would say it's more I've realized which factors can contribute to that it's something for me that comes on says maybe a dissatisfying answer but it's something that can come on really suddenly but I would say that overcaffeination like of sleep fasting there are

handful of things that seem more likely to precipitate this type of experience and other things doesn't happen all the time but I would say probably if I were to try to back into what I describe I'm sure that it starts with and I'm sure it started I have to imagine at my capacity retreat with having bouts of this come up and then trying to suppress it I'm sure that it took some form like that I would have to imagine it was something like that.

So you know just to quit pro quo I mean I have lots of them but I think my mouth gets dry is like an indication of sympathetic activation. Yeah interesting. Yeah. I get really hot a strong stressor for me is when my visual field starts to get wonky and that's when the sort of dissociation sets and things get a little spacey and like you're you know that so if this was a meditation class I would have everyone go around and talk about their own personal indicators.

Because no matter how much research we do those indicators are there's going to be a lot of overlap but they're also going to be some individual differences and really what matters is that the person knows what their indicators are that like my system is stressed don't keep doing what you're doing that's making this happen let's dial it back.

And unfortunately the response is often like we'll just keep going just keep meditating keep doing whatever you're doing at some point there's going to be a breakthrough but instead it's just gets worse. That is more of the angle that I'm taking is like teaching everybody what their indicator lights are you don't get in a car and drive until you know like the gas meters here like this is the tire pressure like you know you have these indicator lights and we have them.

We have indicator lights and we all need to be sort of trained on what they are individually and that will keep you a lot safer when you know where your indicator lights are I think one of the things that undermines that is this sort of fascination and romanticization of altered states and you can think of altered states as a deviation from baseline a deviation from homeostasis which is in trauma speak that is.

Disregulation an altered state is not necessarily a good idea for someone who's trying to stay stable and so just having people to be able to track that and okay like that thing my indicator light is on.

What typically helps that and go do that I need to go lift some weights I need to go dial back and I skip the coffee this afternoon or like maybe eat something by the way the fasting things really interesting we had a lot of information in the varieties project about diet but we really hadn't done anything with it and actually one of my students this year has just started to delve into the diet.

Data and is finding that it's really making a difference that a lot of people have reported that when you go on meditation retreats because they tend to be vegetarian and they tend to feed you very light food sometimes not even there's sometimes there's no dinner.

And so you know it's not fasting so much but it's definitely like you're going off of your like my personal high fat high protein diet like I get very unregulated floaty and and sort of ungrounded when I go on retreats and I really want to have like heavy food and so a lot of people found that to be a factor and found that actually eating really high fat protein meat is a remedy.

For problems and this is also you know recommended within Tibetan medicine and like an old Buddhist text textual reports will also report eating meat and heavy foods oils can also be something that can help.

Sort of bring people down and more grounded and when we interview the teachers as teachers which was a second part of the study there was really not a lot of consensus about like what was a problem what wasn't a problem what was a risk factor what wasn't but there were two things and one was when the person stops sleeping and when the person stops eating.

That's when you intervene so those are the two things that people all teachers mentioned as being something that they worry about let me happen for a second just to mention something that I found in the process of doing homework for this is actually in a heart first piece about you and your team and it discussed something that I've also seen.

In which does not really get discussed so I'm bringing it up very deliberately post certain potent psychedelic experiences so this is something that I've seen in both well actually I should say now I've seen described here as a adverse effect of meditation possibly for some folks and also I've seen this post psychedelic and this is I'll just read quote practicing letting go of concepts one

that I told Britain was sabotaging my mind's ability to lay down new memories and reinforce old memories of simple things like what words mean and colors mean when I'm going to underline is what's coming next to meditators also reported diminished emotions both negative and positive quote I had two young children

another meditator said I couldn't feel anything about them I went through all the routines you know the bedtime routine getting them ready and kissing them and all that stuff but there's no emotional connection it was like I was dead end quote so this and Hadoinia let's call it which interestingly can also be for some people addressed with psychedelics but what's less talked about is that it can be initiated in some people by psychedelics where they come out and they're sort of numb to the world and people think of the amygdala is this for me.

The amygdala is this fear center but it's not exactly a fear center so maybe you could just speak to this particular manifestation of issue because I've seen it in both camps. There's kind of two different ways that this can happen with meditation and and psychedelics with meditation if you look at the neuroscience of meditation and there's lots of different kinds but like we'll just say like concentration practice you tend to see.

You know a down regulation of the limbic system the amygdala and you know activation of the prefrontal cortex so attention system goes up down regulates the limbic system and again this can be great good things you regulate all your anxiety and depression but if you keep going then you're going to see a down regulation of not just negative emotions but also positive ones people forget that like the amygdala is you know a salience detector for all sorts of things

positive and negative and you're going to see if you continue to down regulate your limbic system with meditation and you take a far enough then you will see a decrease in the intensity of all emotions otherwise known as anodonia according to you know obiscacary that could also be something that could be equanimity so depends on what you want.

Tomato to mana. Obviously the person who didn't feel anything for her children that was not her goal but I actually that particular quote that you're reading I read that quote in a conference and a Buddhist scholar like jumped up at the end and said cutting attachments with you know affection with your families is exactly what you're supposed to be doing.

And so I was like okay we need to talk about what your goal are so yeah that that does protest too much meditation like there is overlap so what's interesting about that model prefrontal cortex control over the limbic system is that that's also the neuroscience of dissociation so there are certain forms of meditation that mimic. The exact neurobiology of dissociation so that's one way to end up in this place the other way so I called out the low road because you're just basically just.

Taking everything down getting calmer and calmer and calmer. The high road is the one we were talking about earlier where you're training your attention and everything's up regulating and you're getting more and more and more like your thoughts are racing and you're having flooding of. Traumatic experiences and you're you know everything's getting heightened and at some point your systems like whoa this is too much and you have this beautiful adaptive natural.

Breaker switch called dissociation it'll basically shut down the limbic system again and you'll basically end up in that state the first state that I just talked about where you have like a strong activation of the prefrontal cortex and a down regulation of the limbic system. It's two different roads to the same place and so what's interesting and sort of the overlap with psychedelics is that.

That too much kind of response that can lead to dissociation it doesn't always have to be negative people can have like a euphoric unit of experience where they merge with the universe or they have just something just ecstatic kind of experience. But their organism is like that was too intense that was too much for me I'm turning on the breaker and they wake up in the morning and they're like they feel dead.

And they spend years trying to recreate that awesome experience but you know they're not really listening to their organisms messages which is saying like that was too intense are you listening there is a very interesting overlap at cheetah house when people come for help we see.

The combination of psychedelics and meditation very often a lot of times in this scenario where they go on a meditation retreat had an ecstatic experience or just a very intense experience wake up feeling dead and adonic and they think I got a sort of shock the system back into action and they go take a psychedelic.

And that just makes things worse because the systems like I'm been trying to tell you that this is too much and now you're just really pushing the envelope and we also see the opposite people who have the initial experience on psychedelics and then they decide well I'm very dysregulated and they get told by various authorities you should go on a meditation retreat or you should meditate either way at least the people who show up at cheetah house the combination was not the answer for them.

Let me hop in for a second just to ask a few follow up questions on retreat specifically are there any intensive retreats that you recommend or extended retreats and I suppose the broader question is how can one know where to practice and vet properly right if someone wants to do a meditation retreat.

And the reason I ask is for instance with psychedelics which are still largely underground at this point even though at some point hopefully there will be an entire framework for administering them reasonably safely to people who fit certain criteria.

If someone finds a facilitator says no one under my car has ever had a bad trip that is a huge red flag because it means they're either deluding themselves they're lying or they're really inexperienced those are kind of the only options on the table because you're effectively using nuclear power to change the plasticity of the mind.

Of course they're going to be adverse events of course they're going to be outliers and so you want someone who is actually handled those cases to push my F1 analogy if you go to a race track let's just say and you're going to a track day. And track runner says we've never had any accident of any type on our track that's a bad thing because someone's going to have an accident you want to make sure they have protocols in place they've experienced the presence of mind a handle it calmly etc etc.

So I could see that applying also to vetting meditation retreats but putting myself in the position of someone listening to this I might say holy shit of the people who have tried meditation once x percentage have these persistent problems like this seems really really dangerous maybe I just shouldn't meditate so maybe offset that a little bit.

Are there retreats that you ever recommend and how can someone vet if they're considering doing a retreat a lot of it has to do with matching the goals to the person so I don't want to necessarily rule out or recommend any particular retreat across the board.

I think that there are certain retreats that are pretty repeat offenders and those are ones that have like high dose you know 15 hours of meditation a day no movement practice often you see an alternation between walking and sitting and sometimes there's even yoga added so more intense practices with no movement and also.

Not necessarily tailored feedback from teachers so I would be very careful before going on one of those and I think just in general there are so many different options for retreats these days you can do like an afternoon retreat where it's only a couple hours start there tight trade up and you can do this at home you don't even have to necessarily spend the money you can just download an app and do that for a day and see how you do you know the way you can do it.

You know like tight trade up and and at a day at a time rather than signing up for a 10 day retreat. Something I have not mentioned before is that I've done shorter meditation retreats like two or three days with no issues whatsoever so I just want to point that out the other fine detail that I want to mention because I think spirit rock runs a very good ship and I think they're very well formatted and they do have safeguards in place that they explicitly advise a good way to do it.

It buys against fasting and I violated that rule I overroad that right and also added the psychedelics which certainly I not mentioned anyone until I already sort of capsized yeah it's never used to be an issue.

But I know that people are doing that that people are bringing psychedelics on retreats and I think a lot of the retreats they have to manage a lot of people people are already having like challenging experiences the regular kind of challenging experiences with meditation and so to have to manage people who are also taking psychedelics is that's a lot.

It's not really fair to a meditation retreat no it's going to be invisible to them for the most part yeah sure right it's not going to be reported just like people lie on their medical and takes about the psychiatric medications they're taking if they are.

Wedded to taking psychedelics with facilitator this happens all the time people sort of misrepresent their health status because they're so vested in this last Hail Mary Obi-Wan Kenobi or final hope solution panacea that they see in psychedelics and I have to imagine that also happens with meditation retreats I should also say I'd love for you to say a bit more about repeat offenders are there any other characteristics or

format issues that you see producing more problems than others outside of what you already mentioned so in terms of the retreat or meditation type or in terms of personal risk factors. The retreat or meditation type that seemed to produce a higher volume of people with these issues.

I would say retreats that recruit or are attracting a certain type of meditator which by the way like you fit the bill like pretty exactly when I heard the story I was like wow that's pretty emblematic of textbook yeah. Young male pretty educated combining all sorts of tools you know fairly aggressive we used to joke that one of the risk factors was zelletry a kind of zelletry a zeal.

So something like that and so there's a certain kind of almost like military this is going to be a really really hard retreat those types of retreats are a little bit more high risk and I think there's also the combination of the person

and the teacher slash format one of the things that we found that was really shocking in the varieties of contemplative experience study is that on one hand we expected to see people who ran into problems as people who had lots of problems in their lives but when we actually

looked at the data 75% had graduate degrees MD PhDs JDs these were like CEOs of major companies these are like super high achieving people and we're like this is so interesting how do we make sense of that and we're like oh right being a high achiever is a risk factor.

I was just about to say like the drug addiction in the medical profession is off the charts like suzides off the charts so because these are the kinds of people that you're like okay you're going to sit and follow your breath and they're like okay like they're the ones that show up early for the meditation and they're the last ones to leave they follow instructions exactly they would never modify the instructions for their own benefit that would not even occur to them unless they make it more intense you know the kinds of.

You know the kinds of people that and this is kind of where trauma comes in if you've been trained to scan what are the expectations here what are the sort of unspoken social rules that I need to.

Ace in order to not be punished if that's like kind of your M.O. running in the background and we have all these people like following instructions exactly not modifying them basically listening to an external authority rather than their own internal compass that's the recipe for disaster and so if you can interface with really any type of meditation.

So if you're a spiritual system with maintaining your inner compass that's going to be a recipe for a much better outcome not everybody can do that and not all systems are tolerant of that and so I would also encourage and we've had lots of trainings with meditation centers trying to be able to be able to be more flexible.

So I know is like I need to be able to leave the meditation in the middle so that I'm not continuing to meditate and the meditation retreat manager is like no that won't be allowed you have to say if you come you have to stay for the whole thing. That's not really allowing flexibility so are there ways that people can.

Toitrate the amount of practice that they're getting within a retreat is there a way to like hey on on Wednesday will have burger night for people who need to like increase the like fat intake you know that is actually happening now. The vegetarian diet piece is super interesting. I mean I don't know if the acuity is sufficient as a factor but it makes me think also with for instance some of these conditions that are

let's just say contraindicated for most psychedelic use schizophrenia borderline personality disorder understanding these are all kind of like word salad things taken from the DSM which is kind of a big question mark for a lot of reasons but some of these more for lack of better terms sort of chaotic conditions are contraindicated respond really well to something called metabolic psychiatry with Chris Palmer is spoken about this out of Harvard using high fat effectively ketogenic diet but like high fat moderate protein.

Some of these people respond incredibly well so if you look though at the food served at these meditation treats uniformly effectively the exact polar opposite right which is kind of interesting do you meditate do you meditate now or is that not a practice for you. That's a long long story alright let's do it depends on what you mean by meditate okay so meditation when I first undertook it you know with jacks sort of meditation came from a specific.

Tradition and it had a whole bunch of implicit goals and values that weren't really clear to me because I was just like suffering and so I thought I'm just going to do this so I won't feel so much panic and anxiety and etc.

And so you know I've done tens of thousands of hours of meditation I've been you know the expert meditator in many brain imaging studies like I've done my time as a Buddhist meditator but I started to understand that there's a whole set of implicit values that like I didn't necessarily choose what would be an example if you don't mind an example is.

That the ideal affect or the goal emotion state is more on the comment of things and as a direct descendant of general George us patent it's not really in my blood to be calm so. More of a border collie less of a great day and yeah anyway there's lots of people who their ideal state is not calm and so there's lots of implicit values and I think that.

This is just something as meditation is moving into the west and kind of mixing with a lot of different cultures and sub cultures and goals and values like can these contemplative practices be used for many different types of goals rather than ones that were preset as part of a religious practice and I think that is happening but for myself in particular I have you know I'm not going to be a part of that.

I have you know specific practices that I do that I have permission now from myself to modify practice to not just follow the rules the way that I did before and end up somewhere that I didn't want to go but rather to modify things and make sure that.

I'm going where I want to go but that also requires me to like actually sit down with myself and be like where you want to go which is another thing that I recommend for people Amy man as a song right down what you need before you sign away the D make sure you know like what you want because you're going to get on a highway and it's going to be kind of fast tracking you to somewhere.

Making sure that you are actually going where you want to go I want to know what practices that you follow not to imply that anyone should just copy paste right you got to know your own needs but I am curious like where you've landed personally you tell me where do you like to start.

I want to go to the varieties of contemplative experience this was the study that took us 10 years and we came up with 59 categories of meditation related challenges and adverse effects and we categorize them into set. Different domains cognitive perceptual affective which is emotional somatic conative which is motivational sense of self and social so I'm not going to go through all 59 people can look them up they're on this Cheetah house website under symptoms.

But just to give you a sort of basic overview of what is in each category so cognitive types of experiences are increase in thought frequency which you talked about. I trouble with executive functioning so making decisions paying attention loss of conceptual meeting structures which you also mentioned probably the most famous example is the woman who on the way back from retreat stopped at a red light saw the red color but didn't register what it meant that it meant stop.

You see how that would be. You need your concept executive function you need your concepts that's the cognitive domain perceptual you see perceptual hypersensitivity you can also see hallucinations visions changes in perception also changes in derealization so feeling like you're in a dream or.

Things feel flat or cartoon like emotions can go in either direction with you've already kind of touched on so increases in fear and panic and re-experiencing of trauma but also affect of blunt things so loss of emotions altogether. You can also see in the somatic domain we can see else's energy like somatic experiences we have an entire paper on that. What is that so experiences of sort of electricity or voltage or.

We talked about insomnia already and lots of different kinds of pain syndromes headaches different kinds of pains in terms of cognitive or motivational again insane just enlighten or bust kind of changes in motivation sorry honey like i'm gone i'm going to go shave my head and become a monk we see that all the time and then the opposite complete loss of motivation why would i do anything.

No goals whatsoever the sense of self domain is my personal favorite i teach an entire class on it called me myself and i but there's lots of changes in senses of self and that can range from the narrative self the story of me your identity self all the way down to your sense of ownership over your own body over body sensations emotions thoughts

and then also down to your sense of self other self world boundaries can dissolve we have a whole paper on that as well and obviously there's a lot of overlap with psychedelics with that particular category so we can unpack that if you want.

And then within the social domain not surprisingly if you're having these experiences it can be related to some social consequences people don't like hearing about this they have all sorts of reactions wait to you get your responses to this episode yeah i want to talk about the doll I love to before we don't like to hear about so you get so a lot of people get shunned by their communities sometimes you know their teachers get irritated with them.

And then there's also trying to go to work and trying to explain why you can't function so there's all sorts of social dynamics that go with that that was kind of the quick and dirty overview of the 59 categories and I will say that within that particular study the varieties of contemplative experience study we looked at duration of symptoms and duration of impairment and duration of impairment the average was one to three years.

So it was quite a bit of time and it ranged from a few days to more than a decade so this can be and I think you know your experience you can kind of understand why it could be quite a long time before you recover if you don't happen upon jackhorn field for a while.

Yeah I was I won the lottery on that latter part of things and you know the duration you're describing I just want to draw a couple of parallels me earlier alluded to this but you could take almost everything you just mentioned if not everything and map it to adverse events related to psychedelic experiences pretty much everything I think everything that you mentioned and in terms of duration there's something that doesn't get talked about very much also because

it is viewed as perhaps risking the cause and the momentum of the psychedelic renaissance but there's something it's a bit of a mouthful I wish it had a better name but HPPD hallucinogen persisting perception disorder and I know people who have experienced this where they are effectively hallucinating on some level for years.

I have a family member who experienced this by marriage I have a very close friend who experienced this for the second half of his undergrad and for several years afterwards and people can find more on this online but I suppose we could move into scaffolding but I'd like to ask you are there any particular distinctions clear differences between meditation related adverse events and psychedelic related adverse events.

Well we don't really know that's actually a study that we're in the middle of collecting data on so I'm glad that you mentioned that there's a lot of overlaps because I'm also seeing them and a lot of people that have had both experiences are mentioning that there's a lot of overlap so the study that we're connecting is basically looking at basically seeing how much they overlap and whether there are systematic differences.

If I had to guess I would say that the perceptual changes the HPPD like changes would be more common in the psychedelic world I do think there's something neurological going on there that might be not happening in all forms of meditation but we definitely see like visual snow and there can be some perceptual changes that are enduring visual changes that are enduring but if you look at the HPPD

literature it's actually a lot more than just visual changes there's a whole lot of different things going on so yeah I think that's a really interesting question how they compare but also with whether somebody is a dual user and whether it's changing that way.

A lot of people are a dual users yeah it's very hard to disambiguate the resource I want to recommend and I can't vouch for it personally fortunately I do not have HPPD but the more people use these compounds meaning psychedelics of various types the more this is going to become prevalent and really need proper addressing there is a website it's perception dot foundation and that's the perception restoration foundation they have resources they have frequently asked questions

about HPPD they have a documentary trailer they also have a specialist directory I cannot vouch for the capabilities of any of the specialist but a lot of people who experience this feel the way I did in the midst of my silent retreat which is I am broken I don't know how to fix this everyone else seems fine I don't even know to call this and there's a real sense of Utility or hopelessness that can come with that so.

Suffice to say the perception restoration foundation may be a place to start I can't vouch for it but perception that foundation for folks who may want to look that up what is scaffolding. For people who come to Cheetah House and let me just back up a little bit about the Cheetah House sort of origin story I mean the actual Cheetah House started as a halfway house for brown students who wanted to become monastic.

Because of our contemplative studies program so kids will get meditation training in school has part of college they get so inspired by it that they want to go to India and ordained as monks and going there and coming back and living in dorms as celibate non intoxicant taking college students doesn't really work so they lived at Cheetah House that was the sort of the original function of Cheetah House was to support

sort of semi monastic brown students and is it true cheetahs a play on words cheetahs a play on words it's a play on the Sanskrit term chitta which means loosely mind when we started doing the varieties of conservative experience study we were interviewing a number of people who were having meditation related challenges and some of them had just gotten out of the hospital and you know they're like I'm 27 and I'm living with my parents like can I live with you and so I live with you and I'm going to be able to do that.

So I live at Cheetah House so this is like you know my house it's a big Victorian house with lots of floors and so there was an entire floor where meditators could live and kind of recover from whatever was happening so that was the beginning of Cheetah House it is now entirely online and is helping people recover from meditation related challenges and a number of them they are not able to meditate at all they're not able to engage in the same way as they are.

So I think it's really important to engage in anything that looks like meditation all that trauma cues and associations are around everything meditation so sitting with your eyes closed sitting on a floor with your legs crossed using a soft voice and guidance like all of that triggers the response trigger city basically half of the like mental health world just becomes inaccessible to these people because you know they go to a therapist and the therapist is like oh you need to do that.

Oh you need to do mindfulness and they're like no not mindfulness please anything but mindfulness so we have to figure out a way to like help people you know build their own practice and I think the other piece that I wanted to unpack with you is you know after I heard your podcast was the term ideological power and so ideological power is the power to control meaning language and which concepts are available and how they're used.

The power to interpret your own or others experiences behavior or feelings and the power to silence or undermine the important thing here is that trauma is associated with powerlessness and a lack of options and a lack of agency and so for people who have been traumatized by meditation or meditation systems any kind of system is also

a form of ideological power over them even like CBT as a system any kind of therapy or model as a system and so that also becomes something that they're not able to work with because it feels controlling it feels like it's some kind of value system or model that's being imposed on them so how do you work with that and so we have to start with so this is called person centered approach so if you want to do that you can do that.

So if you are my pretend client I would ask you like before you started meditating or just outside of your meditation life what is something that is a resource for you just for general well being or talking about psychological well being as a resource I mean what I typically do is actually ask you look around where you are right now and pick something like a tangible object that's in your immediate vicinity that's meaningful to you.

But unrelated. Right I was going to say intense exercise I mean like I've told every girlfriend I've ever had with you see me trying to sit down and think my way through a problem for more than like a half hour just tell me to go with some heavy stuff for an hour.

And just like tell me to get out of the house and go exercise and chances are it'll resolve itself but if I'm looking for something meaningful that is near me right now there's quite a bit here around me at the moment I could say there is a artist sketchbook for working with mostly graphite and ink where I do some drawing there is a copy of the profit by Khalil Gibran which I read when I hop in the sauna just read a couple pages.

Frequently and then put it down I could keep going but those are two so as you're scanning the environment when I ask you like notice something that's meaningful there's a salience glomming onto different objects skipping over certain areas but glomming on to certain objects but it's not that the salience has a different flavor for each one so if you were going to think about I'm going to take my nervous system in that direction.

I'm going to take it in that direction you could actually start to chart where you could go different option just by looking at these different objects they're kind of telling you oh this will be activating this will be energizing this will be calming this will be strength inducing so pick a direction where would you want your nervous system to go and then pick an object that goes with that I'll choose the sketchbook because that's where I am totally immersed in the world.

I'm immersed in something present tense I can get lost in artwork I don't think about whatever's the stake I made in the conversation yesterday I don't think about whatever bullshit I have to handle tomorrow I find that very nourishing in a calming way so I'll choose that. And so as I'm watching you I can see your eyes are kind of going somewhere that's not anywhere in particular which means you have like some images that are in your mind.

So maybe I'm also looking at the sketchbook that's directly past the laptop. Okay so maybe more generally but we can work with that. Yeah so maybe more generally when you look at the sketchbook and you're talking about it and you're thinking about what it can do for you like what are you noticing that goes with that.

I would say my sympathetic nervous system seems to down regulate breathing seems to slow a little bit from being totally honest I have like a small amount of anxiety because I was really consistent with my art for a while and I've been in the lab for the last two months and I feel badly about it. It's something level of guilt but that's not what I'm going for. Yeah so let me just pause there so some kind of drop in your sympathetic nervous system.

So how is that manifesting you said your breathing starting to calm down what else is going with that what are other ways that you're noticing some muscular relaxation. Yeah back, back neck those would be most obvious I would say less fidgety less bouncing of the foot.

And so as you're looking at this object this sketchbook and talking about it you're noticing that you're having sympathetic activation is decreasing it's changing your breathing there's something happening in your back that's easing. And as I'm feeding this back to you what are you noticing that goes with that I think it reinforces it's like a not exactly positive reinforcement sounds like positive reinforcement for the relaxation so I'm able to settle into it.

This is kind of like the beginning of scaffolding this is what it's like because if I try to say like okay you're going to focus on your breathing or I'm going to give you an object to focus on 50% of people who are given the breath as an object of meditation.

Find that it's not a safe object and can actually induce anxiety so if I have you pick the object I couldn't have picked out in a million years if I got to wander around your house and be like which things should I pick I wouldn't have been able to pick something you know immediately you have so much going on and as a meditator you're able to like feel into your environment and there's like oh wow these different flavors of how they're actually impacting me and so I would spend an hour with you.

Unpacking one particular object and I would be watching how your hands are moving and you might be like oh and there is a story that goes with this sketchbook and like you might end up on who gave you the sketchbook and like it's really about that.

We kind of like go down this rabbit hole together and I'm tracking your physiology with mine and if you're very very dysregulated and dissociated and you're one of those people who can't feel anything anymore I can notice very small changes in your physiology and be like hey remember that one thing that you just said because I saw your eyes brighten up a little.

I'll be able to like amplify specifically amplified certain things but I'm following your lead and so as somebody who's been very traumatized about power dynamics and following any kind of instructions feels like oppression and feeling trapped in sort of some system if I'm following you and just reflecting back to you what I'm seeing that can be a little bit more palatable that's kind of what scaffolding is.

And that's what we offered it meditators who have basically developed a trauma response to meditation itself which can really rule out a lot of ways. Yeah, that's an elegant workaround slash approach and I would say that I'm very fortunate that I don't personally despite the child's experience with the abuse have that aversion to systems or coaches or teachers.

I think in part because I'm such a problem student in the sense that I just will constantly stop things and question things and I don't feel like I need to take anything that is just off the rack so to speak. So I feel very fortunate about that let me return since I made a promise to my listeners and to myself that I would to your personal practices. What does yourself care look like in that department what are those practices wherever you landed.

So I've been doing this resourcing for a long time this scaffolding and where it landed me so I started to realize that I this is in some ways not super surprising but I have a very strong reaction to like living things like animals and plants and so. I started to realize like how powerfully impacted my gardening I started getting really obsessed with like rare plants and growing them in a grow light. What kind of rare plants just to name one I'm so curious.

Oh just like I don't know weird tomatoes things that you can't buy in the grocery store just things that you can't find otherwise but basically where I ended up was my husband and I bought 90 acres in an undisclosed mountain area. In Vermont and we built an off grade cabin there and it is so awesome that I think I'm going to move to Vermont.

Oh whoops I just did it like the Tim Ferriss podcast but yeah like this exercise that we just did if that becomes the practice replacing the hours a day that I did with the passana with a practice like that actually amplifying.

My positive engagement with the world and what's in it that that grew into something so beautiful and magnificent as this place in the mountains and so it's not just a technique that you do at your house to in order to perform better it's just completely taken over my life so that's where I ended up.

So it sounds almost epicurean in a way like telling the garden engaging with nature sure certainly not to add the label to it I'm just saying that do you find that you derive the benefits you hope to derive from meditation through these new this new engagement that you're referring to or have your goals just changed.

If you wanted to paint a picture of like what my daily practice looks like imagine I'm wearing actually my flat shirt like sort of in in in the memories of my Vermont self but imagine me putting on like some car heart overalls and like getting a weed whacker or chainsaw and going out and like doing trail work. And even for like the basic idea of coming back and having to do you know writing a paper or you know running statistics or something meditation never really improved my cognition.

I always found that I was sort of at one of those sleepy meditators I would just get really really really calm and kind of like my brain just kind of got dull but if I go out there and just like use power tools outside and cold. Then I'm like my blood's moving my brains working that's doing more of what I was hoping meditation would do and I'm also just like ecstatically happy which meditation never did that for me.

Humans are built for movement you got to move the meditation is great but it's for me very valuable so I will say that small dose high frequency high meaning twice a day is very strengthening to my mind.

To my life and my experiences and I spend four to five times minimum as much time moving every day like the movement the movement is a critical piece of things where can people find more information with respect to a class or training related to the meditation related effects preventing them mitigating them recovering from them whether it says an individual or a facilitator slash trainer.

The public facing sort of service branch info branch of my lab is at cheetah house so that's cheetah like the animal house like a house dot org and there's tons of information on the website lots of videos and links to different kinds of symptom specific resources but if you're interested in training specifically on the cheetah house website there's a tab called online courses.

If you're a meditation teacher or a clinician you can actually take the courses and there's a quiz and it will give you you know you can make sure that you know the content so there's more information there you can also sign up for the cheetah house newsletter and that will alert you to any of the kind of public lectures.

That we have we have one a month and actually we have one today that's on cert which is spiritual existential religious and theological issues in psychedelic assisted therapies by Roman pull its key so that's a good one to see today he just published an article in jama about that topic and he'll be unpacking it.

For people so we do meditation related challenges meditation related issues but also psychedelics are becoming much more of a topic it's unavoidable on that those the meditation and psychedelics are combining.

Yeah absolutely and you know I want to zoom out for just a quick second and say that actually let me volunteer something I don't think I've said publicly which is we've been talking about among other things these adverse events adverse effects that can be associated with meditation different types different volumes and psychedelics however I don't want to lose what I mentioned earlier I may have gotten the the boundaries the upper and lower bounds.

Wrong on the numbers but adverse events in psychotherapy after my experience is pure rock I went to one of the most famous psychotherapists who works with trauma in the world and if I mentioned his book everyone would recognize it who's in the trade per say and this guy was one of the most narcissistic unbelievably unempathetic people I'd ever met in my life and he did a tremendous amount of damage I met with him twice for two.

Individual sessions and his ego so out of control and his sort of recommendations so intense and so flippant that it did a tremendous amount of damage and that took this was related to the childhood sexual abuse and it took a long time to undo the damage inflicted by a famous psychotherapist and I guess I wanted to bring this up to say that when you engage with these mind altering modalities whether we're consciousness altering modalities as soon that you're dealing with

power tools and you need people who will admit that yes you can cut fingers off if you use power tools incorrectly and furthermore who have lots of time not just working with clients but handling adverse events and handling them is not just an issue of capability it's also an issue of empathy and will so Danny Meyer who's famous for shake shack and hospitality in many different restaurants grammar see tabernin others has this sort of matrix

on the wall for employees and it's the will can matrix right so just because someone is a skilled psychotherapist does not mean they're going to be willing to provide after care or safety net if you have an unraveling it's to me really important that you

sort of assess practitioners in advance to ensure that they have in fact handled these cases and feel very capable and have demonstrated competency in handling these things calmly so I just want to say that because there's so many fly by night renta shaman's running around

and people who have done like one yogurt free and had one or two psychedelic experiences are suddenly acting is on the road messiahs trying to proselytize everyone and this also goes for meditation right like I know people who have basically had

what I would call psychotic breaks pursuing Kundalini awakening and then there suddenly traveling sales people for endorsing this and they haven't yet even achieved stability for themselves is really common so just make sure you're dealing with people who have handled red line cases and have a clear demonstrated track record regardless of the modality so everything you'd like to add not necessarily along those lines but any comments you'd like to make I have more questions I do want to ask about

indeed I forgot about that part of my life how I know I take notes so I don't forget I mean one of the things that we've learned at Cheetah House is that exactly that scenario that you're describing is that the help their professions can also be the source of harm and trauma this is called institutional betrayal when

the people who are supposed to be helping you are actually the cause of harm what happens when you when you have not only trauma to meditation but trauma to all helping professions and helping professionals like really restricts your your options

and so you know we and there's other groups that do this to you know we run a pure support model because a lot of people get to the point where they don't trust anyone until they can sort of prove that I was completely undone by this I understand what it's like to be leveled by this scenario and then you're like okay you get it now I can talk to you

because that empathy when you've been leveled that much this is like one of the silver linings is that you have so much compassion and empathy when you've been leveled you really understand what that's like to be in that place to be a puddle on the ground so that's one of the models that we have a Cheetah House and I think it really works it works in two ways one is that people feel heard and validated

and not alone because they're being able to talk to someone that this happened to as well who's also recovered so they're like oh my god I can actually recover from this and then for the people who are offering care you know they're like wow I had this five year hole in my life that was just this thing that is not good for anything and now I can actually it's something that's actually a gift I can give to somebody else

and so every moment that they spend with someone else is actually sort of being fueled by that trauma so it's nice to be able to have that trauma mean something and be useful in some way and not just be a drain on your life so that's another piece that I think is a nice model that's out there but yeah I hear you with the trouble finding a good therapist boy yeah

a lot of clowns running around all over the place and just to underscore the peer support because you're you're reminding me of something I'll put out a plea to the psychedelic communities which is if you have not this is also related to your getting leveled comment if you have not had at least 30 to 50 high dose psychedelic experiences you should not be serving psychedelics to anyone that'll be statement number one that would be a minimum

and not recommending people do anything illegal but I'm simply saying people are going to do what people are going to do if you have not been tumbled and humbled in a way that has left you questioning whether you should ever touch these compounds again you are not in a position to administer to other people and the equivalent would be if you go skiing once on the bunny slope and you happen not to fall and all of a sudden you're taking people on hell skiing trips without any type of guides or

airbags because skiing is fun and helpful that is when I see all over the place so step number one is 30 to 50 minimum personally because that will give you a chance to go skiing 50 times and not only will you fall you will have some bad

falls and you'll have different types of falls and then you'll be more informed on a subjective level about the risks involved and then I would say secondly you should in this connects to your pure sport comment volunteer with an organization like zendo at festivals where the age range skews younger like lightning and a bottle in other places

zendo is pure driven harm reduction related to psychedelic but really drug consumption and you get a decent amount of training it's pretty nominal it's non directive supports you're not trying to therapist people but here's what I would suggest is you volunteer for the roughest shift which is generally going to be after midnight

and if you're capable and you should determine if you're capable volunteer what they sometimes call the crisis tent which is when they have red line cases when people are really freaking the fuck out and losing their minds often for hours at a time and see how well you handle those if you don't handle those really well you should not be serving psychedelics to anyone so that's my public service announcement anyway and ease how did you become interested in near death experiences

how this was not a question that I'm deeply interested in this is like I wonder what part of my website is going to find discover totally forgot about this I mean I think wow this is a really long time ago but I was really interested in temper low epilepsy and how people have religious experiences

as a result they call it the sacred disease and there's been speculation that there been a number of saints that had temporal epilepsy and so I was really interested to know whether near death experience or well I was just really interested in the question of whether religious experiences and temporal epilepsy if there was an overlap

but near death experiences are actually one of the few types of spiritual experiences that are actually kind of similar there's a typography like there's a tunnel there's a light there's a life review they're kind of similar and so that's kind of an ideal thing to study and so that's what I did and I happened to work in a sleep lab and sleep is a natural activator of hypersynchrony so basically epileptic form brain activity as you go to sleep your brain synchronizes

and so if you tend to have epilepsy it will show up in your sleep you can also use strobe lights to induce epilepsy yeah do you mean hence the warnings on all the video games but from you know an institutional review board human subjects you know I feel like I didn't even see yours in people so but like hey I'm not doing any induction I'm just what they're just sleeping I don't have to tell them that

so anyway they slept in the lab and we we slipped at their brains to see whether they had any kind of hypersynchrony and they did that was the shocker when you say that these are people diagnosed epilepsy you're talking about people who had ND is I taught a class on death and loss in graduate school and as part of that class one of the people I kind of inherited a lot of the guest speakers from like other people

the top of us and one of them was a woman who had a near death experience and ran a near death experience support group and I was like amazing so I went started going to the support group and I was like there's so many of them

and then I was like hey you guys want to come sleep in the lab and we'll scan your brains and see what's going on there and so I kind of made friends with the near death support group and that's how that study happened so the group was I forget how many there were but I don't know like 20 or something like people who had had near death experiences

and then we had people who had some type of non-near death experience control group I forget if they were a trauma survivors I can't even remember far death experience yeah anyway we had a control group and they did not have any kind of epilepsy form activity in their brains

how do you explain that that's so fascinating I'm pretty agnostic as to what that means just if you're like to drink sand and speculating there's two possibilities one is that they did not have epilepsy form activity and it's a scar it's like a resident of the experience chances are when you have a near death experience and these are people that all had their heart stop so they definitely had some anoxia oxygen deprivation which can cause hypersyncherny and epilepsy form activity

so that's one possibility the other possibility is that they had a sort of tendency towards hypersyncherny and that was what caused the experience but you know I was very agnostic about not choosing a position or having an interpretation I just said this group has a sort of distinct brain activity compared to non-experiences and I just left it at that but what was so interesting was the response that I got from both complete skeptics and from the near death experience community

so I got the total opposite from no interpretation on my part and this has been actually like a kind of thing that's followed me for my whole life the universe were shocked test let's see how people take it thank you so much for verifying and proving scientifically with neuroscience because neuroscience can prove anything right that haven't exists

you know I'm like I don't think I really did that but thanks I'm not sure that was in my summary and then the skeptics would write me and be like thank you for finally proving that these people are all nuts you know and I was like okay I didn't either of those things but that's interesting and so wow I mean that's a whole other like conversation is be a researcher or just talk about charged topics and see what kind of responses you get

fascinating I could keep going on the ideas I have a lot of questions about that a lot of the descriptions seem to be incredibly similar to the mystical experiences reported by users of higher dose psychedelics

the description is very very similar which is interesting because you have this sort of fear extinguishing related to death in both camps frequently it seems to be the case and I'll ask you a question we can cut it out of the audio if you want but I'm curious so there seem to be and I don't think there's anything in any peer reviewed studies or anything but many case studies

of supposedly reports of people who observe things while their hearts are stopped or they are technically brain dead so conversations that are happening things that are moving around the tools that are used they take the dentures out of someone and put them on a specific tray these types of things

is that just complete nonsense or do you think that's something that's worth investigating peaks my curiosity it's funny because I have the reputation for being the grampiest skeptic ever and I'm going to tell you some mind blowing stories from my near death experience research what are you trying to do to my reputation here to

we don't have to keep it but I think I know people will be interested in I'm interested I have to follow my crazy story that happened this is true and it happened like the the sort of end of the story happened recently

I'll tell you the end of the story first so we want to move to Vermont and we're building another off-grid cabins were like interviewing builders and so we went walking around we met this builder when you were walking around this other house that he built and he's just showing you know showing us all the features of this house and one of the features was a double pane glass that you can just like flip the switch and there's an opaque gas maybe you have one of those

no I don't have one but I know the windows you're talking about and I was like that's so awesome suddenly this window goes you know opaque and it's like kind of foggy I'm not reminded me of this experience that this woman had in my study she was actually a survivor of a world war two bombing in London so it was a very long time ago

first of all she came back speaking another language from her near death experience that was the first part of things so I was like you know all of these stories and I was like a graduate student and all of these stories were very far fetched to me and this was a language she had not been exposed to I don't know okay she came back speaking like I wasn't paying that much attention their stories were kind of we didn't we never published their stories but

they're like okay Kathy yeah I was like okay I was going on in your brain but she told me this story about some near death experiences have a lot of them have life reviews where they go through their lives and they kind of experience the consequences of their actions from the perspective of who they impacted which can be very hellish depending on who kind of person you've been but then if people are sort of dead long enough they also have

flash forwards where they actually not only see the past but also the future so this was one of the ones that was a flash and so she told me that she basically saw this city and all the buildings were basically made of this glass that had and this is a woman she's probably like 80 at this time she's not super like technologically sophisticated and she's describing this glass that when you flip a switch you can turn it it has some kind of gas in between it that you can

flip a switch and it turns into opaque and that the future will be this glass and I was like whatever okay that's so crazy sounding and then maybe like four years later she called me and she was like the glass exists and she sent me to like a scientific American or like discover magazine and it was like smart glass I think it's called she's like this isn't the exact company so don't like investing in or anything but like this is this is the

car start I know what it's going to be she's like this is the future of what things are going to be made out of so again completely sealed off that part of my life for like I don't know 25 years 23 years and now I just saw the glass myself and for months so I don't know people think I'm super grumpy and skeptical but like I'm just sick I don't know I think just letting the mystery be theirs is fine just doesn't need to be solved I have heard

crazy stories like that I don't know what to make of it will I be investing in smart glass maybe I mean can't hurt right I mean it could hurt depending on how is she invests a little bit a little bit might go a long way after going to both cities out of it that's amazing you know there's part of me

that with no defensible foundation well I'll leave that alone for a second but feels like some of these NDE's the high dose or I don't even need to be high dose but let's just say higher dose psychedelic experiences and many other things some of these meditative states are kind of touching parts of the same thing it's like the five blind men holding onto different parts of the elephant that whole parable

but anyway working pet theory with without a whole hell of a lot to back it up that would stand up to the capitalist kind of skeptic society and so on but still something that sticks in my mind

well dr. Bretton this has been great I've really enjoyed this conversation I think it will be helpful to people and to many who are listening probably you have had some of these adverse events or effects who have felt very much alone and certainly I could have used that feeling when I was going through what I went through yeah that my meditation retreat is there anything else that you would like to add people can find

cheetah house on twitter at cheetah house org on facebook cheetah house dot org and instagram cheetah dot house anything that you'd like to add before we wind to a close I mean I think that I'd like to end just by thanking you for being as open and forthcoming as you have been I don't know if you've gotten any push back but a number of people who share their negative experiences any kind of negative experience

but particularly ones with meditation get a lot of kick back and it's not an easy thing to do so I'm very appreciative that you've done that and you didn't have to so I think it's going to be really helpful for people and you know especially this kind of group of people that emulate you and these sort of young male 18 to 30 demographic so you know you're really in my world you're you know really a hero and doing something that's hard and just so I just want to say thank you

thank you I really appreciate you saying that and it's my pleasure to do it because by offering my story I'm not saying meditation bad I actually find meditation and small doses to be incredibly incredibly helpful in my life

and that is not mutually exclusive with also saying hey in different formats and different doses things can go off the rails and you need to being a good boy or girls got be prepared for that and institutions and groups and facilitators and centers need to be prepared for that and hope is not a strategy it's like you get in your car and drive with the seatbelt off it's like that's just stupid it's like maybe you haven't had a head on collision but they happen every day so where a seatbelt

I mean they're basic precautions and I hope that will help people to think about this in a sort of risk informed way not so that they can say I'm never going to meditate but simply to know this is a possibility and to ensure that they have support structures around to help them in case they run into turbulence or something even more extreme as I did and that's true for so many things in life and I really appreciate you doing the research you do I'm sure you get a hell of a lot of flack for it

and it's important to have this be part of the conversation and it's going to increasingly be part of the conversation I mean you have startups and companies that are worth billions of dollars promoting mindfulness and meditation

you have the same thing happening in psychedelics lots of profit motives which is not automatically something that gets evil but it does be get incentives and that means we will most certainly have tens of thousands potentially hundreds of thousands and millions of people

engaging with things that historically were pretty limited to a fine slice of the population and we are going to see adverse events you know what I promised one other thing that I have to ask about so how did the Dalai Lama receive your description of your research

oh boy did you see did you watch the video no I didn't see the video I saw some text about it okay so there is a video of me presenting to the Dalai Lama as part of the mind and life dialogues I will let viewers make their own decisions about what they think I will tell you some feedback that I got

I mean you'll see me there if you want to watch will be in sympathetic overload it was pretty a pretty terrifying experience in general so I don't really remember the feedback as it was happening because I was a little bit like out of my my body probably but there were a lot of people there

the entire like mind and life board was there and so they gave me some feedback a lot of people found his response fairly dismissive and also a bit not particularly compassionate like he was laughing half the time and I was like well did I tell you that the duration of impairment was three years

and also the people that it happened to were some of our best and brightest meditation teachers name any meditation teacher that you can name who's written Dharma books he was probably in our study and he probably had a meditation related challenge

and the Dalai Lama was basically saying that this happened to people because they didn't have enough Buddhist training so I don't know you're not really supposed to talk shit about the Dalai Lama so I'm gonna lay it on a cup this one out but people need to grow up

it wasn't particularly impressed if you're allowed to say that yeah well it's fine like I just think people need to grow up it's like if you have externalized your agency into someone you view as a god you're setting yourself up to trouble

and I think it's like I'm not a Dalai Lama expert I'm sure that he has and dawnstrably has offered a lot to the world but doesn't mean he's infallible this is also my husband was like he's the Dalai Lama he was brought up from like age zero until however old he is now like to defend Buddhism what do you expect so I think that's a pretty good answer and also it's very emblematic of it's possible that certain teachers have never heard of any problems

because why would you tell them that you never want to be the one that's like failing the practice that they're giving you or telling them that the practice that they gave you is harming you like that would that's just not even like a possibility so yeah it is what it is I left it up there as sort of a historical marker but I didn't refer you to it because it's kind of a mix bag all right so boys and girls out there be safe measure twice cut once and thank you will be so much for the time

I really have enjoyed this I think it will be valuable for people and at the very least it's gonna spark conversation so I'm gonna get a ton of shit I'm fine with it because I think this is important for people listening you'll find links to everything the resources we've mentioned any books etc

people and so on in the show notes as per usual it Timed up logs slash podcast and until next time be a little kinder than is necessary not just to others but to yourself I'll quote Jack cornfield actually which and I'm gonna paraphrase here but if your compassion does not include yourself then it is incomplete compassionate now this is my voice is making sure you account for risks and not live in fear but certainly live informed so until next time everyone thank you for tuning in

hey guys this is Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribed to my free newsletter my super short newsletter called five bullet Friday easy to sign up easy to cancel it is basically a half page that I send out

every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week it's kind of like my diary of cool things it often includes articles on reading books on reading albums perhaps gadgets gizmos all sorts of tech tricks and so on they get sent to me by my friends including a lot of podcast guests and these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you so if that sounds fun again it's very short

a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend something to think about if you'd like to try it out just go to tim.blog slash Friday type that into your browser tim.blog slash Friday drop in your email and you'll get the very next one thanks for listening

this episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals the number one selling fish oil brand in the US more than 80% of Americans it's probably a lot of you listening including me because I do measure my omega fish do not get enough omega 3 fats from their diet that is a problem because the body cannot

produce omega 3s an important nutrient for cell structure and function Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor recommended and in fact this brand was recommended to be by one of my doctors ultimate omega fish oil formula so the ultimate omega fish oil formula for heart health

immune support and more it's incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste so I have been taking ultimate omega for the last two months or so and this fishy aftertaste issue has been a problem for me and it's actually with other brands induce some nausea after a few days and ultimate

omega has been as clean as a whistle I've had no issues whatsoever and if you are vegetarian or prefer to alternate I ended up alternating two products and that is number one the ultimate omega fish oil formula and also the algae omega which is plant based EPA and DHA that's also from Nordic Naturals so I end up getting both of those products and it has improved my recovery from workouts it's improved my sleep it is improved my mood and I know that because I pulled out a lot of other

variables in any case back to the read all Nordic Naturals fish oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form the form naturally found in fish and the form your body most easily absorbs their ultimate omega fish oil is offered in soft gels liquid and zero sugar gummies Nordic Naturals

fish oils are a friend of the sea certified and sustainably made in a zero waste facility powered by biofuel they're also non GMO and third party tested surpassing the strictest international standards for purity and freshness want proof you can visit their website where they provide

certificates of analysis for every one of their products so go to Nordic dot com nr d i c Nordic dot com and discover why Nordic Naturals is the number one selling omega three brand in the US and while you're there use promo code Tim T.I.M. for 20% off of your order that's nr d i c dot com

code Tim for 20% off of the fish oil with no fishy aftertaste all upside no downside try it out these statements have not been evaluated by the food and drug administration this product is not intended to diagnose treat cure or prevent any disease this episode is brought to you by eight sleep temperatures one of the main causes of poor sleep and seat is my personal nemesis of suffered for decades tossing and turning throwing blankets off pulling the

back on putting one leg on top and repeating all that ad nauseam but now I am falling sleep in record time why because I'm using a device is recommended to me by friends called the pod cover by eight sleep

the pod cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night sleep with the pod covers dual zone temperature control you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees

or as hot as 110 degrees I think generally in my experience my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very very cool so stop fighting this helps based on your biometrics environment at sleep stages the pod cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wakeups

and increase your percentage of deep sleep in addition to its best in class temperature regulation the pod cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable until November 30th my listeners can save $350 on the pod cover go to eight sleep dot com slash Tim all spelled out that's eight sleep dot com slash Tim for these exclusive holiday savings one more time that's eight sleep dot com slash Tim for these exclusive and very special holiday

savings eight sleep currently ships within the U.S. Canada the UK select countries in the EU and Australia