 One of the things that seems to stand in our way of being happy is that shit happens This is actually the common denominator for all human experience The fact is that even if we are the luckiest most effective people on the planet life sometimes deviates from our plan And it's just like the Rolling Stone said you can't always get what you want And that can be quite stressful, but of course you all know that shit happens What is less well known is that we also all have the power to change your experience of this shit to train and learn how to have a better attitude about it and How to suffer less through really anything that might happen to us today? I'm going to show you evidence that this kind of training cannot only make you feel better It can also change the way that your brain works and the key practice I'm going to talk about is a practice of mindfulness now mindfulness is rooted in ancient Buddhist traditions that are aimed at the cessation of suffering It's actually part of a system of practices that include things like loving kindness generosity and compassion And it's cultivated through the practice of mindfulness meditation in a secular context Mindfulness has actually been studied for over 30 years and many scientists including me about it a two component process Where the first component is a tension that is oriented to this present moment to whatever is happening to you So you can engage with your life The second component is attitude and its attitude that's open It's curious and it's accepting of this moment exactly as it is and one classic instruction is to pay attention on Purpose and without judgment or in the words of the Beatles you just let it be Now why am I training like this be useful? Well one reason is because most of us are incredibly distracted pretty much all the time and we miss a lot of what's happening to us One study showed that our minds are actually wandering almost 50% of the time and during every single activity even during sex and what's worse is that mind wandering is actually related to being unhappy and That suggests that being mindful in itself might make you happier And it leaves you a lot more time and energy to act wisely and make good decisions That means of being mindful allows you to respond to the world rather than react to it and how does mindfulness do that? Well one way it does it is by altering the brain's defaults That is a default mode network and you can think of it as our autopilot is a network of regions That's more active when our mind is spontaneously wandering and less active when we're focused on a task and To test whether mindfulness meditation alter these defaults We recruited experienced mindfulness meditators not Buddhist monks, but healthy Western adults who just happened to meditate for many years Kind of like me and we then scan their brains using fmri and compared their brain activity to the brain activity of well-matched Controls who've never meditated what we found is that experienced meditators actually show report a significant Lower amount of mind wandering in less activity and connectivity in their default mode network Does it mean that you all need to practice many many years to change your defaults? Apparently not Much less training already starts changing your defaults in one study stressed adults were recruited and randomized into one of two conditions They either did intensive mindfulness training for three days or three days of a controlled training The results showed that even after three days of intensive mindfulness training There are already some similar changes to the default mode network that were similar to what we saw with the experienced meditators In addition those who meditated also showed a reduction in an inflammation marker that is related to disease risk in comparison Those who did the control training actually showed an increase in this inflammation marker in addition the default mode network Actually was responsible for some of the reduction in inflammation This suggests the mindfulness training changes your brain It changes your emotional experience and it changes your body in a way that makes you more resilient to stress and disease And there's even more good news here You might start noticing some of the benefits of mindfulness meditation as soon as the first time that you try we tested this in a few recent studies We're good individuals who've never meditated and we randomize them to either meditate for 10 minutes for the first time or Do a control activity for 10 minutes. We then tested their performance on a task or acquired both accuracy and speed What we found is that those individuals who meditated for the first time Overall were faster or more accurate than those who didn't meditate and we also saw changes in brain activity That suggested that their brains are more attuned to the task allowing them to perform better What this means is that in the time that it might take you to just briefly check your email You might try to meditate for 10 minutes and you might have an improvement in your cognitive performance So in conclusion, I invite you to ask yourself. Do I want to be more focused? Do I want to be more present don't want to have more time and energy to To Make act wisely and make the decisions if you answered yes to any of these questions. You might want to try Mindfulness meditation now mindfulness is not for everyone and it's not a panacea But we know that it can fundamentally alter your brain's defaults We know that it can reduce your stress and make you more focused and importantly it can allow you to live in this moment Accepting it exactly as it is maybe even loving it exactly as it is even if shit happens. Thank you very much