 people using Muse were more effective at falling asleep and falling back asleep, leading to a 20% improvement in sleep quality. All right. So for listeners who aren't familiar with Muse, tell us what it is and why it was designed to do what it does. It's a fascinating story. Thank you. So Muse is a brain-sensing headband that helps you meditate and sleep. For those of you on YouTube, I've got one right here. It's a slim little device that sits on your head and it has sensors on it just like a fit that would on your wrist. And it's able to track your brain during meditation and sleep and give you real-time feedback to help you start or enhance your meditation practice and to help you sleep better. So this actually is measuring EEGs, right? Of your brain. Exactly. So EEGs are the electrical signals that go back and forth inside your brain. Muse is able to measure it and then determine if you're meditating and how to do it better and what stage of sleep you're in and how to fall asleep faster. So can you actually feel Muse working? I mean, it's not going to shock my brain, is it? No, it's passive. It's just reading the brain's electrical activity and from there giving you audio cues and audio signals that help you do what you want to do better. Okay, so you're, and I know your device, I have your device. What you're using sound to help me and why and you really want to help sleep? What, how does this different than just buying a sound machine to help me sleep? This is really different. This is personalized feedback. So when you're using Muse to help you fall asleep, you slip on your Muse, you choose some beautiful content to listen to, which might be a meditation or a bedtime story or a soundtrack and then Muse actually shifts in changes that content to help you fall asleep faster. So sometimes people listen to audio to help them fall asleep, but that audio is just playing at one speed and you wake up, you know, half an hour later and the audio is still playing with Muse. What it's doing is it delivers something called the digital sleeping pill, which is actually able to shift and change the content depending on your level of wakefulness in a way that's designed to walk your brain and to sleep even faster. And once you fall asleep, the audio shuts off. And then if you wake up in the middle of the night and you're still wearing your Muse, then Muse automatically wakes up with you and brings in the same beautiful experience to help you fall back asleep in a way that's designed to help you fall asleep faster. Wow. So wait a minute. We know from experience with our children or even being children that a bedtime story is quite useful to help a child go to sleep. Are you telling me that I can get a bedtime story on Muse and help me fall asleep? How does that work? Sure. So in the same way that when you're a kid, you have an adult there who is reading you a bedtime story and they can understand your sleepy cues. They can see when you're starting to close your eyes and yawn and they'll slow down the story as they see you get sleepier. And as you close your eyes and begin to fall asleep, they'll move into a whisper and then they'll shut the book when you're asleep and silently walk out and then you're beautifully asleep. Well, Muse, in essence, can do the same thing. So because it's tracking your levels of wakefulness, your level of stage one sleep, deep sleep, REM sleep, etc., as you begin to move from wakefulness into sleep, Muse automatically starts to change the bedtime story so it becomes quieter and easier for you in a way that cues your brain that more sleep is coming. And as you have fallen asleep and you move into deep sleep, stage two sleep and deep sleep, the audio actually shuts off so it doesn't wake you back up again. And then if you do wake back up again, it'll pick back up the story and do the same thing to let you back down and to sleep a second time. So Muse really is working personally with you in a way that helps you fall asleep more effectively. And do most people utilize the bedtime story feature or do most people use music? What's been the experience? So we have a wide range of content. Some people like to fall asleep to bedtime stories and we have ones like Sherlock Holmes and sleepy stories like lavender fields. We also have beautiful guided meditations because some people want to deep breathe their way into sleep or release anger or tension and that's more useful. We have soundtracks like gentle sounds of rain and ambient sounds. So each person is really different and how everybody likes to fall asleep is a little bit different. Some people want to be told a story and just let their mind wander. Some people feel better really working with their body and relaxing the parts of it to float themselves into sleep. And so what we've seen is that people find the thing that works for them and then stick with it and that really becomes a cue every night to help them sleep. And then when they're no longer using Muse after a period of time, they understand, hey, I can fall asleep because when you're an insomniac, when you really don't sleep well, you end up becoming really anxious about sleeping. And the process of falling asleep becomes uncomfortable and scary because you're lying there going like, oh god, when am I going to sleep? And so once you spend some time with a tool that allows you to fall asleep far more easily and make the process much more pleasant, and over time also learns that it can sleep itself. And so the entire process, the stress, the anxiety, the frustration starts to dissipate and you become a better sleeper. Now I have a lot of patients and I'll count myself in that who we have, we have four dogs and usually we have a new rescue dog as one of our dogs. And this new rescue dog seems to like to get up at about two o'clock in the morning. And luckily it wants to go out, but I find that, okay, I've taken the dog outside, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm awake for maybe a half hour, 45 minutes. And I can track it with my aura ring or a whoop band. So can this device, if I had it on, will that get me back to sleep faster than me just laying there waiting? Yep, it's designed to get you back to sleep faster because the same technique that it used in the first place, the same bedtime story, et cetera, will automatically come back in when it's time to fall back to sleep after you've woken up. And for a lot of people that's, you know, you wake up, you open your eyes, you look around, and then you're like, oh geez, I'm asleep. I'm open. So then you're like, oh geez, I'm awake again. So then the device automatically turns itself on because it can detect your state of wakefulness and then guides you back into sleep. So in a recent study with Dr. Adrian Owen's lab, we found that people using Muse were more effective at falling asleep and falling back asleep, leading to a 20% improvement in sleep quality in the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, which is like the gold standard. Wow. And how about for new mothers? Has it been tried on new mothers? Obviously, there's a lot of wakeful nights and new fathers for that matter. You're looking at a new mother right here. That's right. Congratulations. Thank you. I have a six-year-old and a six-month-old. So we've just moved out of the intensive non-sleeping period of early infancy. And Muse has been invaluable because, of course, kids wake up in the middle of the night. They need you. You get up. You, you know, settle them. You lie back down. Sometimes as a new mother, you're so ridiculously exhausted that you don't need anything to help you fall asleep. You just crank back out. But sometimes that, you know, your daughter wakes you up at three in the morning and then you're still up. And Muse has been key in helping me fall back asleep. And also, at the end of the day, tracking my sleep and making sure that even though I've had multiple awakenings throughout the night, I've been able to get enough sufficient sleep of deep sleep, light sleep, REM sleep in order to be functional the next day. Now, I would think that EEG would be definitely the gold standard for determining light sleep, REM sleep, deep sleep. How does your device, or we've had the science officer of Aura on a few weeks ago, how do these guys compare? Because there's a lot of subtle differences between devices like an Apple Watch and an Aura Ring. And how does Muse track with all these? Sure. So Aura is definitely a great device. What Muse does is a little bit different. So Aura is measuring your temperature and your heart rate, which are both a proxy for how well you're sleeping. It's EEG that really is, as you say, the gold standard for measuring sleep. So if you go into a sleep lab and you want to really find out how well you're sleeping, they're going to put EEG sensors on your head. And then they're also going to track your heart and your breathing. So with Muse, what you're getting is essentially sleep lab quality data. We have a number of sleep labs that use Muse. And the results have come out looking shockingly similar. So you're really getting the experience of being in a sleep lab. But in this super cozy little headband that you're wearing comfortably in your own bed night after night. And Muse doesn't just track your sleep amazingly effectively, including really telling you the level of deep sleep that you're in. So not just how much deep sleep you had, which some of the other devices can do, but it can actually tell you the level of deep sleep, how much deep sleep you've had within that time, the depth of it. And then not just tracking, it gives you interventions. So tracking device like an Apple Watch or Fitbit can say this is how long you slept. Okay, what do I do with that? Muse actually gives you the intervention to help you fall asleep. So while it's tracking your brain, it's using that to give you real time feedback from your brain and your biosignals that helps you fall asleep in a way that's designed to be faster, designed to help you sleep more deeply and help you fall back asleep when you wake up. So no other device can do that. All right, let's talk, let's go deeper into sleep, excuse the pun. People know that sleep is important. We're beginning to convince people that we actually should have good sleep, that it correlates with a lot of things. It's not just recharging the battery and these stages of sleep are really important. You want to take our listeners and viewers through these stages of what happens during those stages briefly? Absolutely. So when you first lie down, your mind's probably racing and you're now in wakefulness, when you close your eyes, you immediately have an increase in alpha waves and you start a little bit of the relaxation process. Then as you fall asleep, you enter into stage one sleep and you get some particular sleep characteristics that happen there. You're going to see as you move from stage one to stage two sleep, you're going to start to see things called sleep spindles. So these are little bursts of brain activity, about 13-15 hertz and they are indicating that you're starting to fall asleep and they're helping with memory consolidation. You'll also get something called K-complexes and those spikes of activity actually shield your brain from the sounds around you in order to shut you down and help you fall asleep. Then you move into stage two sleep and then REM sleep. So REM sleep and deep sleep are the most fascinating parts of sleep. Deep sleep happens in the first part of the night, typically the first half of the night. So when I said as a new mom, it's actually important for me to know how much sleep I got of the different stages. I've been able to, using news, make sure that my first five hours of sleep, I get really good deep sleep because deep sleep you shouldn't interrupt. But REM sleep in the second half of the night, you can interrupt with less negative effects on your body. So you know, knowing when you're sleeping, how much is key in planning around that. So when you get into deep sleep, you're doing things like memory consolidation. So your brain is going through the events that you saw during the day, the things that you heard and things that you learned and associating it with other information and deciding whether to keep that memory or toss that memory out. And believe it or not, that kind of forgetting that your brain does during the middle of the night is important. Deep sleep has another amazing effect, which is to help your brain actually move out the toxins that are in it. So there's a fascinating study that was published in June 2021 demonstrating that Alzheimer's patients may have impairment in the cleaning of their brain during deep sleep. Because in deep sleep, your brain flushes out things like amyloid beta, whose accumulation could lead to Alzheimer's. The next phase that you should go through for the second half of your night is REM sleep. So your brain goes in cycles throughout the night, but the second half is dominated by REM sleep. And that's the dreaming stage. That's when your brain is associating all of the things that you did in the day with images and emotions and experiences. And that's why you get these crazy, amazing, weird dreams. And then towards morning, you wake up and hopefully your brain returns to alertness and awareness and you're ready for the next day. Now, there's the phase of light sleep. Many people go, oh, light sleep is not important, but there's actually a lot of mitochondrial repair work that happens during light sleep. So light sleep is not bad for you, right? All stages of sleep are important. So people tend to focus on deep sleep as being really important. And it is. Deep sleep is essential for maintaining your cognitive function in a host of ways. But each stage of sleep actually has its own function. And so ideally, you really want to progress nicely through each stage of sleep multiple times throughout the night, get enough deep sleep and enough REM sleep in order to function effectively. And you know, some people who go to bed chronically late, maybe short changing themselves on their deep sleep. Some people who are getting up too early to go to a basketball practice in the morning or, you know, I can get up early and go to the gym, they're short changing themselves on their REM sleep, neither of which is good. So you want to make sure that you're getting in your seven to eight hours every night and not cutting off on one end or the other. Are we finally getting to the point where this argument of, well, I'll sleep when I die and I can do fine on four hours of sleep a night. I'm, you know, I'm a type A hard charging American and sleep can wait until I get older. What, what say you? I say, well, you're going to get older much faster. You know, if you want to sleep when you die, that might happen sooner if you sleep less. Sleep is essential for every system of your body. Sleep is important for your cognitive function, for your emotional function. When you don't sleep, well, you become cranky just like a child does. It's interrupts your emotional self regulation. If you get only six hours of sleep per night for a period of time, your cognitive function, your IQ drops 10 points. You know, it's like you just aged your brain and quite a number of years. Your insulin functions get disrupted. Your body's hormonal functions are disruptive. It comes harder to keep up the weight. Your cardiovascular risk goes up dramatically if you sleep for less than seven hours, six hours a night as does your immune system crash. So, you know, sleep when you're dead. If that's the way you want to do it, don't worry, you'll get there much sooner. For the rest of us, sleep now. It's really helpful. Yeah. You brought up an important point. We know that shift workers who have horrible sleep patterns and horrible circadian rhythm disruption. And also, I can say personally, you know, as a surgical resident where, you know, it was normal to get maybe eight hours of sleep, I mean four hours of sleep. It changes your hunger patterns and you crave sugar. You just crave sugar to keep going. And, you know, we'd hit the vending machines at all times during the night just to stay awake. And, you know, we were looking for hostess cupcakes and ding-dongs and candy bars. And it's amazing how, you know, sleep deprivation will drive people putting on the pounds. And I see so many of my patients who are, you know, bad sleepers that if we can change their sleep pattern, we can really make a big change in their insulin levels and their hunger levels. And you can prove this from tracking studies, right? Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of studies that have been done that demonstrate the impact of sleep on weight loss or lack thereof. Because sleep, as you mentioned, disrupts your insulin. It disrupts your leptin. It disrupts all of your, a lot of your hormonal signalings that tell you when you are full. And your circadian rhythm is often set by food. So, if you get into the pattern of eating at two o'clock in the morning, for example, or waking up in the middle of the night to eat, that sets your circadian rhythm, which is the rhythm that governs both your sleeping and your eating. That sets your circadian rhythm to say, oh, it's 2 a.m. Let's wake you back up again tonight because you did it last night to eat. And so, you end up in this repeated pattern of waking up hungry to eat, eating, disrupting your signaling again, gaining the weight, and disrupting your sleep. So, it's a really unfortunate feed forward, which you can break yourself out of once you realize that you can actually change your sleep and you can change your sleep and hunger patterns. How does the Muse headband train you to be a better sleeper besides what you've just told me? Sure. So, there's a number of different ways that it works. One, Muse is a tool both for meditation and for sleep. We actually started using Muse as a meditation tool back in 2014. So, it's been in the market for many, many years. It's used by hundreds of thousands of people to learn to meditate or enhance their meditation practice. And we started to hear from people that they were using their Muse just before they went to bed to help them fall asleep. And that when they did that, they seemed to be sleeping better. And so, we really dug into that and started to create Muse S, which is the tool that's really purpose-built to help you sleep. And it gives you beautiful guided meditations that you during the day. And as you learn to meditate, you learn how to shut down that racing mind that you have. So, the reason a lot of people can't sleep is because you lie there and your brain is racing and you're like, I can't sleep, I have all of these thoughts. Well, meditation really teaches you how to let your mind go from those thoughts, let go of them, focus on your breath and your body, and shut down your mind so you can sleep. So, that's the first level. We have meditation training. Then we have the guided meditations that, and sleep stories that help you fall asleep. We then pair that with the digital sleeping pill, which is the real-time biofeedback from your brain and body that's designed to help you sleep better. Then you have the tool that tracks you through the night so that you can really see your sleep patterns and what you're doing. And so, you can start to realize how you can change and shift or how you are changing and shifting. We have the tool that helps you fall back asleep after you've woken up in the night. And then we have broad range of content that really teaches you sleep habits and hygiene, it teaches you what to do to sleep better, their guided meditations to help you let go of the stress that you might have during the day, and a range of meditations to do things like help you wake up with morning joy, to, you know, greet the day bright and sunny and happy and to deal with any of the things that come up during the day with greater grace and calm and ease so that you can also sleep better the next night. Now, wait a minute. You said digital sleeping pill. I don't want a sleeping pill. How does a digital sleeping pill with Muse work? Exactly. It has nothing to do with a real pharmacological sleeping pill. The digital sleeping pill is the name that we have for the guided content that shifts and changes to guide you into sleep. We are not into physical sleeping pills either, you know, taking prescription sleep medications or non-prescription sleep medications actually gives you potentially really poor sleep that can interrupt your delta waves. There's all sorts of reasons not to use them. The digital sleeping pill is guided meditation content that actually works with you to teach you to fall asleep more effectively. Yeah, I see so many patients who are addicted to prescription sleeping pills and it's one of the worst things you can do for your brain health. It does not promote normal sleep, as you and I both know. And it's very difficult to get people off of these. I think a Muse prescription may be a good start to get them a digital sleeping pill instead. That's a great idea. Thank you. Yeah, we have a lot of doctors that recommend Muse to their patients both for sleep and for meditation to help deal with poor sleep, stress, etc. So we're actually seeing Muse prescribed in that way, you know, prescribing meditation and good sleep habits and hygiene and tools and techniques and biofeedback as a replacement for pills, which has been very rewarding. All right, you mentioned meditation and, you know, we've had you on before really to talk about the benefits of meditation. I write about it in all of my books, both as a brain tool but also as a longevity and immune support tool. So as a very poor meditator, I have a monkey brain. My wife is a great meditator. Tell me, tell people who go, I can't meditate, I can't shut my brain off. Why meditation and why Muse? What is it doing that's going to help a monkey brain quiet down? Okay, so first of all, I'm sure I'm preaching to the converted when we say everybody should be meditating, but I also recognize that it is incredibly hard to do. I too had one of those monkey brains before really building Muse. I was a psychotherapist. I would be recommending to my patients that they should meditate. I would be teaching them to meditate even though I sucked at it myself, because my mind would bounce all over the place and then I'd be frustrated at myself because I couldn't meditate. And so in the process of doing that, I recognized with my team that we could build Muse as a tool to help you actually meditate more effectively. So what Muse does is it tracks your brain during meditation and gives you guiding sounds to let you know when you're meditating and to keep you there, kind of helping you know when you're doing it right. So most of us sit down to meditate, our brain bounces all over the place, we get really frustrated, and we get up and we go away. We're like, forget this. With Muse, however, you slip on the headband, you sit there, and as you focus on your breath, there's a beautiful soundscape that gets quiet when you're meditating. And then as your mind wanders onto a thought, the sound picks up and lets you know that your mind is wandering and gently guides you back to your breath. And when you're back on your breath, the sound gets quiet and pleasant again, which reinforces to your brain that you're doing the right thing. And then eventually your mind wanders as all of our minds do, and the sound guides you back. So with Muse, you're getting instant feedback during your meditation to actually know what's going on in your brain, to actually show you what you're supposed to be doing during a focused attention meditation, and to really make it rewarding both to your brain and your motivation systems to do it and stay there. And then after the fact, you get data, charts, graph scores, things that actually show you what your brain was doing and become highly motivating to keep you engaged in the practice day after day. And what we hear all the time is, you know, I tried for years to meditate and I couldn't do it. And it's Muse that helped me start my practice. And then it's Muse that helped me go deeper into it. So it's been amazing to actually get people to do this thing that's so good for you that so many people resist through the use of Muse. You know, I was realizing a couple days ago, my car has a lane departure feature that I don't use that once you leave your lane, it starts vibrating and doing all these crazy noises. And it just so happened it was on. And it started doing that as I was just changing lanes. I said, what the heck? And I went, oh, my lane departure feature is on. And then I thought about Muse because Muse basically is a lane departure feature that hey, you just kind of left your meditative state and you know, you've crossed over the line and pull yourself back in. So I want you to build that into your advertising and give me full credit. I absolutely will. That's really funny. So Trevor Coleman, who's one of the co-founders in Muse and really responsible for guiding the initial product, he actually used to describe it as it's like rumble strips for the road. Now, this was back in like 2012 before lane departure features were very common. But it was, you know, like old school, you drive off the highway and there'd be the rumbly pattern on the side of the road to let you know with the cue that, oh, you're going off the path. Come on back gently. You're going off the path. Come on back gently. So you've nailed it. It's the lane departure feature with rewards and encouragement for staying in the right lane and getting to your destination. We can keep going with this metaphor. We give a lot of lip service to the benefits of meditation and I think people in general know that it should be a part of their hopefully daily practice. But take us through why meditation is probably a really, not probably, is a really good idea. Sure. So meditation has by now tens of thousands of published studies behind it demonstrating why it is good for your brain, your body, your relationships. It improves your attention. It can decrease your stress. It can help improve your mood, depression, anxiety. Meditation has been shown to improve your sleep. It's been ensured to improve school testing scores, workplace wellness. You name it, meditation can have benefit in it. Diving into it a little bit more specifically, when we look at how meditation helps you in your life, what it's really doing is it's teaching you to not become so caught up in your own thoughts. Now, most of many of the thoughts that we have are thoughts that are stressful and anxious. Some of them are not useful and repetitive. Some of them cause us anxiety and frustration and we're just used to thinking those thoughts and being carried wherever the thought takes us. With the meditation practice, what you're doing is learning to observe your thoughts and rather than being caught up in them and like thinking about that fight you had with your boyfriend over and over and over again and just thinking that's what's supposed to happen because that thought is in your brain. With meditation what you learn to do is notice that you're having that thought and then exercise the skill of moving your mind away from that thought and onto something that's more important to you or something that's neutral that you want to focus on. Over time as you do that more and more, you begin to recognize, hey, I don't need to think about that fight with my boyfriend or I don't need to think over and over again about the cookie that I really want to eat but I'm not supposed to or the stress that I have over this thing that I need to do that I can't handle. You learn to really manage your mind and your body's reaction to your mind and make better choices about where your mind and your attention go. So that allows you to do things like listen to your wife when she's arguing with you and rather than just reacting on something that she said and being like, well, you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you can listen. You might notice that I'm feeling a little tense about this. You can step back. You can take a deep breath and then you can just continue to listen and not react badly or you can recognize like, hey, I have this intensive craving and you know what? I don't need to act on it. If I just move my attention elsewhere and I do what I know is good for me, I can get myself out of this loop of these bad thoughts or feelings or behaviors that I engage in and in doing so, it can dramatically improve multiple parts of your life. And as you know, I'm very interested in longevity. I guess the older I get, the more interested I am in longevity. There are actual physical things that happen to meditators that promote longevity. Give me an example about telomere length and talk about brain changes that are observed in meditators. I think this is, this to me, rather than arguing with my wife, which I don't do, I learned years ago never to do that. But if I can promote longevity, health span, that's a winner for me. So tell us about that. Sure. It's phenomenal, the cellular changes that meditation has been demonstrated to make. There's an amazing set of studies that demonstrate that meditation can actually impact your cellular aging. These come initially from Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. She is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and she looked at mothers who were very stressed in caring for their kids and she gave half of them meditation classes. She went back and then she looked at their markers of cellular aging and she saw that those mothers that had taken meditation classes and were actively meditating had cells that were demonstrating themselves to be significantly younger than those who didn't meditate. Now she looks specifically at the telomeres and your listeners might know about telomeres. Telomeres are kind of like the little ends of your DNA, kind of like the little pieces of plastic on the ends of your shoelace. Yep. And as you age they start to degrade. They're there to protect your DNA so your telomeres will begin to degrade first, get shorter and shorter as your cells replicate as time goes on. What meditation seems to do is actually increase the length of those telomeres. So as you age rather than the telomeres getting shorter and shorter and shorter until there's none left in your DNA starts to unravel, the telomeres with meditation seem to be getting longer and maintaining their length. And telomeres really are a marker of cellular aging. So you can look at one instance with a shorter telomere, one instance with a longer, and a scientist would say, well, sadly, literally the one with the shorter telomeres is more aged. And so in this way it actually seems that meditation is slowing cellular aging. That sounds good. Yeah. Now let's talk about the brain because this one's just as cool. So meditation has been shown to make real structural change inside the brain and it's even been shown to stave off aging of the brain. So in the work of Dr. Sarah Lazar she's shown that meditation can maintain the size of your hippocampus. So as you age your hippocampus can shrink with stress. Meditation can maintain that size. Meditation has been shown to maintain the thickness of your prefrontal cortex as you age. So bad news, as you age your prefrontal cortex, which is part of your brain in the front that's responsible for all of your higher order processing, like your thinking, your planning, your organization. As you age, that thins. But if you're able to maintain a long-term meditation practice in her study she showed that individuals were able to maintain the thickness of their prefrontal cortices, like reduce the aging of it. There was one subject who was 50 years old and he had the prefrontal cortex thickness of a 23-year-old thanks to meditation. Now in the work of Dr. Eileen Luters what she did was she just looked at an overall map of the brain of meditators and non-meditators to see what the difference in brain age looked like. And so she looked at long-term meditators who she defined as meditating five years or more. And on average those long-term meditators' brains looked 7.5 years younger than the non-meditators. So that's a pretty amazing investment when you sit there and think, why am I wasting my time? What's this five or ten minutes a day meditating every day? If I just use that time for something else, well here just five years of meditation can lead to a brain that may look on average 7.5 years younger. That's a pretty great investment of your time. Well you bring up an important point. I don't have an hour every day to go to my quiet place and quiet my monkey brain. So what's the evidence that you mentioned five to ten minutes? Is five to ten minutes going to do it for me? I probably have five or ten minutes that I've wasted every day. Is that going to do it for me? That's going to help. So with meditation you know more can be better but even five minutes a day can be impactful. So in a study that was done with Muse at the Mayo Clinic they used Muse meditation to help women with breast cancer. And these women were told to meditate with Muse for a minimum of three minutes per day. And they did so over three months and at the end of that time they saw a decrease in their stress, improvements in their fatigue and improvements in their overall quality of life during the cancer care process. Now a lot of these women obviously meditated more than three minutes but the only instruction was you know just minimum of three minutes a day and they liked it so they continued on and some of them did more some of them stayed at three minutes but even a small amount of meditation is better than none and as you do the practice it ends up being something that is rewarding and is engaging and so you know you start with three minutes you move to five minutes eventually you're up to 10 minutes every day and if you meditate for 10 minutes each day you will begin to see the benefits it's it's significant. Okay that brings up the next question. This strikes people as a really good training device to learn how to meditate almost like training wheels on a bike and once you know how to balance on a bike you throw away the training wheels. Is Muse something that you should always use? Is it a way to train you to learn what meditation is or is it there's a whole spectrum? So Muse can be used in many different ways so we have people who you know have never meditated before and they use Muse to learn how to meditate but Muse has so many features that it can be used throughout your journey so once you learn the practice of meditation obviously you're going to go throughout your day and then practice that meditation without your Muse you know Muse is a tool to teach you it's not a tool to do it for you so that when you're in that meeting and feeling stressed you apply what you've learned when you're in that argument and feeling you know ramped up you apply what you've learned but then you can go back to your Muse and engage in any of the content so we have meditations for the brain the heart the breath and the body so it teaches you different breathing exercises it teaches you to sense your heart rate and when it's rising and when it's falling it has literally hundreds of guided meditations on basically any topic that comes up in your life we say if there's something's come up in your life we have a meditation for that you know going into an interview and work wanting to perform better in the gym anxious about college frustrated standing in line you know we have meditations for all of these things that really meet you where you're at to help you gain new perspective on whatever challenges arise in your day so you know it becomes this buddy that you can really turn to to increase your own internal resources and wisdom and help you become your best person at day during the day and your best sleep at night have you considered doing a study with politicians using Muse we have considered um we haven't had any volunteers quite yet but well maybe a better place if they would we need uh maybe the federal government could fund that uh either either the canadian government or the u.s government but anyhow one thing you know you you brought out all these benefits of meditation do you the science yet understand what's happening at the cellular or organ level with meditation that's producing these observable changes in telomere length or in hippocampal size and that's the memory center folks so that's a good thing to have what what's happening at the cellular level sure so there's a number of different ways to look at this um one way we can look at this is from the top down from the brain and what elizabeth blackburn showed is that negative thoughts actually impact your cellular physiology so the way that we are thinking then creates a sense of stress in the body which ramps your cortisol system which leads to a host of negative changes inside your physiology in your body with meditation what you're doing is you're both learning to disengage the negative thoughts which trigger the stress and you're breathing deeply which trigger your vagus nerve to bring in a rest and digest response so as you breathe deeply there's an little nerve that runs up even down into your gut from your head to your gut it's called your vagus nerve and it becomes stimulated with meditation to bring in relaxation to your body to dilate your blood vessels to slow your breathing to slow your heart rate and this then brings on a positive cellular positive set of cellular interactions to do things like reduce aging so when we look into the brain we see some really fascinating things happening so the work of Dr. Sarah Lazar also showed us that even a short term meditation session like eight weeks of meditating is able to increase the number of connections in your brain your amount of gray matter and then when you look at the parts of the brain that seem to be affected meditation seems to be down regulating your amygdala so the amygdala is the part of the brain that's associated with fight or flight so it's a thing that's causing the stressful experience so it seems to down regulate the amygdala and it seems to be strengthening or increasing the prefrontal cortex and it's kind of like the amygdala is the child who's like scared of everything and can be freaked out by a shadow on the wall and the prefrontal cortex is the adult that's the person who's able to come into your bedroom look around to the child and say it's not a monster it's just a shadow it's okay and in some meditators it even looks like the amount of projections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala have increased so it's easier for the prefrontal cortex to talk to the amygdala and down regulate it and quiet it kind of for the parent of your brain to go you can relax it's okay to the child there's a host of other changes also going on in meditation but those are just some big ones in the few minutes that we have left well i actually have written about meditators have a much more diverse gut microbiome than non-meditators and from my standpoint all disease begins and ends in the gut so meditation will give me a more diverse gut microbiome just by meditating so bring it on it's so exciting to watch you and your company through the years and where it's going and how you've helped so many people it's it's it's a remarkable device folks uh it particularly for folks with monkey brains it it really does you know just have to sit there and let your mind go blank that's not the whole idea i can guarantee you but this is a really great way to teach you you know how to bring that focus and focus your attention focus your breathing that's you've actually made it quite enjoyable to meditate how's that and i guess that's the most important thing the things that you enjoy are the things that you do in life and so if we're going to be spending anything you know time on anything in our lives we might as well be enjoying it i think you're going to love this next one if you've got to have breakfast there's better things to have for breakfast that can actually continue to activate ketosis