Andrew Huberman on meditation
- Brain can’t feel.
- When you focus on your brain thoughts will come in waves.
- Feeling, emotions and memories when we focus on the prefrontal cortex
- Being mindful and being aware can enhance one’s level of presence and happiness.
- Not just internal, what’s going around us also helps us enhance our sense of well-being and happiness.
Journaling – Swara (Neuroscientist)
- Journaling is like downloading your emotions into your words.
- It helps when you write it down or speak it up, it helps you reduce your cortisol levels
- If you keep indecisions, tasks, and negative emotions in your brain by just thinking about them in your mind, then you actually increase your cortisol levels and cortisol correlates to stress.
- If you write it out in your own words, speak it out loud or do physical exercise that you literally sweat it out that cortisol then you are releasing these negative emotions, negative thought patterns, anxieties, worries, worries about the future from the brain and body system.
- If you go back and read your journal, you see the though process laid out in front of you, you see your patterns of behavior, decision-making, your relationships with people.
- Seeing that in your handwriting, knowing that its your words, what you thought and what you said, You can’t run away from that.
Naval Ravikant
Another method I’ve learned is to just sit there and you close your eyes for at least one hour a day. You surrender to whatever happens—don’t make any effort whatsoever. You make no effort for something, and you make no effort against anything. If there are thoughts running through your mind, you let the thoughts run.
For your entire life, things have been happening to you. Some good, some bad, most of which you have processed and dissolved, but a few stuck with you. Over time, more and more stuck with you, and they almost became like these barnacles stuck to you.
You lost your childhood sense of wonder and of being present and happy. You lost your inner happiness because you built up this personality of unresolved pain, errors, fears, and desires that glommed onto you like a bunch of barnacles.
How do you get those barnacles off you? What happens in meditation is you’re sitting there and not resisting your mind. These things will start bubbling up. It’s like a giant inbox of unanswered emails, going back to your childhood. They will come out one by one, and you will be forced to deal with them.
You will be forced to resolve them. Resolving them doesn’t take any work—you just observe them. Now you’re an adult with some distance, time, and space from previous events, and you can just resolve them. You can be much more objective about how you view them.
Over time, you will resolve a lot of these deep-seated unresolved things you have in your mind. Once they’re resolved, there will come a day when you sit down to meditate, and you’ll hit a mental “inbox zero.” When you open your mental “email” and there are none, that is a pretty amazing feeling.
It’s a state of joy and bliss and peace. Once you have it, you don’t want to give it up. If you can get a free hour of bliss every morning just by sitting and closing your eyes, that is worth its weight in gold. It will change your life.