Meditation | Green Tea |Intermittent Fasting
IF Insider — №7
“Meditation” Edition — May 26, 2020
In this week’s IF Insider:
Beginning a daily meditation practice, meditation studies you need to know about right now; what we are reading, and how to become a member of our exclusive Fast Factor Circle Community.
What is the IF Insider?
This email is your briefing on the week’s most compelling developments in intermittent fasting as well as innovation in practices that can be stacked with IF, such as plant-based eating, sleep hacks, natural nootropics, brain training and more, all curated by our team of entrepreneurs and ‘future-think’ scouts.
Our Mission is to introduce the power of Intermittent Fasting to entrepreneurs worldwide so they can exponentially improve their lives and businesses and the lives of the people they impact every day.
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Meditation As A Necessary Tool
What’s this?
In our last IF Insider (IF Insider №6–05/12/20), we focused on having you go back to the basics, which for us, is our daily practice of intermittent fasting combined with healthy eating. We gave you a simple, practical, and flavor-filled way to easily add quality nutrition to your life by providing you with the basic formula for building Buddha bowls…one bowl meals filled with nutritious and delicious whole grains, superfoods, and more. If you haven’t had a chance to take a look at and experiment with making your own Buddha bowls, please do so!
This issue’s focus is on meditation, which for us here at the IF Insider, has become our indispensable daily practice to stack on top of intermittent fasting combined with healthy eating.
We have touched on meditation in past issues (see our IF Insider №4–04/14/20 “Calm Edition”) but in this issue, we want to dedicate an entire IF Insider deep dive into this vital skill that will serve you well for the rest of your life.
Meditation — What Is It Exactly?
Before we talk about meditation, it would be helpful to know what it is, as most people have a rather vague idea about it, but really don’t have a clear understanding.
To explore what meditation is, we want to bring your attention to (see what we did here?!) to the work of neuroscientist and author Dr. Richard Davidson, who holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard and is the Director of The Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. Dr. Davidson was named by Time Magazine as one of its 100 Most Influential People.
He is perhaps best known for his decades-long friendship and collaboration with the Dalai Lama who assisted with Dr. Davidson’s groundbreaking work studying the brains of experienced Tibetan monks, some who had tens of thousands of hours of meditation experience. This research showed that meditation can actually change the physical structure of the brain, not only in long term meditators but in those who had meditated daily only for a few weeks.
Dr. Davidson’s understanding of meditation is this:
“The term ‘meditation’ refers to a broad variety of practices, ranging from techniques designed to promote relaxation to exercises performed with a more far-reaching goal such as a heightened sense of well-being.”
And meditation is also “…conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory strategies developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance.”
Benefits of Meditation
Meditation has a long list of scientifically proven benefits including:
Increasing your sense of happiness and well being — People who practice meditation consistently report an increase in quality of life.
Increasing your focus — Meditation improves your cognition and makes you more efficient at tasks requiring focus and concentration.
Enhancing your creativity — Meditation improves insight and promotes divergent thinking.
Improving memory — People who meditate show improved memory as well as the ability to both memorize and store new information.
Helping you make better decisions — Meditation specifically improves the function of your brain’s decision-making centers, which is one reason high-level executives have gravitated to the practice.
Increasing your sense of empathy and connection with others — A specific type of meditation known as loving-kindness enhances that area of your brain associated with empathy. The practice also improves your ability to better sense how others are feeling and leads to improved relationships.
Improving your cardiovascular health — Meditation can actually reduce your risk of heart disease.
Reducing physical pain better than morphine — This is mind-blowing!!
Enhancing your immune system — This benefit is especially important right now, as various types of meditation have been found to increase meditators’ resistance to viruses and other infections.
And there are even more benefits…check out this summary of benefits from the meditation app, Headspace.
Types of Meditation
Dr. Davidson as well as many other practitioners emphasize that finding the specific type of meditation that fits for you is the key to developing a sustainable practice. There are many types of meditation practices with different effects, including Transcendental Meditation known as TM, Metta or loving-kindness meditation, mantra meditation, Christian contemplative prayer, and others.
One of the most popular and widely practiced forms of meditation is known as mindfulness, brought into the mainstream largely through the work of Jon Zabat-Zinn, the creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
According to Dr. Zabat- Zinn, mindfulness is:…the intentional, accepting, and non-judgmental focus of one’s attention on the emotions, thoughts, and sensations occurring in the present moment.”
Here is a free link to Dr. Zabat-Zinn’s audiobook (narrated by the author), a two and a half-hour introduction entitled Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment and Your Life.
Why It Matters — Adding a daily meditation practice to your routine and stacking it on top of intermittent fasting can have a powerful additive effect, not only on your emotional health but on your physical health as well. Daily meditation practice is something that we would like to invite you to try as an experiment for a couple of weeks. This is long enough for you to see some real benefits but not so long that you can’t commit.
Please let us know how this is going for you by hitting reply to this email and letting us know!
Meditation gives you the wherewithal to pause, observe how easily the mind can exaggerate the severity of a setback, and resist getting drawn into the abyss. ~Richard Davidson, Ph.D.
Current Meditation Studies You Need To Know About Right Now
Meditation Can Make Your Brain Younger
Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, started researching meditation after she took up yoga to help her recover from a running injury. Her yoga teacher made claims about how yoga could open practitioners’ hearts and after she began to experience an increased sense of calm from her own practice, she started to do some investigation on her own.
Eventually, she found her way to the scientific literature on mindfulness and was so impressed that she decided to undertake a research project on her own.
In her first research project, she decided to look at experienced meditators with seven to nine years of meditation experience as compared to a control group. The long term meditators had an increase in gray matter in several areas of the brain, including the areas involved in hearing and the sensory cortex.
These findings add up, because in mindfulness meditation you become aware of the present moment, slowing down and paying particular attention to your sensory experience, especially your breathing and the sounds you are hearing.
But in addition to these findings, the researchers also found that the meditators had increased gray matter in the frontal cortex, the area of the brain involved with working memory and decision making. Here’s the finding you need to pay attention to:
The 50-year-old meditators in this study had the same amount of gray matter as people half their age!!
But Dr. Lazar was not content to stop her research there. She was concerned that the study might have been flawed because what if the long term meditators in her study just happened to have more gray matter to begin with?
Naturally, she organized a second study. This time they recruited people who had no experience at all with meditation into a mindfulness program eight weeks in length.
The results were spectacular. After only eight weeks of meditation, the participants’ brain structure improved. The areas involved in memory, learning and emotional regulation, empathy and the ability to see multiple perspectives on issues all thickened. Plus the area where regulatory neurotransmitters are synthesized thickened as well.
Plus, there was shrinkage in the region of the brain involved with anxiety, fear and aggression, leading to a reduction in stress levels in the people who participated.
The best part? The average meditation time of the participants was just 27 minutes a day!
We already know that intermittent fasting can give you a younger brain and body. Why not try stacking a daily meditation practice on top of it for exponential results?
Green Tea And Meditation
In our last IF Insider (№6–05/12/20) we looked at studies on the beneficial effects of green tea in reducing obesity. But green tea, in particular matcha, has a centuries-long association with meditation, helping Zen monks to more easily reach a state of calm and attentive focus over prolonged periods of sitting. And Samurai monks used it as well as a powerful tonic taken before battle to gain clarity and mental alertness.
Here at the IF Insider, we are big fans of traditional Japanese matcha tea, made with the whole tea leaf painstakingly ground into a fine powder. Matcha delivers more in terms of a better phytonutrient profile than does regular green tea. (This is the ceremonial matcha Denise enjoys!)
Each issue, both Denise Wakeman and I bring you a short blurb on what we are currently reading, listening to, or watching, including books, articles, videos, movies, and research papers of value. This week:
What We Are Reading
Denise — For the past three weeks I’ve been attending a daily live (on Facebook) meditation course offered by Cory Muscara. I’m a fan of his teaching after discovering him on the Simple Habit meditation app. Then, I read his book, Stop Missing Your Life. When he offered a free 21 Day Meditation Course I was all in.
During the COVID Quarantine, it became a morning practice I looked forward to each day that helps me feel centered and grounded. The videos are posted on YouTube. Here’s the playlist I created if you’re interested in experiencing Cory’s meditations.
Ellen — Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness by Rick Hanson, Ph.D., promises to be a fascinating dive into the underlying neuroscience of meditative practices. Hanson, a psychologist, Senior Fellow of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times best-selling author, is also the Founder of the Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom.
I have enjoyed his earlier works, including Buddha’s Brain, Resilient and Hardwiring Happiness, so I am anticipating more great reading and learning here, as I have just picked up the audio version.
The book promises to teach the reader “seven ways of being that are the essence of awakening…all grounded in the body…and not esoteric or out of reach.” The author says the book is “…structured like a retreat, with both presentations of ideas and guided meditations.”
I can’t wait to begin!
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Published by Dr. Ellen Britt & Denise Wakeman, Fast Factor Community
