Episode 26: Holly Rogers

The tiny, compounding adjustments of mindfulness

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Today’s episode should be called mindfulness for hyper-driven skeptics with no time. Holly Rogers is a psychiatrist at the student counseling center at Duke University and the co-founder of the center for Koru mindfulness. Holly’s training as a psychiatrist provides a repertoire of research for the benefits of mindfulness, such as improving cardio vascular health, building a tolerance for discomfort, and my personal favorite: noticing tiny pain points with clarity and making adjustments that compound over time. We also discuss the “lowest effective dose” (10 minutes for 4 weeks), why today’s college students are way more anxious than in the past, and why mid-life crisis seem to be starting earlier.

More about Holly

• Website: Korumindfulness.org
• Koru’s blog: The Pause
• Koru Mindfulness App
• Holly’s Book: The Mindful Twenty-Something: Life Skills to Handle Stress and Everything Else

Holly recalls her first time meditating

I had no idea about the crazy thoughts going on in my head. The worries, the self-doubt, the plans I was making, the fears I had. I didn’t even know they were there, until I stopped to look.

The most concise benefit of mindfulness

That ability to notice the pain points, with clarity (not with self-criticism) and make tiny adjustments. Over time, it’s those tiny adjustments we make that lead to a life that has more peace of mind.

How college students “suffer”

It’s often the little suffering of having a paper due (and they didn’t start on it until the last minute), someone they’re interested in (who’s not interested in them), they wanted this internship (they didn’t get it), all the complexities of their academic relationships and pressures. They’re often not as resilient to these little losses as they would like to be.

How meditation builds resilience

Meditation builds your capacity to tolerate discomfort and you begin to trust that. That’s part of what lets you not fear bad things happening, you develop this trust in your capacity to deal with what you have to deal with.

Why are college students so anxious?

Students who are feeling very depressed and lonely get trapped in their dorm room with their phone and if I can get them to turn off their social media and put their phone away, they feel better. But it’s really hard to get them to do that.