- [Narrator] Studies have shown that meditating activates
the same parts of your brain as taking psilocybin mushrooms.
On top of this, meditating has been shown
to lower depression, anxiety and stress,
and it increases confidence, your immune system,
and it also raises your levels of empathy.
Instead of me just telling you about successful people
who meditate, I'm going to just show you four clips
of four incredibly successful people in their chosen fields
who practice something called transcendental meditation,
which is just a form of meditating.
- I meditate every day.
I meditate every day, and it helps me,
it's like having an anchor.
If I don't do it,
I feel like I'm constantly chasing the day.
- I've been a TMer for about five years now
and it is one of the important tools
I've adopted in my own life.
- So everyone in my life meditates.
I am a big proponent of meditation
and for radio, I feel it added tremendous creativity
and having that morning and afternoon.
In fact, to this day, after I do the radio show,
my head is pounding so bad from the headphones
and the loud noise and five hours of headphones and talking.
I mean, it's exhausting.
I go and I meditate and I walk out
and I have the whole rest of my day.
- And you gave a great definition of what meditation was.
- Yeah, I said that it's like you have a cell phone
and then somebody gives you the charger
and you go, oh, now this thing,
I can get this thing up to a hundred any time I want.
- Yeah, fully juiced.
- Yeah, fully.
- The power of fully juiced.
- Yeah, yeah.
- [Narrator] So after watching that,
I think we can all agree
that meditating is at least a little bit helpful.
But what exactly does it do for us?
Because there are so many benefits to meditation,
I don't have time to go through all of them,
but I am going to go over my top five
personal favorite reasons to meditate.
The first main point is that meditation improves
learning, memory and self-awareness.
Long term practice of meditation increases
grey matter density in the areas of the brain
associated with self-awareness,
compassion and introspection.
Grey matter is made up of the cell bodies
of nerve cells.
So basically, the more grey matter you have
in a certain area of your brain,
the smarter you'll become in that certain area.
And in my opinion, self-awareness
is the number one most important trait
when it comes to being successful in business,
relationships, school, or really anything at all in life.
The second reason is that mindfulness meditation
decreases feelings of loneliness.
A study from the Carnegie Mellon University
indicates that mindfulness meditation training
is useful in decreasing feelings of loneliness
which in turn decreases the risk
of morbidity and mortality.
As I've said in the past, I believe a big reason
why people don't get into the right relationships
is because they're often looking for another person
to complete them.
But when you practice meditating and you decrease
that feeling of loneliness and you decrease
that incomplete feeling,
you're much more likely to find the right person
who will make you truly happy.
The third benefit of meditation is that it lengthens
your attention span, and I think today,
with all the distractions in our lives,
this is more important than ever.
To put it simply, if you do something called
focused-attention meditation,
you're basically training your attention span,
similar to how you would train your biceps in the gym.
If you do this on a regular basis,
you will be able to focus on a certain task
for much longer without getting distracted.
It does not have to be a lot of meditating.
In fact, a study has shown that if you practice
meditation for only four days,
this actually could be enough
to increase your attention span.
The fourth reason is that meditation helps fight addictions.
Now when I say the word addictions,
I don't necessarily mean big addictions
like being addicted to drugs or alcohol
but I'm also talking about small addictions
like constantly checking your Instagram,
constantly checking your Facebook messages
or even your emails
or simply just being addicted to your phone in general.
The mental discipline you can develop through meditation
may help you break dependencies
by increasing your self-control and awareness
of the triggers for addictive behaviors.
One study that taught 19 recovering alcoholics
how to meditate, found that participants
who received the training
got much better at controlling their cravings
and it lowered the stress associated with the cravings.
And again, this is linked to building
that grey matter density in the self-awareness
part of the brain.
The fifth main benefit of meditation
is that it reduces stress and anxiety in general.
A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison
indicates that the practice of open monitoring meditation,
which again, is just a very basic form of meditation
reduces the grey matter density
in the areas of the brain related with anxiety and stress.
Meditators were much more able to attend
moment to moment focus.
So all that means is if there was a problem
that entered the meditator's life,
it is much easier for them to move on
to the next thing and it's much easier for them
to address the problem.
While someone who doesn't practice meditation,
oftentimes, they get so hung up
on that one problem or issue,
it could ruin their whole day
and even ruin their week sometimes.
I can honestly say that meditation has changed my life
and I'm not trying to sell you anything.
I'm not trying to get you to download some app.
I am just sharing with you how much of a positive impact
meditation had on my life
and I really would encourage you to at least try it out.
And in the future, I'm going to make a video
on how exactly I meditate.
If you're interested in meditation after watching this,
I really would appreciate it if you shared the video
with a friend or even left the video a like.
And as always, thank you so much for watching this video
and I'll see you in the next one.
(mellow music)