Original subtitles

- [Driver] We're about 2 minutes away from the main entrance.

- How far away is the Syrian border from here?

- Syrian border is about 17 to 18 kilometres,

north of the Za'atari camp. - Yeah.

- The border is completely sealed off.

Jordan is no longer accepting

or able to take any more refugees

because of security issues.

Unfortunately we cannot film the main gate.

- [Shannon] Ah ha.

- So we will have to turn cameras off.

- [Shannon voiceover] When I started my experiment

to see what would happen to my mental wellbeing

if I meditated every day for a year,

I didn't plan to end up in the Middle East,

a region which is the front line

of a global humanitarian crisis,

and the heart of so much suffering.

None the less it was here, on the dusty streets

of one of the biggest refugee camps in the world

where the psychological scars left by war

and homelessness are in plain sight,

that the importance of my first question finally hit home.

But my story actually begins half a world away,

and more than a year ago.

In my work as a journalist and film maker,

I had started to research a new documentary

on what can only be described as a mental health crisis.

And I don't just mean the wellbeing

of the 70 million people

who have lost their homes to war and famine.

Despite living in a time of unprecedented progress

in science, technology, and medicine,

according to the leading medical science journal,

The Lancet, every country in the world is facing

and failing to tackle a host of mental health disorders.

- If economic affluence was a recipe for happiness

and freedom from pain and suffering,

then the developed world should be

about as happy as it gets.

But it's not.

- [Nick Van Dam] The rough estimates suggest that,

something like 20 to 25% of people will experience

mental illness within their lifetime.

So we're talking about one in four people.

And there's even more interest in data more recently

suggesting that that might even be an underestimate

which I find shocking.

And if you think one in four people, that's huge, right.

And if that's an underestimate, you know,

what are we talking about?

- Around the world there about 300 million people,

right now, suffering with depression.

And if you think about depression as a recurrent problem,

that means it's a 1 billion person problem.

- The statistics on kids who are in college,

who are taking anti-depressant drugs.

And it's almost so high, it's unbelievable.

It's a kind of pharmaceutical madness.

- We are definitely in an epidemic of chronic stress.

And we are not meant to be under stress everyday

for years at a time.

And that's when the damage occurs.

- Because the number one thing determining health is the mind.

It affects us directly because what goes on

in our mental and our emotional state

influences us psychologically,

but there's the indirect affects, as well.

So when we're not feeling good in ourselves,

we are not likely to look after ourselves well,

eat well, exercise

and so everything's impacted by our state of mind.

That's why I say it's the number one thing

and we're just not taking it seriously.

- [Shannon voiceover] Above all, there was one fact

I couldn't get out of my head.

Unless we change course,

by 2030, depression will overtake heart disease

and be the single biggest health problem we face.

And it wasn't just my future I was worried about.

I wanted to be able to teach my kids

how to prepare themselves for the world that is coming.

As they faced a future of disruption and uncertainty,

how could they protect, nurture and nourish their minds?

The single filter through which they will experience the world.

While there was tonnes of information

on what we should all be eating and drinking,

how much sleep we should be getting

and how much exercise we should be doing,

when I looked for a widely accepted,

evidence-based recommendation for our mental health,

the brain's equivalent of a 30-minute jog around the block,

or the mind's daily serving of five fruit and vegetables.

There was nothing.

So I guess I just, I wanted to show you this.

These are my health records since I first got sick.

I had constant pain all through my body.

And I had insomnia.

Yeah emotionally, I was in a pretty dark place.

This is the first letter that was written

after I was diagnosed.

I thought I was seeing this doctor

because he was going to tell me that I needed

to take a couple of weeks off work

and put my feet up.

But actually, he told me that he suspected

that I have an autoimmune disease called lupus,

for which there is no known cause

and there is no known cure.

- [Interviewer] How old were you?

- So I was 24, then, 24.

When you've got a chronic disease and you're desperate,

you will like, I would hand over my money

to anyone and everyone who offered me a cure.

I spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars

trying to find something that would cure me.

One of my symptoms was that I, thought I had food allergies.

So I went to this place called Advanced Allergy Elimination

that promised I would be able to cure my allergy.

I think I spent $700 with these guys.

And yeah, here's this news release from when

the government took them to court

and they were found to have misled consumers

about the efficacy of their treatments.

And I was one of the victims of that.

And that's when I started basically turning to science.

[pensive music]

- [Shannon voicover] Experiment notes.

If there's anyway that I can prevent my kids

from suffering in the same way I have,

I want to find it.

And I suspect if there is an answer,

it will buried in the latest scientific research.

To me, any realistic solution

has to meet some key requirements.

It has to be available to any one, anywhere, at any time

which means, it has to be free or at least, low cost.

It has to be available to anyone regardless

of their education or life circumstances

and it has to fit into the busy schedules

of people living in the real world.

My other key requirement is that it has to be based

on a solid foundation of scientific evidence.

Now all that sounds like a lot to ask

but there is one thing that ticks all my boxes.

Mindfulness meditation.

I know we have decades of research informing the advice

on exercise, food and sleep.

But in the last 10 years,

new technology has enabled scientists to peer inside

our brains and bodies while we sit quietly

with our thoughts and feelings.

In other words, meditate.

And contemplative science has exploded.

Whilst there are a number

of popular forms of meditation,

mindfulness in particular has captured scientific attention

and gone from a few hundred peer review papers

to almost 6,000.

From what I can tell,

it's a simple yet adaptable form of mental training

that seems to work on a range

of different psychological levels.

And in a similar way to exercise,

can sit quite comfortably

alongside the best of current medical practice.

And this is what I find really interesting

in the context of my question.

An eight-week programme underpinned by mindfulness

has repeatedly been found equal to medication

for preventing recurrent depression.

Given the mental health crisis,

should we all be practising mindfulness in the same way

that we should exercise and eat our vegetables?

Or is this evidence too good to be true?

There's only one way to find out.

I'm going to do an experiment,

My Year of Living Mindfully.

Hi Marc. Okay, so you're across what--

You're across what the film is, obviously?

[Marc faintly talking on phone]

Yeah.

Specifically in a nut shell, specifically, it's meditation.

So, you probably maybe, unless you've been under a rock,

you've probably heard that meditation is being sold

as this cure all panacea.

And so, this is kind of a project that's looking

at you know, is meditation,

is it just self-report quality of life that changes?

Or is there something really interesting that happens

on a biological level?

- Hey. - Neil. Hello.

- Welcome. - Nice to meet you in person.

- Yeah, come on through.

- Well go down to this lab, straight ahead here.

- [Shannon] I'm thrilled that a whole heap of scientists

have come on board.

Two neuroscientists, I've got somebody looking

at my telomeres.

We're tracking my stress hormones.

That's where you guys come into it

with the gene expression side of things.

Especially from the perspective

that I have an autoimmune disease.

Here's the sample. - Excellent.

Throw it in the freezer to keep it nice and cold.

- And then she has 30 minutes

from when she's taken that blood

to get it back to the lab.

Has this ever been done before?

- So, not at this sort of intensity,

in terms of the scheduling of testing.

- It says saliva.

Who has saliva on their to-do list?

So that's why I'm so grateful that

you guys came on board and said you're interested

and I'm fascinated.

Experiment notes.

It's been a wirlwind but I think I'm ready

to put my hypothesis to the test.

I first got sick 13 years ago,

during an especially difficult time in my life.

Although specialists have given

my autoimmune disease various labels,

if the science is anything to go by,

then regular mindfulness meditation

should have positive affects

on my mind, body and health.

I've set up interviews with 18

of the world's top mindfulness scientists

to guide me over the next year.

And I now have six researchers onboard

to track every biomarker linked to mindfulness

as well as my subjective wellbeing.

Step one is to be poked, prodded, scanned and screened

to establish a baseline before I start to meditate.

- So we've already done this scan once

and now we're going to do it with the meditation.

- [Shannon] Okay.

- So we have comparable data.

- [Shannon] And how does the brain look?

- It looks great. - There's a brain.

- We were commenting on it that there's a brain.

It's very nice, well formed.

No abnormalities.

This part is the hippocampus.

And it's one of the regions we're interested in.

And we're interested in the hippocampus

because it's one structure in the brain

that we can measure very well.

It's sensitive to stress.

It shrinks more with ageing.

So if we want to see whether some interventions decrease

the effect of ageing, that's one place we look at.

- [Shannon voiceover] The theory behind meditation's effect

on the brain is that when we do something,

there's activity in our brain and over time,

if it's done over and over again,

those networks become stronger.

It's the old neurons that fire together,

wire together catchphrase.

And it doesn't matter if I'm learning to navigate

London's streets in a taxi cab,

practising the piano,

or training in mindfulness meditation.

If I do my exercises, my brain should theoretically change.

So far, several studies have used MRI's

to look at the brain structure of long-term meditators.

And there are noticeable differences.

Professor Nicolas Cherbuin who's studying my brain

was involved in one experiment which found

that at age 50, the brains of meditators were seven

and a half years younger than non-meditators.

This has huge implications because brain ageing

or atrophy is linked with everything from dementia

and alzheimers to depression and addiction.

So at first glance, I'm thinking, younger brain?

Sign me up.

But there's a catch.

Their findings led to more questions,

crucially were their brains different

because they were long-term meditators?

Or were they more inclined to stick with meditation

because they had different brains to begin with?

The missing link here is scientific data

that tracks people like me over time.

So, yeah, so I've just been lying in bed thinking

that maybe...

Doing another low budget feature documentary

is a really silly idea.

And I think to myself, okay,

insomnia is back,

it looks like my autoimmune disease is presenting.

Like, is making this film

just the stupidest idea in the world?

Like, am I gonna pay for this with my health?

And I start catastrophising

and I start thinking, oh my God, like,

how can be sick and be a good mum?

So, like I have been chronically stressed lately.

I've probably taken on a bit more than I should have.

- Hmm hmm.

- If I was to keep this up

and you know, my insomnia has returned.

would you think that my symptoms could

become worse? - Yes.

But I think we've talked about this before.

Having realistic expectations

of how you manage that as well.

I think-- - What do you mean by that?

- In a perfect world,

we'd all be stress-free but,

today's society, we're all so,

have so many different pressures.

You as well, like you're working full-time,

you've got two young children,

you've got a lot on your plate.

It'll be interesting to see this year of stress management,

whether that's possible. - Hmm, yeah.

- And--

- [Shannon] You're not even sure it's possible.

- No, no, no, I'm not saying it's not.

I'm not saying it's not.

I'm just saying, you know, like I think,

it'll be interesting what you achieve from that.

- [Shannon] You're a scientist,

but you're also a working mother.

Do you have any idea how I am possibly going

to find the time to meditate everyday?

- I think of this very similar

to what dentists say about flossing.

Floss one tooth.

If you can commit to flossing one tooth,

your dental health will improve, why?

Because nobody flosses one tooth.

You're there, you're ready to go.

You're going to do the full routine.

Just taking the posture of practicing

even if you get up after that,

with that as your requirement for your day,

I think that you're likely to have a lot of success

with this in the next year.

- [Shannon voiceover] Experiment notes, methodology.

To start, I'm aiming for 20 minutes a day using an app

and I'll slowly build from there.

I've also signed up for an eight-week course

and a 10-day silent retreat.

Apart from that, nothing else will change.

I'll still have my usual parenting duties

and full-time work commitments.

As a journalist, that means researching,

writing and travelling for interviews.

And I won't change my diet or exercise habits.

As for the actual practice,

I'm turning to the experts.

I just want to get on tape your definition of mindfulness.

- [Jon Kabat-Zinn] So my working definition of mindfulness,

this is what I call an operational definition

is that it's the awareness that arises

from paying attention on purpose

in the present moment, non-judgmentally.

And the non-judgemental part is the kicker, so to speak

and people need to understand

that non-judgmentally doesn't mean

that you won't have any judgements,

it means that you will be mindful

of how many judgements you have.

How attached we all are to wanting things to be this way

and not wanting them to be that way.

So this is kind of,

it's an operational definition

because when you put it into operation,

then mindfulness arises within you.

- [Joseph] You can begin the meditation by settling

into a comfortable posture.

You begin to feel your body breathing.

- Mindfulness is a sort of state or capacity,

a way of being.

And meditation is a whole family of practices

that are in the service of cultivating mindfulness.

So in Pali and Sanskrit,

the word for meditation is bhavana,

which means to develop or to cultivate.

And so meditation is in the service of cultivating

and developing mindfulness.

- [Joseph] You become aware of predominant sensations.

- So mindfulness is not a way of relaxing.

When we pay attention and look at our mind,

we discover all sorts of things,

which may be anything but relaxing.

- [Joseph] As we end the meditation, you can open your eyes.

As you re-engage with your life and the world,

you can always come back to the very simple feeling

of the body.

The body sitting, the body standing, the body walking.

In this way, we see that meditation is not simply

about sitting, it's not simply about one posture.

It's bringing awareness and mindfulness

to every aspect of our lives.

- The brain is changing wittingly or unwittingly,

constantly, and the invitation in all this work

is that we can actually take more responsibility

for the shaping of our brains

in ways which may underlie positive qualities

of the mind and wellbeing.

- [Shannon Voiceover] Experiment notes, day 14.

I'm getting the gist that mindfulness is essentially

a three and a half thousand year old technique

to teach me how my mind works.

I'm really grateful for the expert advice

because there's just so much mindfulness on offer

that it's hard to know who to trust.

It's available in classrooms and boardrooms,

in studios and online.

There are mindful books, apps, gyms, buses

and even mayonnaise.

Meditation is now the fastest growing health trend

in the US and has transformed

from an ancient Buddhist practise

into a 1.1 billion dollar industry.

I'm starting to realise, there's a big difference

between the mindfulness for mental health

that I'm reading about

in the most prestigious science journals

and the chicken pot pie-based meditation system

that promises to nourish my mind and body

that was developed by the rather cheeky marketing department at KFC.

- [KFC Character] A system that will ease your suffering.

And your hunger.

- So I'm on the road at the moment doing some interviews

and I've just been sent a scientific paper

that's been published in a respected journal.

The paper's called, Mind the Hype.

So, listen to this.

As mindfulness has increasingly pervaded every aspect

of contemporary society,

so have misunderstandings about what it is,

whom it helps and how it affects the mind and brain.

At a practical level, this misinformation and propagation

of poor research methodology has potentially

led to people being harmed, cheated, disappointed

and or disaffected.

So I'm just going to try and get in touch with the lead author

of the paper, Nicholas Van Dam.

He said he's available to talk to me over Skype.

- The main story or the main sort of thing

we want to convey is that a lot of the portrayal

of meditation and mindfulness research

is probably overly positive.

That's not just the media,

that's also a lot of scientific researchers

and you know, promoters of mindfulness and meditation.

There's this sort of, this idea or this sort of sentiment

that it can be used as sort of a solution

or a treatment or a fix for just about anything.

And there's been this massive growth in the marketisation

of that idea, you know,

that there's lots of people now selling products

that promise and offer mindfulness.

And one of my sort of, the things I teach my students,

you know, when I'm training clinical students

how to do psychotherapy,

I always tell them essentially you know,

if someone tells you that this new intervention

will fix everything,

then you know, ask them hard questions.

Because anyone who's trying to tell you

that one thing works 100% of the time

for 100% of the people, is not telling you the whole story.

- So, do you think that the public appetite for mindfulness

is outpacing the evidence base that we have?

- Oh yeah, yeah.

That's for sure.

- There is absolutely hype that's exacerbated

by many press reports

that aren't necessarily doing responsible delivery

of research findings.

- It's one of the struggles of mindfulness science

is just coming to terms with the reality

that we are trying to catch up

to what's happened in terms of a dissemination

and implementation of mindfulness practices

and interventions.

- It's interesting to see that a lot of these very popular

mindfulness training programmes don't particularly

have the science behind them.

And also don't particularly get

at the core mechanistic underpinnings

of how mindfulness works.

Maybe I'm just a scientist but I really think

that that's a core piece that we would want to bake

into the trainings.

If we're developing a pill

to help people lower their blood pressure,

I would want to understand

how people's blood pressure is rising in the first place

so that I could design a pill specifically for that.

- [Shannon] Is this still a worthwhile experiment?

- [Marc Wilkins] I think, I mean, part of me says that

as a scientist, I want to know what will happen.

I'm excited by this.

I think it's really, really interesting.

At the same time, we know that there's a limitation

in the design of what we're going to do.

But we'll need to work with that as best we can

to see what the data tells us.

- [Shannon] So I'm in a situation now,

where I have committed tens of thousands of dollars

towards lab time but I'm seriously questioning

whether or not it's actually going to tell us anything.

- At the end of the day, the biggest limitation

and the biggest problem is,

it's hard to know whether or not the findings

that you would get from one person will tell you,

you know, anything about a different person.

Because essentially, with one person,

we just can't draw that conclusion

and that it'll generalise to everyone.

And that's not to say it's worthless, right.

I mean, there are lots of case studies out there

and case studies are often really important starts.

You know, what you will typically observe

in most scientific fields particularly in,

you know, the applied sciences and medicine,

is we often start with case studies.

- [Shannon] Today's interview was all about interviewing

the people who are all like,

we don't know anything, the science isn't there.

...like...

so, basically I left today going,

hang on, why are we doing this again?

- Well, let me just say,

this film certainly has a lot of question marks.

- Oh God, I don't know what we're doing Jules.

I think we're idiots.

I think the only way forward here is

to accept that the scientists

might not have all the answers.

I think I need to go and find some real life case studies.

♪ I have been searching all of my days ♪

♪ All of my days

♪ Many road you know

♪ I've been walking on

♪ All of my days

♪ And I've been trying to find

♪ What's been in my mind

♪ As the days keep turning into night ♪

♪ yes even breathing

♪ Feels all right.

So it is just past one o'clock in the morning.

And tomorrow I have got

one of the more important interviews for the documentary.

My alarm is set to go off at 20 past four,

so in about four hours from now

and I haven't slept a wink.

I just can't sleep.

I really wanted to be,

I wanted to bring my A-game to this interview.

I've been really looking forward to it

and I'm really well prepared

and in my mind, I had all these great ideas

as to how it's going to flow.

And instead I am going to be a zombie.

So, let's start at the very beginning.

How many million people saw you lose your mind

on television?

- 5.019 million,

according to the Nielsen ratings.

I started in television and news when I was 22

and then when I was 28, I got a job at ABC News.

Shortly after I arrived, 9/11 happened

and I ended up spending a lot of time

in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza.

I went to Iraq six times.

And I didn't spend a lot of time thinking

about what the psychological consequences might be.

And so when I came home, I kind of bottomed out.

I got depressed,

although I didn't even know I was depressed.

I was having trouble getting out of bed.

I felt like I had a low grade fever all the time.

I went and consulted a bunch of doctors.

And before I actually got a diagnosis of depression,

I did something very dumb,

which is I started to self-medicate

with recreational drugs including cocaine and ecstasy.

The bottom for me was

freaking out on national television.

June 2004, I was reading the headlines.

May also lower their risk for cancer,

but it is too early to prescribe statins,

slowly for cancer production.

My lungs seized up.

My heart was racing.

I just couldn't talk

which is a problem

when talking is what you need to do for a living

and it's a vicious cycle

between the thinking and the physical manifestation.

So your body starts to mutiny

and your mind picks up on that, obviously.

And is like, "What the fuck is this?"

And you start thinking,

"Oh my God, I'm freaking out, I'm having a panic attack

and I'm on television."

And then the body reacts to all of that

and starts freaking out even more.

The fight or flight response was useful in the context

of when we were being chased by saber-tooth tigers,

but in a modern context,

we are both the person being chased by the tiger

and the tiger.

You know, we're doing it to ourselves.

- People are worried about the future.

They're worried about the economy.

They're worried about their personal finances.

They're worried about their children.

They're worried about everything.

We're living in this inner mental world

where we're constantly creating trouble for ourselves.

- And now we're seeing anxiety problems

and mental health problems in younger and younger age groups

and some people could argue, well,

it was there but we just weren't diagnosing it before.

But that only explains a small part of it.

- So for people at risk for depression,

sad mood and negative thinking can be very powerful

and very potent.

Just a small negative thought can very quickly spiral

into a downward spiral of depressive thinking,

withdrawal and depressive relapse.

- Evolutionarily, we needed to stay safe.

So looking for threats,

the ability to focus on problems

and hopefully either avoid them or fix them

was actually very good for our survival.

So, the fact that we spend so much of our time

criticising ourselves or thinking about what we did wrong

or what we might do wrong

actually comes with a very wholesome desire

and that's a desire to be safe.

- The stressful experience may be

for let's say five minutes

an exchange you had with a colleague or your boss.

And if it were only those five minutes

that the stress had an impact on us,

we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.

But the way I think about it is that the brain

is actually wonderful at mental time travel.

And we can rewind the mind back to experience

that event for days and weeks.

- [Elissa Epal] In general in stress research,

it has been found that exposure to a situation

doesn't really determine mental health,

let's say depression,

as much as how someone is interpreting the situation.

So feelings of stress are important

and what happens to people is important too

but if I were to put my money on one,

I would say it's the psychological response to situations

not just, does a situation exists or not.

- So the first thing is to realise that it is affecting you

and the second is that there is something actually,

there are many things that you can do about it

and the potential is

of resolving it and coming to a very different kind of place

where we look squarely at the real dangers

as opposed to the illusory dangers to us

and we start dealing with them.

- [Dan Harris] I came home one night

and my wife gave me a book by a guy named Dr. Mark Epstein

who I liked right away because he had actual credentials

as opposed to some of these self-help folks

who don't, to put it kindly.

Epstein writes about the overlap

between psychology and Buddhism

and it was this very dry-eyed to common sense diagnosis

of the human situation.

Buddha uses this term that we have the monkey mind,

hurling ourselves from one hit of pleasant experience,

one movie, one vacation, one latte to the next

and yet never fully satisfied.

The Buddha's description of a human situation

was very compelling.

His prescription was repellent

which was that he says you should meditate.

I did not want to do that.

I thought it was ridiculous

To the extent that I even thought about meditation,

I thought it was for people who are really

into you know, kombucha and crystals and Enya.

But for me what changed my mind was reading

about the science.

- For example, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy

has been shown now to be as good as gold standard treatment

for the treatment of depression.

It's only been around for about 15 or so years,

whereas the medication developments has been

around for 50, 75 years.

And so it's already caught up.

So I think there's a lot of interest

in helping people develop

their own natural capacities to heal.

- And my study was one of the first to look at whether

you could use MBCT to treat active depression.

And we were really interested in mechanisms,

so we looked at stress reactivity.

And so one of the best ways to stress people out

is make them stand up and give a speech.

And we found that the group that received meditation,

they still had a stress response which is good

because you want to have a stress response

but they recovered more quickly.

And the control group were probably still kind of thinking

about like, oh that was the worst experience ever

and like really ruminating about it

whereas the mindfulness group had learned to let go of that.

- And so one of the ways that mindfulness works

is by reducing that reactivity, that automaticity

of the content of our thoughts.

So it's really amazing.

An amazing thing about humans is the impact of language

and linguistic symbol and verbal thought.

I am unlovable.

I'm fat.

I am all sorts of things.

And just that content can trigger other thoughts,

can trigger physiological responses

like I can feel in my body now,

emotions and so on.

And so reducing that identification,

with those passing expriences,

just as events in our consciousness

is one of the most important ways through

which mindfulness leads to wellbeing

and reduced mental health struggles.

- [Dan Harris] I would say it was a couple weeks

before I started to notice some differences.

The biggest one is mindfulness.

We spend so much of our time just kind of yanked around

by the malevolent puppeteer of our ego.

You know, where the thought pops,

some neurotic obsession pops into our head,

you know, I need a sleeve of Oreos

or I need to say the thing that's going to fuck

up the next 48 hours of my marriage.

And we just do it, you know,

there's no buffer between the stimulus

and our blind reaction.

Mindfulness, it's like this inner-meteorologist

that can see, oh, yeah,

there's a hurricane about to hit land

but I don't need to get carried away by it automatically,

reflexively, habitually.

I have some choice.

I'm still the same person, right?

So I still have a predisposition toward anxiety

and depression, panic.

But what I find is that I'm less likely to believe

the bullshit that the ego coughs up.

So what could be a several day long trudge

through mopiness and despair

actually can be truncated quite dramatically

to a couple hours, a couple of minutes, who knows,

depending on how mindful I am.

- Does the critical thinking journalist in you

ever worry that you've just bought massively into a cult?

- I mean I called it 10% Happier.

If the book was called Be Happy Now

or like This Is The Solution To All Of Your Problems,

yeah, I'd worry about that.

I think the vast swathe of humanity could benefit

from this very simple thing of just sitting down,

closing your eyes or not,

trying to feel your breath coming in and going out

and then when you get distracted,

start again, and again and again.

The lessons there from this really simple little thing

are incredibly rich.

What follows on from that is an empathy

with every other human

who has the same process going on.

And so now when you see other people

who are losing their shit at the aeroplane ticket counter

or whatever, you're like, "Oh yeah, that's me, too."

- [Shannon] Okay, so this feels utterly ridiculous.

I am about to speak at an event.

And I thought I was running late

and I'm feeling rushed

and there was traffic

and people relying on me.

So I'm about to take a mindful minute

in the bathroom.

I'm really worried somebody's going to come in.

I'm going to look like an absolute bloody idiot.

- [Sharon] In this meditation,

we're going to add the element of recognising

and noting those things that arise

which are not the breath.

- So day 51 of my year of living mindfully

and here I am meditating on the sidewalk.

- [Sharon] It may be thinking that comes up.

It maybe imagery, it may be emotion.

It may be sensations in your body.

Whatever it is, it's simply not the breath.

- There we go. A mindful minute

in the bathroom before an event.

Experiment notes, day 38.

I've realised that science is only a small part

of this story.

Since meeting Dan Harris,

I've become aware of an incessant mean voice in my head

that took up residence sometime when I was a kid

and drives so much of what I do.

And it's making my meditation practise almost intolerable.

Like I know this sounds crazy

because we're pretty deep in already.

But I...

To be honest, I've been hating it.

I'm struggling to find the time to meditate

and I'm not like, it's... meditation is not pleasant

until yesterday

where something changed.

And I was doing it because I was on a plane

coming back from Melbourne

where I'd just been doing a presentation,

but for a very brief moment,

it was like just peace

and I just sort of held it

and it wasn't like it switched off suddenly.

It was like there was this slow winding down of it

until eventually I was back

to just how I am normally which is you know,

lots of thoughts going on, lots of crazy thinking happening.

So I feel like that moment was this kind of,

it was a beat of interest

that makes me think that I want to keep going.

I interviewed the French-born Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard

right at the end of what was a four day,

whirlwind tour for him of Australia

and yet he still sparkled.

In order to have that somethingness,

do I need to move to the Himalaya

and meditate for months on end?

- No, I don't think you need to meditate

in any specific place.

What I do believe based on my own experiences

as a practitioner as well as a scientist

is that, that kind of ever-present joy

and lightness and spontaneity

really comes from long-term practice.

- There's a saying in the Tibetan lore,

Matthieu who's been in that tradition,

they call it being happy for no reason.

That is to say your set point is joyous.

I saw Matthieu go into an MRI

when they were trying to develop the protocols

that Richard Davidson used.

He was the first subject

but the thing was they had some glitches

and he stayed in the MRI for about three hours.

The MRI is a human cigar box.

Some people can't bear it.

He came out after three hours,

sat up very cheery and said,

"Oh, that was like a little mini retreat".

In other words, it didn't affect him in the least.

- My brain is nothing special,

different than any other one except that,

what I've trained in shows in the brain.

Doesn't matter.

It's not about Buddhist monk.

Please give us a break.

It's about human beings training their minds

and they have a very common pattern

for instance compassion,

if you train a long time in loving kindness and compassion,

when you are asked to do so you activate your brains

in a very strong way.

And if look at the control group that did one week,

a little bit, it's not their fault.

They have not trained their mind

so why should they get the result?

It's like if you train in running or whatever,

you know, if you're a beginner,

you're not going to run a marathon.

So that means it is the result of the training

not of coming from here and there,

being a monk or not monk.

This is irrelevant.

You're training the mind.

What the matter the colour of your dress.

- [Richard Davidson] Matthieu and other long-term practitioners

have helped us tremendously in establishing

what our minds and our brains are capable of.

We wanted to begin there

because if we tested Matthieu

and other individuals like him and didn't see very much,

there'd be no point in evaluating beginners.

And what we saw is something quite remarkable.

Their brains are really very, very different.

And what was really amazing

was that these dramatic differences were present

not simply when these practitioners are meditating

but also during their baseline state.

That was the clue that this is an altered trait.

- So is this one rolling now, Jules?

- [Julian] They should both be rolling.

- Both be rolling, okay.

You don't want to see,

I have this lamp like balanced on my computer.

- You know what, I can't see it on camera.

So therefore it doesn't exist.

- Perfect.

- So like I don't know if this is complete placebo,

but my insomnia has just disappeared.

- Before you started meditating,

what was your insomnia like?

- Once or twice a week, I would be going through the night

unable to sleep.

- And your mind racing,

you know thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts, thoughts?

Yeah and one of the simplest things that I give

to my patients who have clinical insomnia

is a body scan.

So if you think of the habit loop,

there's the worry thought

that triggers getting caught up in that anxiety

and then you start looking at your clock and saying,

"Oh no, I can't sleep"

and then it just gets worse and worse.

- Exactly.

- I don't know if that's your case.

- That's exactly it, yeah. - Yeah.

So what are you noticing with mindfulness?

Are you able to notice that

and then let go of it

or is it not even coming up?

- Like, I'm really aware.

"Oh my god, I've got all these anxious thoughts".

And so I'm kind of,

before I'm going to bed, I'm kind of mitigating my behaviour.

- So how was that placebo?

You're describing an actual behaviour change,

catching that worry thinking, not feeding it

and by not feeding it, not having insomnia.

So you can see a causal link there.

- [Shannon] What I think is really important

is that mindfulness does not cure your illnesses.

But what it does is it helps you

to change your relationship to the illness.

- Well, and it's also,

I think another important potential mechanism

is in helping people take better care of themselves.

Having a healthier diet.

Getting enough sleep.

Getting enough physical exercise.

All of these things that are known

to be really important aspects of being healthy

and that we all struggle with actually doing.

That's one of the things that were studying.

How mindfulness training could be an element

in helping people change their behaviours

to healthier lifestyles.

- [Judson Brewer] It appears that these trainings

can help people change behaviour.

The other thing that we can say is mechanistically

it seems that mindfulness is helping

to decouple the craving and the behaviour.

So that piece we've seen multiple times as well.

So we've seen replicability in that as well.

Where we might be able to start applying this

is to other types of behaviours

where we're seeing similar types of habit loops,

whether it's smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol,

smoking crack cocaine, using heroin,

eating food or even going on social media.

That's been shown to activate

the same dopaminergic reward system

as all these known drugs of abuse.

So, for example, we got five times the quit rates

of gold standard treatment in our smoking programme

when we did a randomised controlled trial.

And mechanistically we could see

how the mindfulness training was decoupling the craving

from the behaviour.

- Sorry Jud, just stop.

You got five times the quit rate

on gold standard treatments? - Yes.

So when we looked at four months after we started treatment

with folks, so they got about four weeks of treatment.

And we looked for months later.

We found that they were five times more likely

to quit smoking than gold standard treatment.

- Ah, so, welcome everybody.

It feels really good to actually be here in the flesh.

- MBSR is basically, was a proof of concept

and a kind of model for how we could catch people

just regular people, no interest in meditation,

but major suffering

because the people we were targeting,

those who were falling through the cracks as I like to say

of the healthcare system.

- [Shannon voiceover] Experiment notes, day 123.

I've stepped up to 45 minutes a day for my MBSR course

mostly practising a body scan technique

and I'm really noticing a dose effect.

I'm now even more aware of my mental habits,

the same thoughts happening again and again

and I'm getting better at noticing my emotions arising

without automatically reacting to them.

As intriguing as this is anecdotally though,

I'm surprised that there's hardly any evidence

that tells me how long I should practise for

or even what specific techniques work best.

One recent study by Harvard neuroscientists,

did directly compare the mindfulness in MBSR

with another popular technique, relaxation meditation.

They split people into two groups

and taught them both a body scan.

But while one group was taught to systematically relax areas

in their body,

the other was taught mindfulness

being aware of each area without trying to change anything.

Although both groups reported feeling less stressed,

it turned out this tiny tweak

in the mental training resulted in noticeable differences

in their brain activity.

In the same way that swimming

and running are both called exercise and can be good for me,

different meditation techniques might actually matter.

And I suspect that particular contemplative practices

will one day be prescribed to different people

for specific reasons.

When I look through the current evidence

on high-quality mindfulness programmes like MBSR,.

they seem to be particularly effective for chronic pain.

Given that we're in the midst

of an opioid addiction epidemic

on top of all the other mental health concerns,

this is no small thing.

And I find the idea that mental training

could be a drug-free option really interesting.

Can I get a brief explanation

of what it is like to be in your body today?

- A doctor would describe my medical diagnosis today

as having incomplete paraplegia, paralysed bowel,

paralysed bladder,

having chronic neuropathic and musculoskeletal pain.

So my lived experience of being in this body today

is I've got pain all the time.

So I was brought up in New Zealand,

very beautiful, free, active childhood.

I was very sporty.

Then when I was 16, I was doing life-saving practice

and I lifted someone out of the swimming pool.

And it turned out that I had a condition

called spondylolisthesis

and that my vertebrae had fractured.

So then in the beginning of my 17th year in 1977,

I had a spinal fusion operation.

Then when I was 23,

I was in a car and we ploughed into a telegraph pole.

[ambulance siren wailing]

I'd fractured the middle of my spine.

So I ended up in a neurosurgical intensive care ward.

The medical team made it clear to me

there was not a medical magical cure.

My spine was a very, very damaged.

More surgery was wasn't going to be helpful

and that I needed to learn to live with it, somehow.

I had, I suppose literally a dark night of the soul.

So I had part of my mind saying, "I can't bear this.

I'm going to go crazy."

And another part of my mind saying,

"But you have to."

And at a certain point, another voice came in

and said very, very clearly,

"You just have to live this moment".

And my experience changed from one of this,

you know, being in a vice to greater ease.

I still feel that that has been the most profound moment

of my life and everything that's followed since then,

all the meditation, becoming a Buddhist,

founding Breathworks,

is still trying to make sense of that.

I came across the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn around that time

and also the work of Stephen Levine

and what they both talked about was turning

towards your direct experience

rather than trying to escape your pain.

- Why does mindfulness works so effectively

with chronic pain?

- Well, the thing to understand about pain,

acute or chronic, but especially chronic,

is that we experience a sensation

and then there's all the mental and emotional reaction

to the sensation.

And so with the same stimulus,

the brain fires off more pain messages.

The person is not making it up.

It's not like a person's imagining the pain.

The person's experiencing it

but there's an amplifying effect

because of the mental and emotional reaction to to it.

Now where mindfulness seems to help

is it helps a person to gently notice the sensation

but to be less emotionally reactive to it

and to re-engage the attention with what's going on

around the person.

- One of the reasons that we likely evolved

to have a human attention system

is because the brain faces

an incredible computational challenge.

There's far more information in the environment

than can possibly be processed.

Attention biases,

virtually all of the information processing.

So for example, if you show somebody two circles on a page

just on a regular piece of paper and you say to them,

those are eyes of a face.

Now all of a sudden,

you can get face processing systems that are engaged.

So it's incredibly powerful

to change the way information is processed,

even at the earliest stages in our visual system.

- So when one study looked

at mindfulness compared to placebo,

but they also did MRI of the brain

to see which areas of the brain are active in placebo

and which ones in mindfulness?

The area of the brain that the mindfulness

was mostly working on were the areas the brain

that decide whether or not to let the message through

to the higher centres.

We often do an experiment with people

when we're teaching them mindfulness.

And you can set a person down or a group of people down

and you can just sort of notice maybe some persistent,

obvious noise, doesn't have to be loud,

but an obvious noise.

And you sit down and close your eyes.

Now, I want you to listen to that noise.

Now, I want you to block that noise out

so that you can't hear it.

Make that sound go away.

If you can still hear it,

I want you to try even harder to block it out.

And of course what people notice

is the harder they try to block it out,

the louder it becomes

whereas in mindfulness,

there's no need to block anything out.

But if the attention is going to something else,

the other thing just recedes into the background.

So it's like the brain decides what messages

to let through and which ones not to.

- Welcome to the class everybody.

Very lovely to see you all.

I have a very effective life now.

I travel globally.

I teach globally.

I've still got chronic pain.

I'm still disabled.

I've still got a paralysed bowel and bladder.

My legs don't work properly

but I have a really good life.

My story isn't one of a miracle cure.

It's a story of healing rather than cure.

And I think this is very, very important

because for many, many years, I felt I was a failure.

Can't manage to earn a living.

Can't manage to sort my life out.

And I can't cure my pain.

And you know, meditation isn't going to unfuse my spine

but meditation has enabled me to profoundly heal

of my response to life as it is

and for me, that's a much greater miracle

because we've all got bodies that will age.

We've all got bodies that things will go wrong.

And if the paradigm is you're only succeeding,

if you can have a perfect body at all times

through all stages of life, we're all going to fail.

So I'm not actually very interested in cure.

I'm interested in learning to live with my life,

with whatever arrives in any day

and we can't control what arrives in our life,

but we can control how we respond

to what arrives in our life.

[bell chiming]

- So, welcome everybody.

Our last class.

So maybe we'll just take a moment to arrive.

Just feeling into what it feels like to be here.

- [Shannon] Today, I'm having a seven out of ten day with pain levels.

I'm having an arthritis flare through my body.

I found the body scan enormously difficult.

The word that's on the tip of my tongue is unbearable,

but I was just so conscious of the exercise

that we did a few weeks ago

where we connected with the catastrophising story

that happens.

And I you know, you just mentioned Vidyamala Burch

and it just so happens

that we interviewed Vidyamala

for the project that we're working at the moment last week

and she talks about learning to be with

that emotional response to the pain

which I've never in my life been taught to do.

So um...

Yeah.

Do you think that in many ways part of the problem

is that we're not taught how to suffer?

- Wow.

We're not taught how to suffer.

You know, it's really interesting.

Maybe, I think in some ways,

we are taught how to suffer

but sometimes it doesn't necessarily mean

that what we've learned and what we've been taught

is the most adaptive way.

Mindfulness meditation and these other interventions

aren't necessarily about alleviating suffering completely.

Maybe alleviating unnecessary suffering

is one way of thinking about it

'cause I think that not only but I think many people think

that meaning, meaning,

gratitude,

compassion,

good things

also come from suffering and gives us perspective.

And so I think even this idea

that we should be free of suffering,

maybe is just not the case.

♪ I blame you Hollywood

♪ For showing me things you never should ♪

♪ Show a young girl

♪ In this cruel world

♪ 'Cause life's not a happy ending ♪

♪ Sure there are some

♪ Like Johnny and June

♪ Maybe other people too

♪ Like me and you

- [Shannon voiceover] Experiment notes, day 143.

MBSR may have finished but I have no doubt

that the experiences and friendships

it kindled will stay with me.

And I'm now so aware of just how powerful my attention is

in every aspect of my life.

Attention is one of my most precious resources,

but I've never valued it before.

I feel a bit like Neo in The Matrix

after he's just woken up.

I can see all the forces around me trying

to hijack my attention.

Despite all the benefits of new technology,

we now live in a world full of distractions,

on our streets, in our homes and at our very fingertips.

Has being distracted become my default setting?

What would it be like if I turned it all...

Off?

So here we go, my first silent retreat.

I'm not scared.

I am maybe trepidatious, could be the right word.

I've never in my life been in a situation

where I haven't had a book to read

or music to listen or a movie to watch

or people to talk to.

I've never, ever experienced

that kind of sensory deprivation.

- [interviewer] So what day will you lose your mind?

- Well, hopefully, I'm not going to lose my mind.

The good meditation teachers can recognise the signs

of people who are in distress

and hopefully guide them out of it

but I'm not going to lose my mind.

I'm not going to lose my mind.

- When I was doing my psychiatric internship,

two people the same year were hospitalised

at my hospital from a 10-day meditation retreat centre.

So it seemed like as a responsible clinical psychologist

something worthy of following up with.

The variety of the contemplative experience study

was an interview-based study,

about various difficulties that can arise

in the context of practice.

The most common reported category was increases in fear.

You can also see people who lose all emotional tone

altogether including like feelings for their children.

And then sense of self almost always

at least the people that call us

are reporting with some kind of disturbance

in their sense of self.

They don't feel like they own their emotions

or their thoughts.

- [Shannon] So that's depersonalization, right?

- [Willoughby] That's depersonalization, yeah.

- You know, I'm partly doing this

because I want to be a better mother

and a better person, a better wife, a better friend,

a better daughter, a better sister.

Like I wanna be a better person

but what you're telling me is that there are people

who are reporting experiences of losing those relationships.

- Yes.

I mean, one of the more encouraging things

about experience-dependent neuroplasticity,

which is basically the idea that you get good

at what you practise is that it's fairly gradual.

You can monitor yourself.

And I think a lot of the quote-unquote adverse effects

are really about mismatches

between the practises and the teachers

and the programmes and people's goals.

You know, they don't want to lose their sense of self,

but that's what certain practises are designed to do.

So don't do those practises.

Do ones that cultivate positive emotions,

you know, there are practises like that.

Those are some of my favourites.

Going on a retreat can be a very intense experience.

It's called a retreat.

That makes it sound like it's a spa

but it's actually really difficult.

- My agreement with the organisers of the retreat was

that once other people started arriving,

I would stop using the camera in public.

So I think yeah, the arrival of that car there,

it pretty much symbolises the arrival of the other people.

So, I guess for now,

it's going to be signing off

and I'll just be using the diary cam in my room

and maybe during the chats that I have with Patrick,

the teacher.

From seven o'clock tonight when we start silence,

until the end of this retreat,

in 10 days time,

it's just going to be me in the contents of my mind

and I guess that's really just starting to hit me now.

- The resting state is a topic

of tremendously increased scientific interest.

So, if you put a person in an MRI scanner

and instruct them to simply rest,

we see a pattern of brain activity that is non-random.

What you actually see is that there are circuits

which emerge as being more activated than other circuits

and those circuits have been called the default mode.

And one of the characteristics of the default mode

is that it seems to play some role

in the kind of self narrative that we have

occurring in our minds all the time.

And meditation seems to change

that in very interesting ways.

And so the parts of the default mode that

may be particularly important for this self narrative

become less strongly connected

to other areas of the brain.

And so what it suggests

is that the self narrative is not hijacking

the other brain circuits in the same way

where we can learn through specific kinds

of meditation practises like mindfulness

to regard the self narrative for what it is.

They are thoughts rather than getting hijacked by them

as if they are reality.

- The posterior cingulate cortex is actually one

of the hubs of the default mode network.

It seems to be a marker of the experiential self

at least that's our hypothesis.

So the idea is there's something in our experience

that says this is going to set a boundary

between me and the rest of the world.

When somebody's meditating,

those boundaries start to dissolve

and on an experiential level,

we feel this often as an expanding quality

of our experience.

And if that expansion goes all the way to infinity,

we start to lose that boundary between our self and others

and what we found was the posterior cingulate cortex

gets really quiet

when we're meditating

or being curious or even being grateful.

- The curriculum of mindfulness is whatever is arising.

Now, you see that more on, let's say,

a 10-day retreat because like there's nothing going on

except in your mind, there's a lot going on.

So, how are you going to be in relationship

with whatever's running through your mind?

And that's where the liberation comes in,

that's where the insight arises.

That's when you realise that you are much bigger

than your narratives and that changes the brain activity

in these narrative networks, the default mode network.

And as I alluded to,

I think metaphorically at least, we need

to do a lot more science before we can know the degree

to which it's literally true,

we're shifting the default mode

from one of mindlessness and mind wandering to mindfulness.

- [Shannon] I'm experiencing these moments

of deep awareness.

How can I possibly keep this going

in the craziness of the so-called real world?

- You can't. - You can't.

- You need all the conditions to come together.

That's why people do retreats.

Now, insight is interesting

in that it has the characteristic

that once you see something, you've seen it

and that never goes away. - Okay.

So I'm not going to forget.

- You will forget your insights

but the effect that it has, "Oh, this is what's going on",

that stays.

I like to call it the Santa Claus effect.

So when we we're young

and every year this magical figure turns up

and we always left out some beer for him

and some cake because you know by the time

he gets to Australia, he's pretty tired.

And then one Christmas Eve,

you hear sounds in the living room.

So you creep out and have a look.

And there's your father scoffing the beer and the cake

and you mother laying out the presents.

But Christmas can never be the same

because you've seen something

and the world is different now.

Insight works like this.

You forget your insight.

but there's a sense in which your insight never forgets you.

- Hey. - Hello.

- How you doing?

Welcome back.

- Thank you. - How was it?

- It was extraordinary.

You know, what's in my head right now, don't you?

- No, not all of it.

No, I get where you're coming from.

- So are we going to see that on a brain scan?

- Well, should we go take a look?

- Let's go.

I've been home from the silent retreat for just over a month

and I can honestly say I feel amazing.

I feel amazing in my head

and I feel amazing in my body.

I have no symptoms of my autoimmune disease.

The changes are so monumental for me

that I can't help but wonder

if this is simply that I feel differently about my illness

or if there's something more going on

like under my skin and in my cells.

Now, I do understand that it's early days.

But, do you think this research holds promise

for autoimmune diseases?

- It's a good question Shannon.

I think that mindfulness and mind-body activities

are helpful to the immune system

regardless of whether it's being overactive or underactive.

While genetics plays a huge role

when you want to know who's living well to a hundred,

we think lifestyle plays a tremendous role

and it's the interaction of lifestyle

and experience with genetics.

It's not one or the other.

The action is in the interaction.

- Whether or not mindfulness actually cures a disease

remains to be seen.

There's some hopeful signs.

A study that Richie Davidson did actually,,

where advanced meditators in six hours of meditation

turned off or down regulated the genes

that create inflammation in the body.

Whether that's clinically significant or not,

it's too early to say.

- And that does have important health implications

because we know that inflammatory processes

are at the root of many chronic illnesses,

cardiovascular disease, arthritis,

asthma and if meditation can reduce inflammation,

that's a really important finding.

- That's very exciting though

as somebody with an autoimmune disease, I have to say.

- We're very interested to see what would happen

if someone like you with an autoimmune disease

were to become a very serious meditator

and track what goes on during that time genetically

and in terms of symptoms, of course.

But that hasn't happened yet.

- [Shannon] What I'm starting to realise is

how frontier this science is.

And that at the end of my experiment,

I might not have scientific data

to explain my own transformative experience.

How do I reconcile this?

- That's a hard one, I don't know.

I mean, I think our assumption,

our default in science is often,

"Oh, we want to know whether

or not mindfulness meditation works."

Let's hook the person that's doing the meditation

up to every possible thing we can think of

and it may be that the effects

are on the person as a whole

and that you may have best observe those

in that person's life.

So the really cool studies that I've seen have looked

at cases where they randomised therapists

in training to either get Zen meditation practice

or just relaxation.

So they taught the therapist either to be more present

and more mindful

or just to relax and they then looked at the clients

and what they found in this study is that

the clients of the therapists who got Zen training

got better faster and stayed better longer.

And so I think for me,

we really need to think carefully

about where are we looking for the effects?

Where would we notice this?

If this is working, where would we observe it?

And it might not necessarily always be biology.

- [Shannon voiceover] Experiment notes.

I'm now only starting to realise

what the last 283 days have been about.

When I sat down to meditate on day one,

I thought I was making a film about getting happier.

But I've actually been learning how to suffer.

I call this being discomfortable,

comfortable with all of life's inevitable discomfort.

I'm also coming to terms with the fact

that I might not find any black and white answers

and that the scientific process is actually made up

of shades of grey.

I guess, I'm no longer under any illusion

that my experiment alone can possibly answer

my starting question.

Could mindfulness be part of the solution

for the mental health epidemic?

Can it really ease the suffering of anyone, anywhere,

in any circumstances?

As an educated white woman, living in a peaceful country,

I don't know.

I've received a film grant that allows me

to make one final trip before the project finishes.

And while there are examples of mindfulness being used

to help people in situations far worse than my own,

in prisons, in disadvantaged schools and communities,

my attention has been drawn to the Middle East

and to the front line of the global humanitarian crisis

that has caused more people to be displaced by conflict

than after World War II.

If there was ever a place to put mindfulness to the test,

this would be it.

- [Shannon] I am currently in the Za'atari refugee camp

which is one of the largest refugee camps in the world.

And it's really one thing to read about places like this

on the Internet and to see the images on the television,

but it is a completely different thing

to actually come here and see this for myself

and to meet the people

who now call this place home.

- [Shannon] When I met Om Hamze today,

she is the single mother of six children.

She told me that this is home

because there is no home for her to go home to.

I really,

I can't see how teaching meditation

is actually going to change anything.

- There's no doubt that when you have tens of millions

or even millions or even hundreds of thousands of people

that are forcibly displaced,

there are governmental and non-governmental organisations

that leap in to provide assistance and care

and they have to deal with all sorts of things like,

you know, housing, food, water

and later education, all sorts of legal

and immigration, residency issues and status.

And those things are really important, there's no doubt,

they're critical but then, you have those same hundreds

of thousands of people who endured unimaginable pain

and experience of trauma and ongoing chronic stress

of uncertainty about what this means

and we can't see those scars.

And in terms of access to mental health care,

it's just a tiny, tiny fraction of the millions

who need care receive any care

and among those that receive some care,

the truth is we don't have a good understanding

of what they need.

- [Jim Gordon] So what happens is people are living

with all this anger,

all this fear, all this worry about the future

and if you wait these patterns of extreme stress

become fixed, fixed in physiology and biology,

fixed psychologically, people's fear and anxiety

and depression, fixed in behaviour.

So the best time to work with people

is when the trauma is actually happening.

- [Shannon voiceover] Experiment notes, day 328.

There are over 75,000 people in the Za'atari camp

and 70 million displaced people

in similar situations worldwide.

What I just can't get out of my head

is that only a tiny minority are even in camps

and being supported by organisations like the UNHCR.

Across the border in Israel,

in the ghettos of South Tel Aviv,

there are thousands of asylum seekers

with the highest rates of trauma

and other mental health issues

ever recorded in a community sample.

In the face of all of this,

how can mindfulness possibly be anything more

than just a band-aid solution

for people who are bleeding out on the inside?

I found a team of researchers

from the University of Haifa

who are asking the same question.

What makes you think that mindfulness could help?

- So it's a good, it's a fair question.

Here in Israel, we've been studying the refugees

that have come here, asylum seekers from Eritrea

and from Sudan mostly.

And when we began,

we needed to identify intervention approaches,

that there's evidence already,

that they're effective for stress-related

and trauma-related symptoms,

that are low cost.

You have to be able to deliver them

by like people in the community, paraprofessionals.

You can't have a psychiatrist,

one or two or three or even twenty treating a hundred

and fifty thousand refugees in a refugee camp.

You can't do that.

And mindfulness interventions, not a panacea.

But meet each and every one of those criteria

and so we had a number of good reasons to think

that it could actually work.

- My name is Mogos and I was born in Dekemhare, Eritrea.

I left in 2009. The political situation of Eritrea

it's one party, one president almost for 28 years.

And there is no election.

There is no free press.

Your future is very dark

because you are like their property.

You are not safe.

- So you left? - Yeah.

There was someone, a smuggler, it's all the same.

We paid him money.

They treat you very badly.

They only care about the money.

It's not that they care about you.

For example, on the desert you don't have water.

They put some petrol into the water.

In order, not you to drink.

And everyone is screaming, crying, vomiting

and most of it I tried to forget it

because it's very bad memories.

But sometimes,

on the border

and on the Gulf.

And the Suez Gulf, I remember it sometimes

because it was very hard on the the sea.

So I remember it sometimes.

- [Amit Bernstein] Up to 70 or 80 percent of a given East African population

in Israel has either survived torture or witnessed torture.

Half of the population has either suffered

or witnessed sexual assault for example.

It's extraordinary high numbers.

In some of our samples,

these are community samples not treatment seekers.

We're talking about rates of post-traumatic stress symptoms,

elevated symptoms between like 55 to 80 percent

and the consequences for them in anxiety and depression,

not to mention the consequences for generations

of that kind of damage to human psyches, so yeah,

we have to act now.

- Things like psychological stress, trauma, abuse

will actually not just change us in terms of the brain

but will actually change the way our DNA expresses itself.

So for example, Holocaust survivors

and in very precise ways the experience of that trauma

changes the DNA in ways that are different for people

who experience, say child abuse or other forms of trauma,

but those changes are passed on directly

through the DNA not just through the brain change

but through the DNA into the offspring

leaving them more at risk of mental health problems.

So it's not just about helping somebody now.

Everything we do to help somebody now

is also an investment in the wellbeing

of future generations or when we traumatise somebody now,

it's not just that person that suffers,

it's the offspring as well.

- So yeah, we developed what we're describing now

as a mindful trauma recovery intervention

or program for refugees.

And we are now in the midst of a randomised control study

of that intervention.

- Refugees here, we're facing a lot of problems,

especially with the deportation.

It is the mind that gets me crazy,

that gets me to be depressed

because all the time think, think, thinking,

I'm addicted to it.

I don't know how to stop it.

When I stop it, I got peace.

When I not know how to stop it,

I got crazy or I get depressed.

It's like after you meditate,

you become like new person.

You start to ask yourself, is that me,

that I'm walking on the street

like I had no problem.

And then after so many hours so you get back,

where you have been, it's obvious. But for some

more minutes, you become someone very new.

I hope so, it will be distributed

to all of the people and then to

become part of the refugee system.

- So our first groups have finished the intervention

and the feedback has been pretty amazing.

People, men and women, saying things like,

I relate to my experience in a totally new way.

I didn't know I was on autopilot.

And the preliminary data is promising.

Compared to controls, we're seeing an almost 50 percent drop

in stress and trauma-related symptoms

after the nine week intervention,

which means that it looks like this intervention works,

for even the most vulnerable

and traumatised people on the planet.

It's pretty amazing, it's pretty amazing.

- [Shannon] This is incredible for me, I have to say

because like you've got so many worries

like meditation is almost like a luxury.

- It's like a medicine for me.

Maybe a luxury for you, it's like a medicine for me.

It's a different way of interpretation for it.

I use it like a medicine.

♪ We could be the healing

♪ When you're feeling all alone ♪

♪ We could be the reason

♪ To find the strength to carry on ♪

♪ In the world that's so divided ♪

♪ We shall overcome

♪ We can be the healing

♪ We can be the flower in the gun ♪

♪ We can be the healing

♪ We can be the flower in the gun ♪

- [Shannon] That's it, the last EEG for the whole project.

We're done.

I don't know if these little nodules

sitting on top of my skull are able

to actually measure those changes,

but I can tell you that

my experience is different, yeah.

After more than 100 scientific tests,

365 days and 453 hours of meditation practice,

I now know the results of my year long self-experiment.

Using an EEG, we did seven scans to test my attention

and working memory.

Whilst there were clear differences between

my resting state and meditating state,

there was too much noise in the data to see any trends.

My conclusion?

You just can't meditate away the impacts

of things like sleep deprivation, jet lag or the flu

but my brain did change.

The MRI scans showed structural changes

in a number of key regions

including the fact that while most brains start shrinking

when we reach out early 20s,

areas in my brain that relate to self-awareness,

memory and dealing with emotions did the opposite and grew.

- What is very interesting is that in the right hippocampus,

in your brain, there's an increase in hippocampal volume

and quite a substantial one.

The hippocampus is used for the modulation of emotions.

And so for instance,

those people who have depression

tend to have a small hippocampus.

So it's an important structure.

- In terms of my experience of what has been changing

as a result of the meditation practice,

it's my emotion regulation.

So what you're saying is that,

that subjective experience

is being reflected there.

- That's right. - In my brain.

- It's consistent with what we see here.

- [Shannon voiceover] The frontier of mindfulness science

is whether or not doing something with our mind

could have downstream effects throughout our body

and the answer is yes

but where and why?

That's where it gets interesting.

My blood tests showed that my autoimmune disease

hasn't vanished and whilst there were trends

in my immune function, inflammation and stress markers,

this experiment didn't occur in a sterile laboratory.

The ups and downs of life

created a lot of noise in the data.

At a cellular level when we looked at my telomeres

which are the caps on the end of my DNA,

the last sample showed that they may have grown

which is interesting because shorter telomeres

are associated with a host of chronic illnesses

and while it's tempting to sell this as good news,

we actually used three different measuring techniques

on each sample and they all showed different results,

which tells me that it's very early days for this science.

As for the more than 17,000 genes that were analysed,

the blueprint of our body that we often think

of as fixed and unchangeable.

Well, maybe it's not.

- There was something which came up.

Out of the seventeen thousand three hundred or so genes

that we looked at,

this was the one that showed the biggest change.

The thing which I found absolutely fascinating

is that this one happens to be a master regulator

of inflammatory processes

on which you're showing this greatest change

throughout your mindfulness process.

- That big dip there.

That's the first sample after I did the silent retreat.

- That's correct.

- And is that, that's showing that that gene

is effectively switching off?

- It's being what we call down-regulated.

That's right, it's being turned down.

So if I was going to do another experiment,

I'd certainly be saying well,

let's keep a careful eye on this gene.

Because it did show some change.

The change isn't what we would call

statistically significant,

but I think there's an interesting trend there.

- [Shannon voiceover] But for all the objective

biological markers I've thrown at this project,

I now realise there's only one measurement

that matters to me,

how I feel.

- If your subjective experience of your life

is that this is good for you,

do you need something, someone else to tell you,

"Yes, it's good for you".

- No, I don't--

- That's the point of subjective wellbeing research

is that it actually, the subjective is so valid.

In fact, you could argue it's the only valid tool.

If the person themselves

is having a better experience of their life,

well, then that's actually all we need.

- [Shannon voiceover] Over the course of the year,

my subjective wellbeing score went from 69.4

or just below average to 93,

well above the average person's happiness

and wellbeing set point.

As I head out of the lab and into the real world,

I can't help but wonder how different my life would be

if I'd been taught this skill at a much younger age.

And what the impact would be for my children's generation

on things like education, healthcare and politics

if more people learned to notice deeply and respond wisely.

Now, I don't think for one second

that mindfulness will solve all of the world's problems,

but it is a simple skill

that helps us to understand how our minds work

and that changes everything.

I started this looking for something

that I could do every day to protect,

nurture and nourish my mind.

It's now day 543 of what was supposed

to be a year-long experiment,

but I don't think of this as my year

of living mindfully anymore.

It's simply living mindfully, every day,

for the rest of my life.

♪