Jason Meno
Appearances
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
If they had a bad time in the past, they might think they have a bad time again. So I imagine that their past experiences are probably coloring these expectations they're having. And then the next two questions were, how much do you believe that meditation will make you feel worse? And those numbers for finishers was 8, 8%, 8 out of 100. And non-finishers was 13.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Finishers were 8% that meditation would make them feel worse. and non-finishers were 13%. So both groups are low, but clearly the people who did not finish the meditations, they thought that it would make them feel worse. Or it was higher.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, some of them dropped out. They did like one meditation or two meditations and dropped out. So we've got all that data. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
The last expectation question was, how much do you believe that meditation will be painful or difficult? And the people who finished, they believed it 11% that it would be painful or difficult. Really? And the non-finishers... 11% did you say? Uh-huh, 11% for the people who finished. And the people who didn't finish, they believed 25% that it would be painful or difficult. So almost over double.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So that's a pretty big jump there.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, it's a very clear signal that the people who didn't finish believed from the get-go that they were going to have a bad time, essentially.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, non-finishers' familiarity with meditation was 68%. So that's pretty high. Almost the same, yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
For familiarity with meditation?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Well, the numbers here are, it's a scale of belief from 0 to 100. Mm-hmm. So the 11% is... These are means. Yeah, these are means. So it's the average belief of the groups are 11% and 25% that it would be painful or difficult.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
It is, yeah. So my only guess at the moment, we'd have to actually reach out and talk to these people to see what they think, but... My thought is that both are pretty much the same familiarity with meditation. And I'm guessing that the people who are finishers that did not drop out, they probably like meditation. They probably think it's helpful and that it's not too hard for them.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And the non-finishers, although they have the same familiarity and experience of trying meditation, they might have had some worse experiences in the past. Like every time they meditate, they don't find it very rewarding or they find it difficult and painful. So to me, that's how I am making sense of it at the moment. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
They both have the same experience, but those experiences have been more positive for the finishers and more negative for the non-finishers.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. These expectation questions, I think like, yeah, what was your experience like with therapy in the past? You know, because I imagine that's probably going to determine whether or not you're kind of motivated and willing to try again. So, yeah. So next pieces of data, we start getting into some now. Now we're going to start getting into the actual feelings and thoughts.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So in the introduction section, after asking them all these questions about, you know, how familiar are you with David and meditation? And what do you think meditation is going to be? Is it going to be helpful? Is it going to do nothing? Is it going to hurt? So after asking those questions, I then ask them to come up with a negative thought.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And I originally did this as kind of a control because I came into this experiment actually thinking that my hypothesis was the feelings ratings are probably going to change. Like people who have good experiences with meditation, it'll probably improve their mood a little bit. But I don't expect the thought beliefs to change. Like if you have the thought, I'm a loser or I'm
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Um, something horrible is going to happen to me in the future. If you have those kinds of negative thoughts, I wouldn't expect that sitting down to meditate, just focusing on your breath or watching your body would change your belief in that. Like to me that I don't expect that to happen, but we'll see what happens in the data.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So, so I originally, I asked them to grab a negative thought that they're having. And I asked them, how much do you believe that thought and how upsetting is it? Uh, With the goal of this being kind of one of my control mechanisms, that was my goal here to see like would this ideally that wouldn't change. So let me see if I'm pretty sure I have that data here, too.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So the negative thoughts that they came up with the. Average belief in the negative thoughts, which it could be any negative thought. They were free to come up with any thought they wanted, you know, so there was no limit. But the belief that they rated it from zero to 100, the finishers, their belief in their negative thought was an average of 76%. And the non-finishers was 74%.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So a little lower for the non-finishers. But to me, that shouldn't be too big of a deal.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And then the upsetness, again, for each thought, I ask them, how upsetting is this negative thought to you? So if you have the thought, I'm a loser, you might believe it 75%. And now how upsetting is that thought? And the average for finishers was 83%. And 79% for the non-finishers. So pretty similar. Okay. So we got some good negative thoughts.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And then I get their negative feelings. So I had them. We in the app, we are using seven different sliders of feelings. I think the first section is sad, down, unhappy. Then the second section is anxious, worried, panicky. Okay. And then in guilt and inferiority, anger, we have seven different emotions we calculate on. And I have all the data if we want to explore it more in detail here in a bit.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But one way to represent this data is just to take the average, just to normalize the score across all seven sliders. So the negative feelings normalized score, the average of all the negative feelings they rated. For the finishers, it was 37%. So that would be like an average of 37% anxious, 37% depressed, 37% angry. Yeah. So across all the feelings together, the average was 37.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And for the people who didn't finish, their average was 46. So that's a difference. Definitely about nine points higher.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. So the people who did not finish, actually, their initial negative feelings were definitely higher than the people who did finish. And then after getting their negative feelings, we get their positive feelings. So, again, we have seven different dimensions of positive feelings, which range from like how satisfied are you with your life? How loved do you feel? How optimistic do you feel?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Thanks, David. Yeah. So quick background. So I've been working on the Feeling Great app for a few years now. And more recently, with the advent of AI technology, there's been all sorts of interesting developments. new ways that we can apply team CBT to like delivering it through an app. But as part of this process, I really have to experiment.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
How motivated do you feel? There's like these seven different positive feelings that we we've created. And we use those all throughout the feeling great app. So for this one, the average positive negative positive feelings normalized for finishers was forty nine percent. So they're actually not I mean, they're doing OK. They're like moderately happy.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
You know, they're kind of right in the middle, but they could definitely be doing a lot better.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And then for the non-finishers, it was 45. So 49 versus 45. So the non-finishers are also, not only are they a little more upset, their negative feelings are higher, but also their positive feelings are a little bit lower compared to the people who did finish everything. So that's the feelings.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But then right after, so after I get them to rate their negative and positive feelings, I ask another interesting question, which was, Imagine it's one hour from now. You've just finished all of these meditations. How do you expect your feelings to look like? What do you expect these feelings to be at the end? So this is another like expectation question that we're getting into.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But this is quite important, which is what do you think is going to happen to you? Like the previous questions we asked about expectation was like, do you think this would be helpful to you? Do you think it'll make you feel better? Do you think it'll make you feel worse? But now we're getting really detailed.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
We're asking actually on every single individual feeling, what do you think you will feel by the end of this? And so here's the numbers. So for the people who finished, they expected their negative feelings to drop down to 25. From 37 to 25, modest expectations. Modest, yeah. So they didn't really expect it to crush their feelings down, but they saw like a small drop.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
That's what their expectation was. This isn't what actually happened. This is just what their expectation was. And then for the people who didn't finish, their expectation was 30. So they expected a 45 to 30 drop. So definitely the people who didn't finish, they also didn't think they would get, uh, as a substantial lower.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, it's just two groups. Right, exactly. And I did not have a control group for this. This study is definitely a very crude pilot without a control group, and you need a control group for these kind of things. It's a good beginning.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, the expectations. Exactly. Yeah, that's why I asked. Right. Yep. Great question.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I sure did. So the positive expectations was for the finishers. They thought their positive feelings would jump all the way up to 59. From 25 to 59. No, no, no. Their positive feelings, they started on 49. Yeah, 49 to 59.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I have to try things out and see what works and what doesn't work. And so I created this tool. I called it the new cool tools club. And it was a group of just people who signed up to help try out all these new cool tools that I was going to be building and see what works and what doesn't work.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, they really didn't expect very much to happen, actually. Kind of interesting. And the non-finishers, they expected their positive feelings to go from 45 up to 58.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. So that wraps up all of the initial data gathering that we did right at the very, very start. So now we can go into what happened. So so there's now after getting all this information, they started the meditations. So, again, each meditation was 10 minutes long. And there were five.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So the first meditation was a what's called a body scan meditation, where you just essentially start from your toes and you think and you think about like, OK, focus on the sensations of your toes and relax them. Now, focus that focus your attention on your ankles and relax them and then your calves and then your knees.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And so 10 minutes of that, like sweeping up and scanning throughout the body and relaxing different elements of it. And the second meditation was a counting concentration meditation. So you would essentially focus on your breath, and then as you breathe in and out, you'll actually count up to 10. So breathe in, one, breathe out, two, breathe in, three, breathe out, four.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So it's a way to try to concentrate your mind on your breathing while mentally counting. So that was the second meditation. The third meditation was a loving-kindness meditation, where essentially you are imagining someone you love very much, and you use a mantra, basically, where you say to yourself, may they be happy, may they be free from suffering, may they be filled with loving-kindness.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And then you apply that loving kindness thinking to someone who you love and then to someone who you feel neutral towards. And then you apply that feeling toward yourself. May I be happy. May I be free from suffering. May I be filled with loving kindness. And then you extend it to someone you don't like, someone you actually have quite negative feelings towards.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And you extend loving kindness thoughts to that person. And then it gets bigger and bigger and expands out to your whole community, the world, all beings in the universe, all beings in every parallel dimension. And I don't think it went that far, but that's typically how loving kindness meditation works. So that was the third meditation. And again, it's only 10 minutes.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
The New Cool Tools Club.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And after each of these meditations, I'm having them re-rate their belief in their negative thoughts and feelings.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
After each meditation, yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
That's right, yeah. So they'll do the body scan meditation one, then they'll rate their belief in the thought and their feelings again. And then they'll do the counting meditation to rate their belief in the thought, rate their negative feelings again. So that's how we went through each one of these.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yes, that's right. And then meditation four was a Vipassana meditation where it's just you're paying attention to the breath and your thinking and the feelings of your body. And I think that one specifically I did a noting Vipassana where you mentally note what you're experiencing. So if you notice yourself thinking, then you'll say to yourself, thinking, thinking.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
If you notice that you're breathing, then you'll think to yourself, breathing, breathing, breathing. If you hear a sound, you'll think to yourself, hearing, hearing. So that's how that meditation worked. And then the last meditation, which I kind of threw in as a curveball. Originally, I tried it as a control mechanism.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But the last meditation is called the do nothing meditation, which that's literally what the meditation has you do. Like that's the instructions. Like it starts out by just saying, OK, the instructions are do nothing meditation. OK, get to it. Do nothing. That's that's that's the meditation. And I mean, it is considered a real meditation.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Like I think of the Zen tradition, it's or one of the Zen schools. It's called Shinkantaza is the name of that. But yeah, I like that meditation. But but you're not doing anything. So it's like that's like the perfect meditation. Like how would that change your thoughts and feelings? You literally do nothing. You just sit there. for 10 minutes. And so that was the that was the last meditation.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So and then at the end, of course, after all of this, I get some of their final comments and what they thought and how this was for them and try to understand if they did experience some changes. Why did they think that happened? And what's what's going on? So let's look at that data. Let's see what exactly happened with the meditations.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
It's called like a non-dual meditation. Yeah. It's completely letting go. Yeah, I tried alternating them between essentially what I would call like very relaxing type meditations versus concentration, intense, like demanding meditations. So, yeah. So here's the numbers. The negative feelings, these are averages. They started off at 37.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
No refunds. No, it's free. And basically, we reached out to a bunch of the podcast listeners and people who were on your mailing list, David, and just asked people, hey, who wants to sign up to try out new cool stuff that we're building? And so with this group, I started asking the question, well, what do I want to test? What do I want to try out? And I don't remember what kind of
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So it really, the first meditation basically took the number down, and then it just didn't do anything else. It just kind of evened out. Now, this is, oh, and so again, along with this is the expectation. So they went from a 37 down to about a 25 at the end. They expected their feelings to be about 25. Right. Almost like what we saw in our experiment. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So their expectation of what they thought would happen to their negative feelings is exactly what happened. So that's now the question is, is OK. Does that mean if they expected it to be lower, would have been lower? I did do an R squared just like the expectation versus the actual. And it was a 56 percent, a point five six R squared value.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, with least squares.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, so definitely positive correlation, but not as strong as you might expect. But we're also the hard part about doing these statistics is that we're not working with normalized distributed data. These people were all over the place in their expectations and beliefs and starting beliefs and ending beliefs.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
It really you I had to look at the histograms of this data to look at the actual shape of what was happening. And I'll just describe that the negative feelings basically all was they were all clustered up closer towards the mid rain. Actually, do I have that here? I'm pretty sure I do. That's the thought belief. Let me get this image in front of me.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So the negative feelings, they all started out actually pretty flat across the board. So I think our average was around 37 for this group, but that's just the average. In reality, there were people with 10s, 20s, 30s, 40s, 60s, 70s, 80s. They were kind of all across the board with their negative feelings at the start.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And what I notice here visually is right after meditation one, there's a big squish on the people who had high feelings ratings. And there's this big, huge, giant jump up in the lower negative feelings. So people's feelings are suddenly shifting from high feelings to lower feelings immediately after meditation one.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Let me. So the numbers I just read to you a minute ago were the negative feelings.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
No, I can give that next.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, thank you. Actually, I guess I'll read off the, so what I'll do is I'll go through, we just went through the negative feelings. I'll go through the positive feelings, the thought belief, and the thought upsetness. Those are our four.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. Okay. So for positive feelings, the initial was about 49%. And the changes went to, from 49, it popped up to 55, 54, 55, 53, 54. So a similar pattern happened. We basically, the first meditation, they popped from 49 up to 55, and then it just stayed kind of flat. The rest of the meditations, at least the averages, the averages stayed consistent.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
bit me, that got me to want to do this, but I just thought to myself, well, it would be really cool just to put meditation to the test. Because, you know, in team with methods, you really can use anything as a method as long as you're testing before and after, as long as you look at what changes are happening.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But again, if you look at the actual distribution and shape of the data, there's a squishing effect that happens. That although the average is actually staying about the same, there is this shifting in the data from one side to the other, even though the averages are fairly consistent. Because we have, it seems like we have a bimodal distribution.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
We do have two very different groups of people and how they're reacting to meditation.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
53.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
54.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Uh, well quickly, the expectations that the people had for their positive feelings was 59. So interestingly, the expectation they had for their negative feelings, they spot on hit it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
They thought it was going to be 25 and they got to 25. Yeah. But for the positive feelings, they only got up to about 55, 54, 55. Yeah. But their expectation was 59 on average. So they actually didn't get as big of a positive feeling boost as they thought they would. Although whether this is statistically significant or not, we'd have to double check all those numbers.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
It sounds about right.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, they're close. They're close. Now, here's the real kicker. So let's talk about thought. So, again, I introduced the negative thoughts as kind of a control. I did not think that their belief in these negative thoughts would change. But here's what happened. So they started off with an average belief of 76% in their negative thoughts. And then here's the sequence after each meditation.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So from 76 down to 64 to 61 to 54 to 54. Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. To 52 to 51. Wow. So they got this consistent decline, which is different from the negative feelings. The negative feelings, they got one kind of pop improvement, and then it stayed level. But with the thought belief, it was slowly coming down each time. I did not expect that. This shocked me. I was like, what? And now, so that's the belief.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And there's lots of different questions that creeped up here of like, okay, well, if we did do meditation as a technique, how would that work? There's a number of problems that happen with this. For one, how long do you meditate for? There's no real consensus on how long you should meditate to get a maximum or beneficial dose. Should you meditate for 10 minutes? Should it be an hour?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And now here's the upsetness.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, I had a feeling that that was going to happen. That's also why I put that meditation right in the middle so that we could see some effects of early meditation first before we get to the loving kindness.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Because loving kindness meditation is so popular and is consistently the one that really does make people feel better because you're sitting there sending loving feelings towards yourself and people and even the people you don't like. So it's quite an intense emotional meditation. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Belief and negative thought, which is also interesting.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Well, they're doing these meditations in sequence. So the moment they finish meditation two...
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And their belief was 61%.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So technically, the body scan, the first meditation they do, has the biggest reduction.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And now that's the belief and the thought. So next up is the how upset do they feel about the thought? And this one's a bit different. So their initial upsetness was 83% upset. And here's the sequence after each meditation. So from 83, they went to 60. Wow. And then down to 54. And then down to 48. And then 48 and then 47. Wow.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Should it be every day? Should it be multiple times a day? There's all these questions that came up here of how do we even create a good experiment for this? And I started digging into the literature and just seeing what research has been done so far on depression, anxiety, mood changes, and meditation. And there's a lot. I mean, it's been pretty heavily studied.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yep. Kind of the same, like a big, big initial reduction, a little reduction, and then another kind of big reduction with loving kindness, and then it just kind of levels out a bit.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. So that's the data. I mean, there's there's so much more that we could like analyze. I mean, we can get into all the individual negative feelings and how every single. feeling changed and the shape of these. There's so much data here and there's so many ways to analyze it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, exactly.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I mean, that's that's it makes sense to me. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, there's an ocean of data kind of coming in. And this is only 35 people that finished this. So I would love to see this expand out into an actual study with thousands of people and with a control group as well to see how this happens. Because there's all sorts of questions I have about this related to why did their belief change.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, like number one question for me is... Why would meditating change your belief in a negative thought?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Because we're seeing it's changing them a little bit. They're not crushing the thoughts by any means. It's definitely not as powerful as team or externalization of voices or actual cognitive techniques. But there's an effect happening here. And whether that effect is purely from like...
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
You know, there could be a Hawthorne effect of just the fact that we're regularly showing them their negative thought over and over again and having them like think about it by showing it to them over and over again. That could be having an effect. There could be, you know.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I mean, the Hawthorne effect is you know that you're being watched and you're being studied. So you're actively thinking to yourself, oh, should I be thinking about these negative thoughts? Should I be trying to change these negative thought beliefs? So the relationship you have to the data is being influenced just by us studying you and asking you these questions. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So it's possible there might be some kind of pressure they're putting on themselves knowing that they're studying this. And of course they're familiar with you, David. They're like, they're familiar with team and this podcast. So they likely have this expectation perhaps on themselves. Actually, that's a question I didn't ask.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
How much do you expect, you know, the belief in your thoughts to change? Um, I didn't ask that question, unfortunately.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But one of the big problems is that a lot of these... Research designs have been too focused on long term meditation. It's like, hey, let's meditate for many, many weeks at a time. So they'll enter like a six or eight week meditation program or or mindfulness based stress reduced production program that has meditation in it. So that's where a lot of the studies are kind of hard to parse out of.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Right. Yeah. Like if we scaled up these numbers and we got a group of people who weren't so familiar with David, weren't so familiar with meditation, and we gathered those demographics and controlled for them, what effects would we see then? Yeah, that's a big question too.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yes. Like I sent out an email and the title of this experiment is called the mindfulness mystery and experiment. So people who probably are interested in helping out with this experiment or interested in mindfulness and meditation, they self-selected into participating as well.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Well. we're not interested in spending weeks and weeks meditating. We're interested in seeing like, how can we change your thoughts and feelings right now at this moment? So I needed to come up with a study design that would let us test that. So the other problem with meditation is that there's lots of different kinds of meditation.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. And again, just a reminder, the first meditation was a body scan. And it's actually quite a hands on meditation where the guided meditation is this woman talking to you every couple seconds telling you, OK, now pay attention to this part of your body and relax that. Now pay attention to this part of your body. So, you know, big question is why would that have such a effect?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
effect on your belief in your negative thoughts and how upsetting they are. Here's my hypothesis. Because what we're talking about with the placebo effect is how are you making meaning of what's happening to you? And how are you making meaning about the things that upset you? And what would it be about sitting and feeling like you're meditating by scanning through your body
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
What would change the meaning making you're doing about your life or yourself or the problems going on that are upsetting you just by engaging in that activity? And I imagine it's very similar to exercise, where when you're exercising, you believe you're doing something very good for yourself. I think there's quite a universal belief that exercise is good thing. Exercise is healthy.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Exercise will help me. Yeah. That in itself is a huge, huge meaning making effect you're doing.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And so with meditation, I imagine there might be a similar belief here that's happening, which is this is going to help me. This is something good for me.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, relaxing. Like that's the other part of this too, which is I really think in my personal experience with meditating as well, because I meditate a lot and I'm also like challenging my negative thoughts on the side too. And I can see the limits of how my meditation does and doesn't help me.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And I can certainly say that there is a therapeutic benefit sometimes to disengaging from the problem for a little bit before trying to re-engage it again. Yeah. So there might be something quite good about basically – when you're caught up in your negative thoughts, it's almost like you have blinders on and you're just staring down the tunnel of all the negativity.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Like you're really – you're discounting the positive.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. And really, I think any activity that can pop you out of that type of blind... Distract you, right? Yeah, to get you out of it for a little bit, to give you some space.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Right, yeah, it could be anything, really. It could be, yeah, I mean, it could be watching, maybe watching TV, I'm not sure. Again, these are things we'd have to control and experiment for to see, like would watching TV for 10 minutes or watching a YouTube video for 10 minutes have a similar effect?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So even if you do decide like, okay, we're going to meditate for 10 minutes or an hour, what meditation do you do? What is it that might have an actual effect on your thoughts and feelings? Because there's all sorts of types of meditation that range from focusing on your breath to visualizing things in your mind to purposefully imagining beautiful and wonderful things.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Another way I'm thinking about it right now is sometimes whenever you're thinking about solving problems in your life,
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And a lot of the time the answer comes to you when you're out on a walk or you're in the shower or you're doing something completely unrelated to the very thing that you've been thinking about before, that there seems to be a subconscious type of chewing on the problem that our brain does when we allow our brain to take care of it on its own.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So that's also another potential pathway that might be happening here, which is we've given you a negative thought.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
On average, yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
The distribution does show more changes happening. Like there are some people that are starting to push down even further in their belief in upsetness. So it does, it's minor, the effects, but I hear what you're saying. On the practical level, the meditations were guided.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So every minute or so, there was at least some voice coming in to provide extra guidance to help push them away from maybe some rumination they might be doing.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, in all five meditations, you were basically, your hand was held 99% of the time. Mm-hmm. And so there there wasn't too much time to to get too sucked into your negative thoughts. Although one piece of information to give here, which is after all these meditations, I did ask people, like, what was your experience like? What what what happened to you here?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And generally, everyone was quite appreciative of. like getting the chance to try meditation again after a while, and many don't meditate for a whole hour like this and got to experience these different things.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So there's so many directions this could go in. So here's the experiment I set up. I picked five very different kinds of meditations. And I found recordings that were done by professional meditation teachers. A lot of them were actually from the University of California, San Diego.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But there was one thing that someone said that stuck with me that could be also an explainer, which is they said that the moment they saw their negative thought again and their negative feelings again, and the moment they saw that there was a little bit of a reduction in it, their belief that it could change because of meditation now improved more.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So their expectations of meditation helping them might actually be going up as they meditate. The moment they saw that very first shift in their thinking, that seemed to have a bit of a snowball effect because it boosted their belief. Like, oh, it changed it a little bit. Oh, interesting. Oh, maybe this is going to work. And then that acts as a kind of catapult into more change.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Someone mentioned that that was their experience, which to me makes sense.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
They have a mindfulness center, and they've uploaded a bunch of their mindfulness training and meditation, guided meditations online. So what I did was I picked five different meditations, and each one was 10 minutes each.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
My my first reaction is like, well, what's your do you like pistachio ice cream? Because some people really like pistachio ice cream and some people really don't like pistachio ice cream. So to me, it's a little bit about like what you like, what do you believe is going to be helpful and useful? You know, there's a lot of there's a great number of people out there who really.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I wanted it to be less than an hour. I really wanted people going to this experiment that they wouldn't have to spend more than an hour meditating at max. So that was just a choice I made to say, let's try to make this experiment one hour long. And I want to put a bunch of different meditations in there. And in my opinion, five minutes is too short. And 20 minutes is quite long.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
truly believe you know meditation is a complete waste of time we saw that in the data too like the people who like almost half of the group dropped out and did not do this exercise and that group certainly had the belief that this was it was going to be difficult it was going to be a waste of time It was going to be, uh, that it wasn't going to be that helpful.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So those beliefs I think are important. And that's really my big takeaway from this experiment as well, is that the beliefs you have about what you're going to do to feel better matters a lot. Cause that's going to change your motivation. That's going to change whether you're going to follow through with the exercises you're doing. Um, so to me, I think that's a critical component to this and
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And actually, a lot of the meditations that I found online with guided meditations were about 10 minutes each. So it just fit in really well to do. Let's do 10 minute meditations. And for an hour, five should be plenty. So, so in reality, there was 50 minutes of meditation, but I had them do a lot of questionnaire answering and, and, and there was a bit of an intro.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's recently after doing this meditation experiment, I was only meditating like maybe once every few days or so. I wasn't doing it that often and really not that intensely and that that seriously. But after this meditation experiment, I kind of wanted to dive into it more myself.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And I was like, OK, well, let me like start capturing my own negative thoughts and seeing how they work. And for me personally, meditation doesn't budge my negative thoughts like hardly at all. Like for me personally, it just doesn't really affect them. But there are lots of other side effects that I got from meditation. Like I've definitely felt way more chilled out. Yeah, I've seen that too.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. Well, thanks for that. Oh, you see that in me? Oh, yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yes, I'm quite skilled as well. Like I used to practice for many 12 hours a day for a long time. And so I've just kind of fallen off the practice. Now I'm coming back to it and I'm experiencing this contrast again of like, oh, right, this is what it feels like to be regularly meditating every day again. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I asked people, I didn't get into this data for this chat, but I also captured how much did they like the meditation and how hard was it. And that last meditation, the do nothing, people really didn't like it, and they found it very, very difficult. While the body scan, people really liked it, and they did not find it difficult at all. And it was basically like an uphill scale from there.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
At least while these specific meditations. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Ask, ask away.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
That would be a wonderful thing to look at though. Like I would like, it'd be super cool to basically get a group of people, ask them, what do you think would make you feel better? Like what are activities you could do that you think would be really good for you to do? And, you know, it might be like, oh, cleaning my kitchen, talking to my kids more, going out and taking a walk every day.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
You know, we could have people like describe what they think would be good for them and then have them rate their negative feelings and thoughts and things like that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So the total experience was one hour long start to finish.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Oh, I see. I've experienced, I think, like the moment the choice is made, like the moment you say, I'm going to do this thing that's good. It's not even like going off and doing it. It's basically before you've done the activity, the choice that you've made to go and do something good for yourself.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Right, yeah. Like those initial positive or the initial feelings that we gathered were actually already after they've realized they're about to do an experiment. So they might have actually gotten a mood boost just by being like, I'm going to meditate for an hour once they realize that that's what's happening.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I think about 180 are in my new tool, new cool tools club. That's a tongue twister. And... 60 made it in and actually started the first introductory like data collection phase.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Um, but yes, I can attest to this kind of the, the, there's a bit of an expectancy mood boost that you can get to. I think that's related to this. Like the moment you've made the decision to do something good, that there could be a mood boost from that.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
That's right. Yep. So so part part of this was so this this kind of gets into some problems with the study, which we'll talk about later with the data and what this means and how to interpret it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Like I, I certainly back when I was really, really depressed and before I found team, I remember the first, every time I would reach out to get a therapist, I would get a huge mood boost. I would notice that I had this just because I started seeking help. I hadn't received the help yet, but just the action of making that moment, that forward movement of I'm doing something good for myself.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But yes, this was mostly David's fans, people who are very familiar with David because they're part of they were originally part of the listeners of this podcast and they joined this new cool tools club as well. And so this is kind of how the funnel of people came in. But I essentially I just emailed the club and I said, hey, I've created this course. It's one hour long.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, yeah. We'll put my email in the show notes. And if you want to join in and try out all the other wacky experiments and things I'm running as part of the Feeling Great app and our creation of it, then yeah, I'm happy to have you join us and find new stuff.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So if you've got an hour to spend, please take this course out and try this experiment with me. And there was about how many people that I have? Let me look at that numbers again. We had a total number of 60 people who joined. Wow. And of those 60 people, and we'll get into these numbers more, 35 of them actually completed the whole thing. And 25 dropped out.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. Thanks Rhonda. Thanks David. It's great being in sharing all these nerdy numbers with you. So it was fun.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So we have 35 points of data of people who went through this process.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Uh... No, I could certainly. Well, I don't know if I can actually. The app is anonymous, so I don't think I can reverse. No, I wouldn't have a way to reach out, actually.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Right.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah. And I did run some analysis that I'll talk about here in a bit of what the difference was between these two groups, because we did gather even the people who did drop out. They did provide some initial information that that's quite useful. So so at the very start of this, when you're when you're doing a meditation experiment, one of your biggest questions is the placebo effect.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Like, is meditation a placebo? Is it just essentially you think meditation is going to help you? Therefore, it does. And another way to think about it is you could think of it as the expectation effect. What expectations do you have about meditation and what do you think is going to happen to you while doing this?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Because not only can you have the placebo effect, but in meditation, there's also a problem with the nocebo effect where you actually think meditation might hurt you or give you a panic attack or something bad might happen to you if you meditate. And that can result in some unpleasant side effects as well. So here's what I did at the start.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I created a little introductory lesson where I just explained what this was going to do, that they were going to sit down for an hour and going to try these five different meditations. And the first set of questions I asked them were really just, I wanted to understand how familiar they were with David, how familiar they were with meditation, and what they expected to happen in this.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So I'll read off some numbers here so you can get an idea of what people thought about this process. So for each one of these questions, I'll tell you what the finishers, the people who actually finished the meditations, what they thought and what the people who didn't finish thought.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So both groups, finishers and non-finishers, their familiarity with David, I just ask them, like, how familiar are you with Dr. David Burns and his work? From zero to 100, all of these questions I ask are going to be from zero, not at all, to 100, like 100%. So with how familiar are you with David, the average score was 80 for both groups. So very, very familiar, very much so.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And then I asked, how familiar are you with meditation and mindfulness? And that number for both groups was about the same, 69. So, you know, quite a bit, quite, quite familiar, but not super duper familiar. Yeah. The next question I asked was, do you think how much do you believe that meditation will make you feel better? So this is the expectation effect that we're asking here.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
One of the expectation effects. Do you think meditation will make you feel better? How much do you believe that it will? The people who finished, they started off believing at 62 percent. So 60 percent, 62 percent, they thought it was going to make them feel better. And the people who didn't finish was 58%.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
So definitely the people who didn't finish, they did not think that meditation was going to make them feel as good. But both groups were over 50%. They still believed that it was going to have some effect.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
I didn't run any... I haven't run that test yet. When I look at the distribution of the data, they look like different distributions. Like when I run a box plot and histogram, started to get nerdy about it. But yeah, they do look like different distributions, but their averages are very close and their medians are very close.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, you can think of it as very different clusters. The people who finished the meditations, they're pretty spread out all across the board. So there were people who didn't think the meditation was going to have much of any effect. There were people who thought that, yeah, it definitely was going to have an effect and everywhere in between.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
But the people who didn't finish, they definitely seem to be more clustered into the side of thinking that it really won't have much of an effect or it won't be that helpful. So a lot of these questions, I'm also asking very similar repeatable questions as well to increase the reliance of these metrics.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Like basically for the question of will it make you feel better and how much do you believe that it will be rewarding? They're very, very similar questions. And in both of these cases... How much do they believe it will be rewarding? About 62% for the finishers and 55% for people who didn't finish.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yeah, that's right. Very, very similar. And now we get into the neutral effect of the question now is how much do you believe that meditation will have little effect at all? And with this one, this is a negative question. I would say this is a neutral question. The negative question, which I also asked, which is how much do you believe meditation will make you feel worse?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
That's right. Yeah. The question was, how much do you believe meditation will have little effect? Little effect, kind of not very effective. Not very effective, right. Oh, okay. And the finishers, their belief was 27%. So not very many people. So there was a little bit of signal there that there was some skepticism that it would have little effect, but it's small. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And the non-finishers was 35. So almost eight points higher. So definitely people who did not finish didn't think it would have an effect either. The next question was meditation. How much do you believe meditation will be a complete waste of time?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Yep. And the finishers said 17%. So 17 out of 100 is what their average score was. And the non-finishers was 26 out of 100, so nine points higher. Yeah, so the people who did not finish it, well, they started off believing. Like, they didn't even meditate yet, but they believed that it would be a waste of time. And...
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
And in context, like one of the earlier questions we asked was, how familiar are you with meditation? And both groups were moderately familiar, you know, around, I think it was in the 60s. So it's possible these groups of people, they've meditated before. And if they had a good time in the past, they might think that they'll have a good time now.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Thank you.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
I'll be your co-therapist.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Okay, sure. So let's say you did fail your test. Why is that upsetting to you? What does that mean to you? Well, then I'll fail the class. And let's say you do fail that class. That would be a pretty terrible thing, but I'm wondering why is that so upsetting? What does that mean to you if you failed that class? Well, then I won't be able to get a good job.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And if you didn't get a good job, what would that mean?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Yeah, so you said one of your fears here of if you fail that class, then you won't be able to get a good job or get a good job at all or you might lose a job. And I'm wondering why is that upsetting and what does that mean to you if that happened?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And if that's true, it would be terrible. I mean, jobs are very important in our lives. But I'm wondering why would that be upsetting? What does that mean to you if you could never get a good job?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
I see. Yeah. So that sounds like... So that belief that if I can't get a good job, then I'm a failure at everything. Would we call that the self-sustaining belief or would we go further than that? There's more. There's more. OK, let's get going. So let's say you did fail. You were failing at everything. What if that were true? What does that mean to you? Why is that upsetting?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
That seems to be the—I think we might have hit the bottom of the barrel with that one.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
No.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
The thing that I think of when it comes to self-defeating beliefs are, in Buddhism, what are called the five aggregates or the five skandhas.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And one of those are perception, which is kind of the... When something happens to you in your life, there's an automatic process that's your reaction to what's happening, even before thoughts start occurring, even before thoughts start reaching your consciousness. It's just that, for example, you see the face of someone you really don't like.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And there is just this ingrained belief deep down inside that that's a terrible person, like you believe that. And so when you first see that, it's actually like your nervous system has been embedded in it, a programming of your belief. And so when you see this person you don't like, you have this gut reaction, this sudden intense perception that that's what's happening to them.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And then only after that do the negative thoughts start bubbling up and you can actually see how you're making meaning of things and how you're actually concluding based on stuff. So in Buddhism, there is this kind of difference between the gut reactions you have to things, which you could say perhaps are negative.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
defined by your self-defeating beliefs like when you believe that the moment you make a mistake that you're going to lose your job or that you're going to be a failure that no one's ever going to love you that might be very ingrained in your perceptions of of the way you make meaning of things before thoughts even begin arising so that's that's one one way to think about it would be self-defeating beliefs are kind of embedded in your perception of the world
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Yeah. And even your own actions, like you might be avoiding taking any action to meet other people in the world or, or to, you might be avoiding or trying to stop yourself from doing things in your life. Um, because that's again, a core belief of like you're, you're jumping to conclusions underneath the surface of, um,
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Like the moment someone offers up like, hey, you should come on to the podcast and talk, you know, your gut reaction might be like, no, I don't want to do that. There was no thought between the reaction and the offering, because there was like some self-defeating belief that that was kind of...
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
uh embedded in how you made sense of that do you know anyone who has that type of reaction jason yeah me yeah you asked me if i wanted to come onto this podcast i was like no you know you're like well why not i'm like well i'm kind of shy and i kind of don't want to do that and you're like oh that's a great thing to do yeah how are you feeling now shy oh you are really right now
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Well, I think I think actually what I'm most the thing that's like spiraling in my head a bit is mostly like wanting. I care a lot about the listeners questions and I want to make sure like we don't. I'm not sure since I don't know how things work on the podcast all the time. So I'm kind of worried about like, oh, are we going to get to enough people's questions?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Did we answer this person's questions well enough? Will they be satisfied with these answers?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Pretty great. I think the question of like how to challenge, how to change a self-defeating belief is good. The only maybe only one dimension of it we didn't get to directly, I don't think, is they said if self-defeating beliefs really are the cause of it all, if that should that mean that the self-defeating belief would be the primary focus of to challenge first before negative thoughts.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Like basically should you first try to defeat your self-defeating beliefs? Should you even work on your negative thoughts at all? It seems to be that's like another question that's embedded in this.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
It reminds me of, what are they called? There's a word for it in Pali. It's like the three marks of existence, I think. It's like everything is impermanent. As long as you attach yourself to impermanent things, that you will be quite dissatisfied. If you try to place all of your happiness on your ability to succeed or not fail, then it's impossible not to fail.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
That's a requirement of the world and life, that you will make mistakes. And so as long as you place your happiness happiness on things that are going to fall apart or won't meet your perfection standards of how things should be, that because of that, yeah, you're going to sign yourself up for a lot of pain.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
But then there's another idea, too, which is anatta, which is a whole other thing of non-self. And that basically there's no thing that you can really point to and say this is a complete and utter failure. Because then you start getting into questions of what's called dependent origination and what makes up origination.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
a person, what makes up a thing, what makes up your, uh, the meaning you make of, of how the world works around you. It's, it's, it's just made up of pieces and parts and there's no one thing you can point to and say, this is everything that makes up your happiness. This is everything that makes up your suffering.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
So there's, there's all sorts of pieces that you could go with the three marks of existence in Buddhism to explain some of this stuff too.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
No. That's my no practice for the day.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Well, I'm a little confused because the question in the email says cognitive techniques are not very helpful to me 30 minutes or five minutes before the presentation or match. I don't have time to sit down and write and challenge my thoughts and I can't focus at all on my thoughts. Are there any strategies to reduce this form of relapse or nerves? So I'm not sure if this approach.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
I'm going to be a broken record a little bit and say I don't think we've answered this person's question. You know, they're they're talking about how 30 minutes before their presentation, they're about to enter a seminar room. They're the first speaker.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
The first speaker is about to talk and they're next and they can feel their heart starting to pound and they're getting this sense of nerves and anxiety coming up again. So the question is, is how can they deal with that right in that moment?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
I'll give my shot at it. Awesome. But, you know, because I face this a lot, like I faced it right before coming onto this podcast myself. Like there's always this anxiety that comes up and. I think one thing that needs to be said is that anxiety is normal. Like there's like healthy nerves that come up when you're about to do something that's exciting or interesting or difficult or challenging.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
So I think it's important to like, OK, yeah, I feel my heart pounding. I feel my my palms start to sweat. I feel my thoughts start to race a little bit. And some of that for me personally is just leaning into it.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
It's exposing myself to that and being willing to not fight against it or make the interpretation that like, oh, this means I'm going to blow it or this means something bad is going to happen. Instead, there's a lot of different things that I can do to deal with those nerves right then and there. One, my personal favorite technique is just cognitive flooding.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Like what's the worst thing that could happen? What's what's like I did. I've been doing it in this meeting, actually, like. I'm sitting here and I'm like imagining like, oh, the comments in the YouTube comments, someone's going to say like, oh, Jason, what a fool or like, oh, his his face is ugly or, you know, like I started imagining all these cruel comments.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And then the moment I really try to get my anxiety up, actually, in that moment, suddenly the anxiety disappears. And so those are kind of some of the tech. I mean, so these exposure cognitive flooding technique is one of my favorite ways to to work with these nerves. But a lot of it is also just like acceptance of like, oh, yeah, my heart's pounding. I'm really excited right now.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Like, oh, yeah, I'm feeling a bit anxious about this.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Yeah. Another kind of on the spot technique I use a lot when when my mind is racing and I'm feeling anxious about something is a lot of that anxiety for me. And in terms of performance anxiety, it comes from that perfectionism of like, oh, I need to give this speech perfectly or I need to say all the right things.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And one of my favorite techniques that I think from feeling good was average practice was just imagining, well, What would a very average talk feel like? What would an average presenter act like? Would an average person feel really anxious right now? Yes. Okay, I'm doing great. I'm just following along and trying to be as average as possible.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And that kind of lessens a lot of that perfectionistic demandingness that often makes the anxiety ten times worse. Yeah.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Yeah, totally.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
Jason, do you want to add anything? Sure. When I think about self-defeating beliefs, I kind of see them as... I see negative thoughts as the very end branches that is coming out of a self-defeating belief.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
And so that's why like when you use the uncovering techniques, like Matt said, you start with that negative thought and you're kind of like out on the edge branch of, you know, of suffering in your life and the way you're thinking. But when you start uncovering, you say, well, why is that upsetting to you? What does that mean to you?
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
You start getting back to your value system and you start getting back into like the meaning you make of the things that happen to you. And that at its core becomes a
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
self-defeating belief but i agree with matt too that whenever a self-defeating belief comes up with me like when i'm doing a mood log sometimes when i'm writing out my negative thoughts i realize like oh hey that's like one of the common self-defeating beliefs right there and so there really is no difference on the mood log often between the self-defeating belief and the negative thought um
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
When Anonymous said that they seem to be a little harder to defeat than normal negative thoughts, I do agree with that. Definitely when you're starting to get closer and closer to the most upsetting parts of your thinking, they can be extra challenging, definitely when you're applying methods. But at the end of the day, it's just another belief that you're working on in your mood log.
Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
419: Ask David: Changing an SDB; Intense Public Speaking Anxiety
That's my take.