Feeling Good Podcast | TEAM-CBT - The New Mood Therapy
420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!
Mon, 28 Oct 2024
The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two Mind-Boggling Discoveries about Meditation! Featuring Jason Meno Today, Jason Meno, our beloved AI guy on the Feeling Great App team, shares some incredible and innovative research he recently did on the effect of meditation on how we think and feel. As you know, basic research is a high priority of our app team, and our major focus is to make basic discoveries in how people change, and especially on what triggers rapid and dramatic change. We use that information to develop and refine the app on an ongoing basis, and also to contribute to basic science. Jason recently created a “New Cool Tools Club” which has 160 members who Jason can notify whenever he has a cool new app tool that he wants to test. If you are interested in joining, you can find his contact information at the end of the show notes. There is no charge if you’d like to join this group! Jason had a strong background in Buddhism and has been working with our company for several years, focusing in the last year on the AI chat bot portion of the Feeling Great App. He has meditated for many years, and uses TEAM-CBT as well to deal with his personal moments of stress and unhappiness, something that most if not all of us experience at times! Introduction Jason was interested in evaluating the short-term impact of meditating, and did a literature review but found that most or all of the published studies had a focus on the effects of daily meditation over longer periods of time, like two months for example. He was also interested in how long and how often people should meditate, and what types of meditations, if any, were the most effective. So, he decided to test a one-hour meditation experience consisting of five ten-minute recorded meditations, including A body scan meditation, systematically relaxing various parts of your body, beginning with your feet and toes. A breathing and counting meditation, where you focus on your breathing and count the breaths going in and out. A loving kindness meditation, starting with sending feelings of love, happiness, and health first to someone you love, then to yourself, then to someone you aren’t especially close to, or don’t particularly like, and on and on until you are projecting love and kindness to the entire universe. A mindfulness exercise where you notice if you are thinking, hearing, watching, remembering, and so forth as various thoughts pass through your mind. A “Do Nothing” meditation where you are instructed to simply “do nothing” for ten minutes. Because previous research on meditation did not use scales that assessed specific kinds of negative feelings in the here-and-now, he decided to use the highly accurate 7-item negative feelings sliders as well as the 7-item positive feelings sliders prior to the start of the medicine, after each meditation, and at the end of the app. He also asked many questions about motivation and expectations prior to the start of the meditation experiences, all answered from 0 (not at all) to 100 (completely), including How familiar are you with David’s work? How familiar are you with meditation? How strongly do you believe that meditation will make you feel better? How strongly do you believe that meditation will be rewarding? How strongly do you believe that meditation will only have a small effect? How strongly do you believe that meditation will be a waste of time? How strongly do you believe that meditation will make you feel worse? How strongly do you believe that it will be painful or difficult? You can find these data at this link. He also asked every participant to generate an upsetting negative thought, like “I’m a loser,” and use 0 to 1000 sliders to indicate how strongly they believed that thought, and how upsetting it was. 60 individuals started the experiment, and 35 completed it, with 25 dropping out prematurely before they completed some of the meditations. He presented the data as a two-group analysis, those who completed and those who failed to complete the hour of meditation. Here, are just a few of the preliminary findings, and more refined analyses are planned so we can look at causal effects. Both groups were moderately to very familiar with David’s work and with meditation. The completers had higher scores on the questions about positive expectations than the dropouts, although the differences were not great. The dropouts had substantially higher scores on four questions about negative expectations for the experience, like “it will be a waste of time” or “it will be painful or difficult.” The initial scores on the belief in the negative thought were similar in the two groups (76% and 74%, respectively), but the Upsettingness of the thought was a bit higher in the completers (83% and 79%. The mean of the initial scores on the 7 negative feelings sliders was significantly higher in the dropouts (37% and 46%, respectively), while the initial scores on the 7 positive feelings sliders was somewhat lower in the dropouts (49% and 45%, respectively). Both groups expected a modest reduction in negative feelings and a modest boost in positive feelings during the hour of meditation. Results on the 35 completers After the first ten-minute meditation, there were significant reductions in the negative feeling sliders (from 37% before to 25% after) and increases in the positive feeling sliders (from 45% before to 55% after). There did not appear to be any additional improvements in negative or positive feelings in the subsequent four meditations. There was a significant reduction in the belief in the negative thought after the first meditation, and the reduction continued throughout the next four meditations. (76% to 54%), for a reduction of 29%. There was a significant reduction in the upsetness caused by the negative thought after the first meditation, and the reduction continued throughout the next four meditations (79% to 47%) for a reduction of 40.5%. You can find the remarkable results if you click here! There are many fascinating results, but one of the most amazing--which we've replicated almost exactly in independent beta tests--is the remarkable similarity between the changes in negative and positive feelings the participants predicted, and the actual results. They are so close it looks like somebody faked the data, but that's not the case at all. We will have to do more analyses to figure out what this means, but in simple terms, this seems to be iron clad proof that our expectations of the mood changing results of any intervention can be tremendously powerful. In fact, you could argue--and it would need further statistical analyses to test--that the causal impact of the expectations eclipsed the causal impact of the actual intervention, which in this case was meditation. One of the cool things about quantitative research is that it nearly always shoots down our favorite hypotheses, and also gives us new and totally unexpected gifts to stimulate our thinking! In this instance, there were at least two mind-boggling and toally unexpected results: When people mediate, the improvement in negative feelings is accompanied by parallel reductions in participants belief in their negative thoughts. Participants predictions of the changes in seven negative and seven positive feelings by the end of the hour of meditation were spot on, and seemed almost impossibly accurate! Discussion The findings are exciting and specific, and suggest that the reduction in negative feelings during meditation may be, and is, mediated by the reduction in the users’ belief in their negative thoughts. We will attempt to look into this more deeply using non-recursive analytic methods with SEM (structural equation modeling). All samples are biased, and it can sometimes be extremely helpful to understand the bias in your sample when interpreting the results. The sample in this case included users favorably disposed to meditation, and responding to an email inviting them to participate in a meditation experiment. Only those who persisted the full hour were analyzed in the final outcome data, which could be another source of bias in the data. How much improvement would we have documented if we were analyzing completers (45) AND dropouts (35)? Actually, this type of analysis is possible using Direct FIML (Full-Information Maximum Likelihood) with SEM techniques. I will, in fact, do these analyses as soon as I get the data set from Jason. This will allow me to estimate the scores at the end for all participants, including those who dropped out. It seems mathematically impossible, but it actually can be done. If those who dropped out are systematically different from those who continued, it will “know” and correct for this. For example, if those who dropped out were, on average, doing more poorly, then the estimates based on those who persisted will be biased, and the degree of bias could potentially be infinite. The SEM analyses will also tell us if there are no significant differences in those who persisted and those who dropped out. Finally, the data LOOKS like the meditation “caused” some fairly significant improvements, although the results were in some ways puzzling. Using SEM, I should be able to determine whether, and to what degree, the improvement was simply a “placebo” effect resulting from the participants expectations of improvement, as opposed to an actual result of the meditation. So, stay tuned for updates on this amazing and deeply appreciated research initiative by our beloved Jason Meno! Thanks for listening today. Rhonda, Jason, and David
Hello, and welcome to the Feeling Good Podcast, where you can learn powerful techniques to change the way you feel. I am your host, Dr. Rhonda Barofsky, and joining me here in the Murrieta studio is Dr. David Burns. Dr. Burns is a pioneer in the development of cognitive behavioral therapy and the creator of the new Team Therapy.
He's the author of Feeling Good, which has sold over 5 million copies in the United States and has been translated into over 30 languages. His latest book, Feeling Great, contains powerful new techniques that make rapid recovery possible for many people struggling with depression and anxiety.
Dr. Burns is currently an emeritus adjunct professor of clinical psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. Hello, David, and hello to all of our listeners around the country, around the world, and throughout the galaxy. This is the Feeling Good podcast, episode 420, and we were lucky enough to have Jason Minow back as our very special guest.
And today is going to be a monumental podcast because we're going to hear a shift in David's thinking based on his favorite topic, research. And our topic today is really awesome. It's on team and negative thoughts and the mindfulness mystery. So let me turn it over to you, David and Jason, and you can tell us about your research and what you've done.
Well, I'll turn it right over to Jason, just with the brief introduction that, as you know, I'm a big advocate for research, and we've been doing all kinds of research with the app, but you, Jason, have started on some really cool, innovative experiments that you've been doing on a variety of topics, and I think we want to get that out into the
and to the public forum because it's not only important, but it's innovative and fascinating and kind of mind-blowing. So take it away, Jason, and we have no idea where we're going to end up, but we'll give it a start and see where it winds its way through the cosmos to the conclusion.
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.
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.
Wait, Jason, what was it called?
The New Cool Tools Club.
I want to say that. New Cool Tool Club. That's right.
I know. I want to be a member of that.
Yeah. And all of you who want to become members, send me a check for $49.95. Yeah. And no more.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And how did you come up with that time, 10 minutes?
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.
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.
So the total experience was one hour long start to finish.
So, and Jason, how did you find the subjects there are the subjects, the people who did it, they were all members of the new cool tools club.
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.
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.
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.
So we have 35 points of data of people who went through this process.
Did you ask the 25 people why they dropped out?
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.
Okay. But what we can do, if you send me the data, because we have their data at the beginning up to the point where they dropped out, and then we can put it into an Amos structural equation model, and then we can get the estimate of the scores at the end of the entire group rather than just the completers. And we can see if there's a statistically significant difference there. Yes.
Right.
The 35 versus the entire group.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
Were those numbers statistically significant? They're pretty close.
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.
And... When you say they look like distributions, it's probably hard to describe in words without visualizing. Yeah, how do you actually... Bimodal distributions or clustered at both ends or something like that.
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.
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.
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.
62, so the same kind of difference we saw above.
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?
Oh, I see. So this is how much do you believe it will only have a small effect? Is that what it is?
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.
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?
Oh, really? That was the question? A complete waste of time?
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...
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.
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.
Let me write those down again. I'm writing as fast as I can. Doing a little fire hose of info. Yeah, the finishers were what percent?
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.
It would be fun to plot these things, get these data in there and calculate the causal effects on the changes. Yeah. Because if you're able to do that, even though the non-finishers, you know, dropped out, they had some data along the way, I suspect.
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.
Yeah, cool. Cool.
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.
So that's a pretty big jump there.
That's the biggest spread. Three questions. The last four questions have been like 50% greater in the non-finishers.
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.
It's interesting because the familiarity with meditation was in the 60s. You said the finishers, it was 69%, and it was still in the 60s but lower, right, for the non-finishers?
Yeah, non-finishers' familiarity with meditation was 68%. So that's pretty high. Almost the same, yeah.
In the known finishers, you just suggested a data that was 58 or 68.
For familiarity with meditation?
Oh, 80 in both groups. Oh, no, no, 69 and 69 or 69 and 68. That's right, 69 and 68, familiarity with meditation.
What do you make of that, Jason? So this group of people are fairly familiar with meditation, and yet they have this idea, this thought, that 25% of the non-finishers and 11% of the finishers thought that meditation would be painful or difficult. 13% of the non-finishers thought that it would make them feel worse. And that 26%, which seems pretty high, that it would be a complete waste of time.
And my guess is that people who are familiar with meditation would not fall into those belief systems.
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.
Right. I find that surprising.
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.
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.
They both have the same experience, but those experiences have been more positive for the finishers and more negative for the non-finishers.
Right, exactly. We should have questions like that for the app.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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%.
So a little lower for the non-finishers. But to me, that shouldn't be too big of a deal.
No, that wouldn't be statistically significant. Yeah.
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.
Yep.
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.
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.
And for the people who didn't finish, their average was 46. So that's a difference. Definitely about nine points higher.
That's pretty pronounced there. That's interesting.
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?
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.
You know, they're kind of right in the middle, but they could definitely be doing a lot better.
Right, they're from a zero to 100. They're not like in the pits. Right. They're not in the joyful or even very happy range. They're just kind of halfway up. That's right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, I mean, it's, it's relatively the same reduction. They both had a 33% expectations of improvement. Yeah. 30%, 33% drop roughly. That's right. Yep. Um,
So Jason, are you looking at the non-finishers as your control group, kind of?
No, they're just two groups.
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.
It's a good start.
But these expectations are very helpful.
Yeah, the expectations. Exactly. Yeah, that's why I asked. Right. Yep. Great question.
So what was that? Did you do the positive also, the expectations?
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.
Yeah, very, very, very limited expectations of happiness increases.
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.
Yeah, it's pretty similar, although they were slightly higher expectation, maybe not statistically higher, but they had an increase of 13 45ths and the other had 10 49ths.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And after each of these meditations, I'm having them re-rate their belief in their negative thoughts and feelings.
After each one?
After each meditation, yeah.
And they're doing one meditation at a time consecutively?
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.
So they're going to rate their belief in the negative thought and then how upset they are between zero and 100 after each of the five meditations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love these different choices, Jason. Four of them are all about internal, your body, counting your breath. paying attention to your breath and the things around you, thinking, breathing, hearing, planning, experiencing. And then the one, the loving kindness is focusing outward, like sending out loving kindness to, you do do it toward yourself, but you're sending it out towards others.
And then the do nothing meditation, I guess, fits its own separate category. Yeah.
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.
25, 26, 24, 26, 25.
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.
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.
Yeah, correlation or an R-squared, a 56% R-squared.
Yeah, with least squares.
And like a 0.7 correlation or 0.75.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you read us the upset numbers? We have the belief numbers.
Let me. So the numbers I just read to you a minute ago were the negative feelings.
Oh, the 3725, those were the feelings, not the belief and the thoughts.
No, I can give that next.
Oh, okay. Let me just relabel my columns, feelings, and then percent, belief. Okay, great. This is fabulous work, Jason.
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.
The positive feelings and the percent belief in the negative thought.
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.
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.
We do have two very different groups of people and how they're reacting to meditation.
Can I just see if I've got my numbers right? The upset, the positive feelings after the body scan was 55, is that right?
Mm-hmm.
55.
53.
54.
54. So that's really incredible. They had their first...
blast after the the body scan one and then no real changes after that and and are you reading to us the completers or the non-completers uh this is just completers because the non-completers don't have any of this much of this data at all so i'm just yeah so this is just the okay sure 35 people okay sure everything and then the percent beliefs
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.
Oh yeah.
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.
But the positive feeling sliders, the main, was 49 and 45 in the two groups, right? Yeah.
It sounds about right.
Yeah. And where was the expectation? Oh, the expectation was 59 and 58. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't get up quite to their expectations. Well, they were in the ballpark. It was pretty close.
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.
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.
And now here's the upsetness.
So they started off... Just give me a second to locate the data because I've been taking notes. And how much do you believe... Oh, here. What kind of meditation and how much... I'm trying to find out how much they believe their negative thought at the start. It was an average belief of 76%. Oh, yeah, yeah, here it is, 76 and 74. Oh, yeah.
So they went from 76, and now we're looking at the completer group only, to 64, 61, 54, 52, and then 51. So they had one drop, you know, a... 12-point reduction in the belief from that body scan and then kind of some kind of a continual thing, you know, like another 13-point reduction by the end. Yeah, that's right.
Not surprising to me is that the biggest drop was after the loving-kindness meditation.
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.
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.
And what you were saying, the loving kindness had the greatest change in what parameter?
Belief and negative thought, which is also interesting.
The loving kindness, it's hard to know what reduction it had unless we asked their belief in that at the beginning of it.
Well, they're doing these meditations in sequence. So the moment they finish meditation two...
Yeah, okay.
And their belief was 61%.
Right, right. So that had a seven-point reduction. And the initial exercise, Rhonda, how much did that go down? That went from 49 to, I believe, from 76 to 64, right? That had a 12-point? That's a 12-point.
So technically, the body scan, the first meditation they do, has the biggest reduction.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
Yes, absolutely, yeah. I wasn't paying attention to that. I was hypothesizing about loving kindness, so I zeroed in on that. But you're right, that's the biggest change, an immediate change. Yeah. Super interesting.
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.
So it looks from these numbers like the percent belief and the thought and the percent reduction and the upsetness were strongly correlated.
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.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
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.
As well as taking into account both groups.
Yeah, exactly.
You get consistent estimates. But it's really interesting and it looks like that during the meditation, the reason the upsetness changed was because the belief of the negative thoughts changed. Is that fair?
I mean, that's that's it makes sense to me. Yeah.
Yeah. Cool. Well, that's that's a fantastic thing. And I know you're doing a lot of research on a lot of things simultaneously, but it's like a cornucopia of of discovery here.
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.
Let's make a list of questions.
Yeah, like number one question for me is... Why would meditating change your belief in a negative thought?
That is the big question.
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...
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.
Well, let me start out making it more basic. Is the effect due to meditation or placebo? Wouldn't that be like expectations effect?
Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's right.
And then the second question that you said, the third one was Hawthorne, but what was the second one that you said? Is the effect...
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.
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.
How much do you expect, you know, the belief in your thoughts to change? Um, I didn't ask that question, unfortunately.
Oh yeah. That'd be a good one. Um, And then is the effect due to a sampling issue?
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.
But we might be able to control for them with this data, because you have some data on that, how familiar they are, what their expectations are for meditation. We can find out the magnitude of those causal effects, if they are having causal effects. But the same as in our general thing, are we attracting a population of people with positive expectations and positive experiences with meditation?
Because these were... you know, random from a larger group. So these were the ones that wanted to participate in an experiment on meditation. Is that right?
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.
Yeah. and once again, I think from my point of view, we're seeing some reductions in negative feelings and some boosts in positive feelings with at least one of the meditation exercises, which kind of puts a nail in David's coffin that meditation really doesn't do much for you. But on the other hand, the size of the effect was no different from a placebo effect, which supports David's thing.
And we can look into this more with structural equations. But another thing I think that people have been saying for a long time is, To me, I'm pretty much of a pure cognitive therapist. I believe that change in negative feelings comes from a change in perceptions. And a lot of people don't buy that at all and angrily don't buy it.
And they'll say, well, you can get a runner's high and that proves that it's exercise and not a change in your thinking. But, of course, when people say that, they're just kind of spouting lies
mindless garbage to put it in a kindly way because they're not measuring changes in negative thoughts during exercise and I exercise all the time and I never have a change in you know some boost in positive thinking I never have a boost I never have a runner's high
But what this study shows is that there is a, and I can check it out more thoroughly with structural equation modeling, but it looks like this confirms the idea that any change in negative feelings is mediated through a change in belief in negative thoughts. And I think that's
That's pretty exciting, and I think you're probably the first person in the world ever to measure, well, not only such refined measures of positive and negative feelings during meditation in a short period of time, but the first to document changes in negative thinking during meditation as the mechanism that changes negative feelings during meditation.
What did you make of the fact that there was this, something I wouldn't have predicted at all, this big boost in... feelings after the first meditation and nothing much after that except for that the percent belief kept going down and then the percent upsetness from that belief went down and any thoughts about that or
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?
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
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.
Exercise will help me. Yeah. That in itself is a huge, huge meaning making effect you're doing.
Yeah. Yeah.
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.
Would the body scan one be because it was first or because it was different?
Or because it was relaxing.
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.
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.
Like you're really – you're discounting the positive.
You're hypnotized.
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.
Or put you in a different hypnotic state.
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?
Oh, yeah, right. Yeah, right. That would be your control group. When I started my work as a psychiatric resident, I used hypnosis techniques. I don't know if extensively, but a good bit with patients. And I was doing what you're calling the body scan relaxation. You know, focus on your, clench your fist and now relax it.
You can feel all the energy draining out, all the tension, all the worries are gone and blah, blah, blah, and go through all the different parts of the body. And we call that hypnosis, but it sounds like not different at all from body scan meditation. Would that be fair? It could be.
Another way I'm thinking about it right now is sometimes whenever you're thinking about solving problems in your life,
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.
So that's also another potential pathway that might be happening here, which is we've given you a negative thought.
I imagine that the last one, the do nothing meditation, runs the risk of obsessionally thinking about your negative thought. Like with the body scan and the counting and the loving kindness meditation and even with the Vipassana where you're paying attention to what's going on internally and externally. Yeah.
You have that 10-minute break from your thought that you described, like you're separating yourself from the break. But the do-nothing meditation where you're doing nothing, it seems to me that could be inviting yourself to obsess about the negative thought and bring that back up. And that's why I think it's really interesting that with that fifth meditation, things stayed pretty much the same.
Like there really wasn't much of an improvement with that fifth meditation. Yeah.
On average, yeah.
On average.
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.
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.
Oh, I see, yeah. But I like your thinking.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Someone mentioned that that was their experience, which to me makes sense.
Let me ask you another. You ask a question, Rhonda. I have one.
No, you go for it. I just asked one.
Okay. I just have to applaud this fascinating work that you're doing. It's really, really fabulous. And it's a joy to hear you present it and talk about it. And the fact that you're doing this, it's really groundbreaking research. And... We can maybe have the five-minute version of this in this foundation meeting coming up later in the fall.
And I could present a five-minute version of some of the stuff I've been doing, too, because I think it's very exciting. But I have kind of a naive question. One of the Tuesday groupers who's now pretty much in private practice said, and well-known to our community, brought into the Tuesday group, I would say about, I don't know if you were there that day, Rhonda, it was three or four years ago.
And it was actually Jacob who brought in some, I think, a loving kindness meditation for us to listen to. Do you remember? Were you there that day? I think so. Yeah. And I remember when listening to it, not only did it give me loving kindness, but it created intense feelings of rage. And I wish I wasn't in this room. And Jill Levitt felt exactly the same way, really.
Not only not helpful, but offended. And, you know, you could say resistant or turned off or whatever. And then sometimes I've heard presentations of guided imagery hypnosis. I think these are just different words for the same phenomenon going on with people. and I think I've also used them with groups.
I've been in groups where we were doing it, and just finding my mind wanting to go over here, and they're trying to push us over here, and just kind of an adverse... And that would be different from non-helpfulness. And do you have any feel for what that's all about?
I felt better when I heard that Jill had the exact same reaction because she and I think very similarly in many ways about certain things. But there's probably just pure speculation there. Could you say your question again? What's the question? Well, the question is, you've talked about bimodal distributions. Yeah. And can you define what that is?
Basically, that's a normal, you know, that's a bell shaped distribution. What you see with my hand, you know, it's low. Some of the population's real low and then there's an average of the population and then it tapers. And some people have real high like depression in the population. Some people take my depression test would have a zero rate.
And others would have a 20, and the rest would be on kind of a bell-shaped distribution. You know, kind of most people clustered at some average value, whatever it might be in the population or in the group you're studying. But a bimodal distribution is where you have two bumps. It's clearly two populations with different means that are different from each other.
They're not all part of the same normal distribution. Like, for example, in a football game, you have half of the people in the stadium rooting for one team and half rooting for the other team. So that would be a bimodal distribution. But they're not all falling on the same curve. They're two different populations with two different kinds of responses.
Okay, great. So now that you've defined that, Do you remember your question?
Well, the question would be, why might some people like David and Jill perhaps have, I know just, I can only speak for that one example, because for all I know, Jill loves meditating, but that have just intensely negative feelings. And some, as you say, Rhonda, love a loving kindness kind of meditation. And probably a lot of people just find it boring and indifferent sometimes.
And I'm just saying, how would I be different from the people who are, you know, kindly loving the loving kindness?
Jason, do you want to answer that?
Yeah.
I have thoughts about that too, but you go first.
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.
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.
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
That's what we saw in the beta test of a year and a half ago with 290 beta testers of the app, that we asked them to predict what their hopelessness would be after using the app, their anger. You know, how hopeless are you from zero to 100? How angry are you at the initial evaluation before they'd ever been in the app?
And then what do you think your scores on these seven negative feelings will be after you've used the app? And they weren't all exactly correct, but they were almost all almost exactly correct. Like they predict the mean of the group, the prediction was that the hopelessness would go from something like 0 to 100, like from 40 to 15.4.
I'm just out of memory, and it actually, the actual end hopelessness was 15.1. It was within three hundredths. And and anger. A few of them were off by like a 16 prediction and a 12 actual on a zero to 100, which is still pretty damn close. But most of them were within a point or two. And it was just mind blowing.
But the analyses also showed that there were that was only accounting for a small amount of the variance and change. The R-square attributed to that change. And that there were other causal factors going on in the app that caused these massive changes. And I'm just babbling now, but isolating the actual causes of change is, I think, incredibly important. So we find out, you know, what causes.
causes are real and how powerful are they and are they stronger than these expectational effects and how much of what we experience is what we brought into the experience and then we attribute it to the experience whereas it was our expectation that might have accounted for most of what happened and that could happen going to an amusement park, going to a church service or a
you know, whatever, an athletic event, you could have the expectation that it's going to be pretty boring, and it probably would be. But that might also be just based on memory, that you haven't found this athletic event interesting in the past, and then you get dragged to one, and you don't expect much, and it isn't much. But I think that's interesting.
Yeah, and can I take a stab at answering their question, David?
Yeah, you can.
So when I started meditating a long time ago, I definitely had the expectation it would be good for me. And that's why I started. People around me said, oh, you should meditate. It's really good for you. It's really good for you. And so that's why I started. And in the beginning, I was bored and I felt angry a lot. And I had a lot of adverse feelings come up like, why am I doing this?
This is really dumb. I don't think this is helping. But also I had a lot of negative, yucky feelings come up that didn't feel good. But then because of that expectation, this is good for me, I had the motivation to continue.
And the more I continued, like practicing a musical instrument or practicing any kind of a TMCBT technique, the more I practiced it, the better I got at it and the more calm I could be as a result of it.
Was there like an exposure therapy?
Yeah.
You could say that.
I think that's a really good way to describe it. Yeah.
But that would be different from getting good at it. That would be just getting used to those feelings and deciding they're not that dangerous anymore.
And then they just and then they fade away.
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.
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.
Yeah. Well, thanks for that. Oh, you see that in me? Oh, yeah.
You're filled with joy and, you know, peace. And, you know, it's very pronounced in my way of thinking. I'm glad you can see it.
That's you generally as a whole, Jason, from your years of meditating, right?
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.
And this is completely anecdotal. I wish I could have been a part of your study. But to me, it's really hard. I can't see... in my own personal experience that meditation has any effect on my negative thoughts, but it does have an effect on helping me feel calmer. And I would tend to be in the group of people that are at risk to ruminate on negative thoughts.
So I have to really fight against that. And so that like the, the do nothing meditation would probably be more damaging to me than guided meditation. Yeah.
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.
So people like being guided in a positive direction with positive suggestions. Yes. Seems like it.
Yeah.
At least while these specific meditations. Yeah.
Oh, and Max wanted me to ask you a question.
Ask, ask away.
Could it simply be the choice to engage in a practice for betterment that caused the improvement?
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.
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.
And that's kind of the pleasure predicting.
Yeah, yeah, that's a pleasure-predicting sheet, yeah. Yeah, you could do all kinds of cool stuff. I didn't understand your question, Max, and I was thinking of having Max make a cameo appearance too, should he choose to. He's our technician but also a philosopher and extremely interested in all of this same stuff.
But the choice, isn't that the same as we were talking about already, the sample selection bias and the expectations bias? to what extent they account for the change that we've seen as opposed to or in addition to the actual meditation. I didn't get the difference in your question, Max. Yeah. Could you read the question one more time, Rhonda? Sure.
I'll pay more attention to the wording. Could it be simply the choice to engage in a practice for betterment that caused the improvement?
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.
And these were the people who wanted to come and participate in a meditation experiment.
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.
How many were invited and how many, I think 70 were in your study or something? How many received the email?
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.
And then only 60 actually made it in. Yeah. And 35 completed it.
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.
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.
You could tell your therapist that. Just say, I got the greatest mood boost ever just before I started working with you and knew I was going to work with you. And then it quickly faded once I actually worked with you. Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, thank you, Jason, for this really eye opener. And maybe you folks can email us too. And Jason, you'll find Rhonda and Jason, David, our contact information in the show notes. And let us know if you like having this crazy scientist on our show. He also has many other amazing, wonderful things to offer. Did we tell him last week, Rhonda, what we're hoping to cook up? No.
We don't know if this is going to happen, but Jason, you've been very active in Buddhism and meditation and all forms of spiritual searches and discoveries. And we thought it might be fun, and this might not work, but we were thinking of having an Enlightenment month where we would invite different Buddhist monks to come and join us, a different one each week, and give their teachings.
share their feelings and see what is the overlap with team or what is different with team. Because I think that a sense of spirituality, however you want to define that term, can be a vastly important part of work with team. It's not just learning to change your thinking to reduce negative feelings. It's also about blowing the negative feelings away
pretty much entirely and going like on a trampoline, being catapulted into hyperspace where you're actually experiencing what you could call enlightenment, a radically different view of yourself and other people. That's pretty exhilarating. And it's never been talked about when I was a psychiatric residency as a part of treatment. We were just hoping to get people maybe 50%.
or something like that. There wasn't ever any concept of joy and discovery. And some of us think that's an important component of what we're trying to do.
Well, David, were we thinking of inviting a Buddhist monk, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim imam, and Christian spiritual leaders so that we could have a bunch of different perspectives?
And I think a lot of times the people who are considered mystics within each religion might be merging on the same kind of spiritual territory, just using different metaphors to convey that. But I don't know. There could be. Jason, you probably know way more about that than I would. But either way, I think it would be of interest. Cool, yeah.
So write and tell us what you think and what you're looking for. We aim to please.
Okay. Well, thank you, Jason, so much for coming on to the podcast and explaining about your experiment. And Jason, are you looking for more people to become members of your new cool tools club?
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.
It's always kind of really fun and interesting stuff. We're going to be testing your new Habits and Addictions module with AI, which is a pretty cool tool. There's a lot of these cool tools. And so read the show notes. You can find them on the website, which is they're published right there.
at feelinggood.com, and you click on the podcast and the quick list of all the podcasts, you can find the latest one at the bottom, and the show notes are right there, and you can get all the contact information so you can ask questions. And, yes, we would love to have you join the Cool Tools and Fools Club. Is that it? You got it. So goodbye, everybody. Thank you, Jason.
Love you and appreciate your brilliant, fantastic work, not only in the research domain, but in the healing domain, because you're the one who's put the the magic into our app and hopefully put some magic into the hearts of a lot of our, our app users. And if you're interested in the app, check it out too. And the, and either of the app stores, you can take a free ride.
And if you want to buy it after you've tried it for a week or two and can't afford it, contact us and we'll give it to you for free. Cause we want everyone who's struggling and hurting to, to have a chance to take a shot with, with the app because we, we often see very rapid changes in negative feelings and we, we would really love it to have to share that experience with you too.
Yeah. Thanks Rhonda. Thanks David. It's great being in sharing all these nerdy numbers with you. So it was fun.
This has been another episode of the feeling good podcast. For more information, visit Dr. Byrne's website at feelinggood.com, where you will find the show notes under the podcast page. You will also find archives of previous episodes and many resources for therapists and non-therapists. We welcome your comments and questions.
If you want to support the show, please share the podcast with people who might benefit from it. You could also go to iTunes and leave a five-star rating. I am your host, Rhonda Borowski, the director of the Feeling Great Therapy Center. We hope you enjoyed this episode. I invite you to join us next time for another episode of the Feeling Good Podcast.