Keep your brain young! Three minute meditations for busy people.

Do you want to keep your brain full of energy and creative juice? Have you ever had brain fog or find it hard to keep your focus? We need your full potential to shine and in this episode you’ll learn a concrete, scientifically proven method keep your brain sharp, young, and healthy! 

Meditation doesn’t have to be hard or complicated. You’ll learn two techniques that you can start doing right away. Get benefits like: 

• Reduce anxiety

• Reduce stress

• Keep more cognitive ability as you age

• Regulate your emotions

• Improve ability to learn new stuff

Start simple, start small. Each meditation only takes three minutes to learn and with daily practice you’ll join the millions of people who have experienced the benefits.

Think you don’t have time? Jump to minutes 11 or 21 and give it a try for three minutes! Let’s get started, take action now!

Tips for success:

1. Pick a time each day to meditate and stick with it. Most people find that first thing in the morning works wonders; set your day off right!

2. Start and small: use one of the techniques from the video and set a timer to practice for just three minutes every day. After a few weeks, increase the time to five minutes. After a few more weeks, increase to ten minutes. A little bit every day goes a long way!

3. Check out Apps like Headspace, mediation series by Jack Kornfield to help. Also, The Gita Brown Show will release three episodes in January designed to teach you everything you need to know to meditate! Check those out in January 2020!

Full transcript:

Hey friends, welcome to the Gita Brown show, bringing harmony into everyday life. Are you a creative person? Are you a busy person? Do you want more inspiration? If so, you have found your place for guidance and support. I've got practical tips for you and today, my friends, we are talking about how to keep your brain young. Ooh, isn't that a good thing? If you're especially like me and you have a little bit of the gray hair going on, they're middle aged, I'll say it. Um, you want to find ways that you can keep your brain young and activated and we have some amazing new research out that actually proves the method I'm going to teach to you today. Works. Isn't that cool? So just a teensy bit about me. I'm a yoga educator, a musician, and a writer, a creative person just like you. And for 30 years I've been doing yoga deep dives into wellness and creativity, and I've taken everything that I've learned and I'm filtering it through this show and sharing it with you.

Not all of it today, but one little piece. So let's talk about your brain a little bit. Let's go in through your daily experience. Have a little check in for a minute. Do you have brain fog? Can you concentrate for long periods of time without taking a break? Do you rely on caffeine and sugar to make it through? Or do you just kind of operate and I like just good enough level and you just get your stuff done, but you're not fully able to activate and use all the information that you've learned throughout your day to filter it through an activity. If you maybe have like a really super high functioning level you're at, you're like, you know, I'm really cooking on all cylinders, but I'm wondering if there's another gear I can get to. Or my friends, no matter where you are on that spectrum, there's always more you can do to enhance the functioning of your brain.

And I'm going to show you how. So the way this is going to roll is I'm a tell a little story. Because I like to tell stories. Then we're going to do a little practice together. Then I'm going to give you some scientific research to back up what you just experienced. Then we're going to do another little experience of the same technique you can use to keep your brain young. So by the time you leave this, you'll have some concrete ideas of how to keep your brain young, healthy, how to keep your mental focus on edge. So by now I hope you're ready to hear your lesson for the day kiddos, which is: meditate! meditate now. Okay, I can hear some of you like groaning already, like, Oh yeah, that's on the list of like things that I should do with my life. I hear it all the time from my yoga students that they do " yoga", but then I find out they never meditate and I'm like, so you're actually not doing yoga.

I don't know what you're doing if you're not working on your mind. Because yoga is actually more about training your mind and then your body., Or I hear from a lot of people like, Oh my brain is way too busy. I couldn't possibly meditate. I couldn't keep myself still for even two minutes. Well that's kind of like saying, well I couldn't practice the piano because I don't know how to play the piano. You're practicing so that you can learn how to do it. So you meditate to learn how to do it. Um, I also hear a lot of people say all the time, I don't have any tim., So I'm sorry I'm going to call you out on that one. That's kinda BS. You know, you have time. You know, you have five minutes in the morning where you can sit quietly. I mean, with the exception of maybe some of you out there who are like heart surgeons who are on call, you can find five minutes to meditate.

In fact, you don't have a choice. Because if you truly want to keep your brain young and healthy and contribute to your highest level, you have to find the time. What are you waiting for? It actually gives you time back, which we're going to talk about today. So if you're one of those people who groaned about it, let me tell you a little bit about my story. And how I kind of shifted that grown from, Oh yeah, I can't live without this. And then we're just gonna do a little one. It'll take like maybe three minutes of your time and you'll see if you like it. Then I'll give you some science. Like I said, we'll do another technique if you didn't like the first one. Okay, so meditation. I've been meditating since I was in high school. I started out with those really dippy like new age, 1980s recordings, you know, where the woman was talking in this soothing voice and there was like bird sounds in the background and there was always somehow a harp or a synthesized harp, even worse playing.

And my friends would all come over and they would laugh so hard that they couldn't meditate with me when I would play these tapes because they were just so cheesy. But I still did them because they kind of made me feel good .and all they did was sort of teach me how to relax my body a little bit. But then I noticed even though I was in high school that I would go to play my clarinet or I'd go to class and I was like, wow, that all seemed easier. What was hard yesterday, today got easier. And the only difference was is that I spent like 10 minutes listening to that silly, new age meditation tape. So fast forward many, many years. Eventually I got some legit training and meditation, some of which I'm going to do with you today. Or I actually had teachers with me in the room structured and showed me how to do it a bit more properly so that it wasn't relying on a recording to do it, but that I could really do it on my own.

And so I sort of had this nice grounded practice and I just noticed it made me feel better. It decreased my anxiety, it helped my performance in music increase and get easier. So then enter though a really challenging time of my life. So I was married to a man who was my childhood sweetheart. We met when we were only 12 years old. He was sweet and kind. And we dated on and off, you know, as you do when you're young and eventually in our twenties we got married and then he became addicted to drugs and alcohol and they really took over to where it got to be, end stage alcoholism. And I was afraid that he would die and thank God I had meditation during that period. Because if you're someone right now who's going through a challenge or a rough patch in your life, you know how sort of distorted things can get, you know, how sort of catastrophic our thinking can become, right?

Every decision seems fraught with peril and we're under this heavyweight of grief. It becomes hard to even do the simplest things. So I was living in a daily situation like that where I felt like my decisions would mean whether he would live or die throughout the day. Do I divorce him and he know that he's probably gonna face homelessness and death, which unfortunately did happen. Or do I stay and potentially lose myself in, in the relationship. So faced with that real true life or death decision. I had meditation as my guidepost every morning because I was suffering so bad. It was my refuge. It was at time when I could just sit and follow my breath going in and out, and I used a mantra, which I'm going to teach you in a minute, to just repeat over and over. This phrase in my head repeated over and over and over, and as I repeated that phrase over and over and over, the experience was not pleasant.

It's not like I was sitting there in some little bliss bubble or a yoga teacher, you know, on a Lotus pond. Just feeling lovely. I was feeling horrible and wretched and I was feeling like my life was ending. My relationship to this wonderful person was ending. I was worried about his health and his life. I was worried about what the world would think about me as a divorced person. All of that stuff was right there with me in the meditation, but because I was focusing on the mantra, it gave my mind a little bit of perspective. It's almost like, you know, when you're at the beach and you see those seagulls and they're just riding the, um, the currents from the wind above the ocean. They don't have to flap their wings or anything. They're just riding. It sort of felt like that. Like I was still being buffeted by life.

It's still being pushed and pulled and challenged by it. But I was riding that current a little bit instead of being sucked down by it. And from that little bit of elevated perspective, I started to realize that my experiences were just that experiences in the moment and they wouldn't last forever. Those emotions and feelings would come and they would go because I went through every emotion in those 30 minute meditations in the morning. I went through fear and anger and rage and grief and all of them and sometimes joy. Um, but that I noticed that those emotions came and they went and they came in, they went and just like that goal sort of riding the winds above the ocean cliffs, um, I started to notice that, huh? Maybe I'm not that person who stuck in suffering. Maybe there's a higher self, maybe there's a part of me that's connected to the larger world and my fellow man all the time, and at least those little tiny glimpses of that sort of higher self or my soul or just my peace, whatever you want to call it.

It gave me enough courage then to come back into those very difficult situations with my ex husband and move forward with grace. And I'm really proud because when we got divorced, it was actually an extremely loving day. It was fantastic. Well, it wasn't fantastic, but it was fantastic the way we handled it, right? We shared a cab, we shared a lawyer, we went out for lunch afterwards, we took a walk. We really did it with a lot of love. And I know from my perspective that my meditation every morning for the years and years leading up to that moment of making the decision to leave the relationship allowed me to do so with more love and more clarity ,instead of getting sucked down by the temporariness of my emotions. And that's what meditation has given me a clarity to kind of as my wonderful father, this great professor always says, rise above it, rise above it.

I think again of that bird soaring way high above everything is still there. You're not denying it. It's just you're taking a more elevated perspective. But to do that, my friends, you have to train your mind and it actually does keep your brain young, which I'm going to give you in the scientific part, so I'm still meditating. You know, many, many years has been, you know, over a decade since my divorce and still meditating and I can tell you it just gets better and better and better. So let's just do a little one right now, just like think of it like a little sample. You know how you get like a little appetizer or at a cocktail party, they give you a little bite. Just give you a little bite of a meditation. Then I've got to give you some new amazing neuroscience that they're finding out about meditation and how it can keep your brain young.

Then after that we're going to do another type of meditation to see if you like that one. Okay? So if you're listening to this as a recording or on a podcast, you know, maybe hit pause now, don't try and do this while you're rocketing down the highway at 70 miles an hour. Hit pause, do it when you get to your destination. It only takes a couple of minutes and I'm sure that you'll see the results. So wherever you are, let's just take a moment to sort of establish a nice gentle seated posture. You can do the standing or you know, if you want to lay down, you can lay down and do it as well. The important thing, my friend is just to be really super comfortable. The first meditation I'm going to teach you is a meditation on your breath. And we're just going to notice our breath flowing in and out.

So first things first, get nice and settled. Make sure that wherever you are that your hips are nice and relaxed, that your spine is long, right? So you can kind of think of the crown of your head is getting taller and taller and taller, and even if you're laying down, you can sort of think of your body is expanding and filling its whole space. Let your shoulders relax, let your arms relax and just check in for a moment. Even with your face, let your jaw and your eyes relax just a little bit and then just start to let mind notice your breath.

You can close your eyes if you wish or bring your gaze just towards the floor as you draw your awareness towards your breath and just notice whatever it's doing. It may be shallow, it may be deep. You may feel like taking a deep breath doesn't matter. Just notice your breath flowing in and out. Can you even kind of label it as fast or slow? Anytime your mind wanders over to other things or questioning or wandering to say, Hey mind, come back to the breath. Just generally keep bringing it back again and again and again. You can even label your inhale mentally and silently by saying breathing in and when you breathe out, you can just say breathing out or out. So you're just labeling each inhale in and each out as an out and just very gently with yourself and bringing your awareness back and back again to noticing the breath in and out. Just watching the breath. If that feels too remote, you can even bring your senses to the tip of your nose and feel the breath coming in and out of the nose as a physical sensation. Just noticing it, coming in . and noticing it. Going out, breathing in and breathing out. Gathering your thoughts and just letting them rest. Noticing the breath flowing in. I know it's another moment in time following your breath, letting all of your thoughts rest on noticing the breath

and then just gently open your eyes or bring your gaze back up. You can move and stretch a little bit. See how easy that is. You could even do that sitting on a plane. You could even do that before a meeting. You could do that anywhere. No one would even have to notice that you're doing a breath meditation and it doesn't take a lot of time. If you do two or five minutes a day. Not only can this give you that sort of connection to your higher self that I was talking about a moment ago, but it can actually keep your brain young. So my friends, I read this study the other day and it just blew my mind. I actually had to go look up the original study and then another study that was on a read the full science behind it and I was just fascinated.

the journalist Melanie Curtin wrote an article for Ink online about this and it's actually this wonderful neuroscientist named Sarah Lazarre. Sarah, I hope I'm saying your last name properly. L a, Z a R but she's at mass general and Harvard medical school and she started studying meditation kind of by accident and she says in the article she was training for a marathon, got some running injuries and someone suggested, Hey, maybe you should take up some yoga. And she was sort of as like, like some of you might be like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll stretch a little bit. Sure. So she started doing yoga and then she started noticing, Hmm, I'm going to quote from her right here. "She was thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm here to stretch. But I started noticing that I was calmer, I was better able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and openhearted and able to see things from others' point of view. "

So long, long, long, long, long story short, she goes ahead and, because she is a neuroscientist, she designed a study, actually two studies. The first study she looked at longterm meditators versus a control group and those with a strong meditation background had increased gray matter in several areas of the brain. We all want more gray matter. That's the thinking part of your brain, including auditory and sensory cortex and also the sensory regions, which makes a lot of sense, right? Cause you were focusing on the senses in your body. But here's something very interesting. There's a part of the brain that's a correlated with decision making and working memory has a, uh, it's in the frontal cortex. So most people, this frontal cortex right in here shrinks as you age. Shrinks down. But 50 year old meditators in the study had this same amount of gray matter as those half their age.

Can I say that again? 50 year old meditators in this study had the same amount of gray matter as those half their age. So like they had the brains or the gray matter of their brains rather of a 25 year old. And they, the significant difference for them in this study was that they were meditating. Wow. I don't know about you, but I would like to keep as much of my brain functioning as long as I can cause I have a lot of people to serve. So she did an a second study in this. They use mindfulness based stress reduction, which is a fantastic program. Highly, highly recommend it. So eight weeks of meditation. So you think, okay, two months of meditation changed people's brains for the better. It thickened certain areas of the brain. Hang on, I want to get to the really cool part.

Okay. This is the one that really blew me. There's this part of your brain called the amygdala. This is the part of you that freaks out from fear. And if you're going through a stressful time, this is the part that is probably firing and being a little bit over-reactive, right? It's that like fight or flight part of the brain that just sends you sort in a panic tizzy. So new meditators, this might be you if today was your first time meditating, congratulations, you did it. New meditators saw shrinkage of the amygdala, which means that correlates to a reduction in their stress response and to their fear response. So that means without you needing to think about it, after you've meditated, if you are presented with a stressful situation or a fearful situation, your response is going to be much calmer because you have literally changed the, um, physicality of your brain.

Isn't that amazing? I think that sort of explains my experience, right? Why I went through a very stressful situation with an abusive alcoholic, wonderful person, but he was an abusive alcoholic. And I was able to stop responding out of fear and instead respond out of love and find a way to move forward compassionately. There's the science right there. So these folks in this study, I meditated for 40 minutes a day, So that might not happen for all of you right off the bat and certainly didn't for me. I started with five minutes and I did that for years. And then it kind of went to 10 and over time you build up a tolerance to do more and more. Start simple, start small. All their studies suggest that with just 15 to 20 minutes a day, you can see significant changes in the composition of your brain.

Um, I think there was one other cool thing in the study. I wanted to make sure. Um, Oh, this is another really cool thing. Last thing I'll do and then we're going to do another little activity, my friends. So after eight weeks of meditation, another part of the brain that changed was the left hippocampus got larger, which is involved with learning memory and emotional regulation. So there's that ability to regulate your emotions and response and your ability to learn new patterns is enhanced when you meditate. Okay, how much more can I make the case for meditation? It does all of these amazing things that also previous studies have proven that it reduces blood pressure. I'll give you one other little quick anecdote from mine that's a little more fun than a divorce story, which is that I go to get at least one physical a year, usually two, just because I'm kind of on top of my health and I'd like to check in. Every time I go get a physical, I spend a couple minutes, you know, on a time when you go to the doctor and you're like sitting in that little room by yoursel, , waiting when they're going to get there, you know you're in the little paper gown and you're freezing.

So I used to just get annoyed during that time where I was like, you know what? I better be a good yogini. I'm going to meditate while I'm waiting. So I sit there and I just kind of relax for five or 10 minutes and I meditate, so there I am, I meditate and then the nurse comes in. What do they do? They slap on that blood pressure cuff and they check your numbers. This has happened to me so many times. It's almost freaky. I think next time I'm in recorded silently and actually get proof of this. Every single time the nurses look at me and they go, do you meditate? Do you do yoga? What do you do? Your blood pressure is really low almost every time because the, and I've asked them and then the nurses that they see the people coming through their room often enough, the ones that meditate or do yoga that their blood pressure levels are so much lower that they can tell just by the numbers, which is telling me it's changing my body from the inside out.

That my over base line for stress is so much lower, so if you want to keep your brain young, healthy and vibrant, let's do another meditation here together right now we're going to use another technique. If you didn't like following the breath, that felt a little too, uh, not concrete or just didn't work for you. Let's do one that we call, um, a meditation on a mantra. A mantra is just like a mind protection thing. It's just a word that you repeat over and over again to give your mind something to focus on. Cause if you're like me, your mind is in a million places at once. So let's give it one thing to focus on a mantra. The mantra we're going to use today is ohm. Shanti Shanti means peace. So that's kind of a good thing to meditate on. And ohm is just that symbol of like universal energy, right?

We know that at its elemental level. Everything is vibrating particles of energy. So ohm is that recognition of that creative force that we're all vibrating and we're all connected. So it's like universal energy and peace. And all you have to do is repeat it silently. I'll, repeat it out loud. You repeat it silently. After a few repetitions, I won't repeat it out loud, but just keep repeating it silently to yourself. And I'll give an ohm to signal the end of the meditation. So another two minute mantra meditation on ohm. Shanthi so once again, establish your seat. Maybe take a deep breath. Make sure your posture is easy and tall. Your hands are relaxed, the eyes can close, or the gays can go to the floor. The jaw and your eyes can be soft and easy. If it helps, you can start out loud with me or you can repeat it silently.

Om shanthi

Keep repeating the mantra silently. Bring your awareness back to the mantra, letting all of your thoughts rest with the mantra .

Om

that's your little sample of mantra meditation. Very powerful. You can keep it with you at all times to create that vibration of peace and health for yourself. So my friends, if you want to keep your brain young, you want to keep your vibrancy in your ability to serve your community. Meditate. That's your homework. You know, I'm a teacher. I'm always going to give you homework. Your homework is to meditate. Maybe you do it two minutes every day, right? When you wake up in the morning, I know you can do two minutes, it's not hard and you will see a benefit even with just two minutes over time. Then it might develop to five if you need more guidance, though, you can use great apps like a highly recommend Headspace. It's a fantastic app that gives you guided meditations. It'll even take you through a meditation course.

You can hop on over to my website, gitabrown.com I've got meditations there and on my YouTube channel, or you can just Google it and you can find lots of free meditations, so avail yourself of those, right? Remember, you're not alone. People have been doing this for 4,000 years and they figured out a way to do it. You're not the first person to struggle carving out time. You're not the first person to resist meditating and a lot of days I have to kick myself to get doing it too. But everyone who does it has experienced the benefits and I know you can too. I know you can too. So stop the excuses. Set that timer, get your mantra meditation or your breath meditation going and enjoy the benefits. Next time I see you, I want to see that glow that comes from a clear mind and an open heart. So that's your homework. Get meditating my friends. Let's close with a little chance for peace. I'll do it three times and I'll give you the English translation afterwards.

Lokah samastah sukhino bhavantu

May the entire universe and you my friend, be filled with peace and joy, love and lights. Ohm. Shanti. Hey, if you liked this, please share it with your friends. Share the meditation. Love! Share, keeping your brain young. Let's all be healthy and vibrant well into our hundreds. Let's do it. Sign up over at my website for updates and insider tips. I only share with my newsletter peeps or drop me a little note on social, Instagram, Facebook, that type of thing. At GitaCBrown. I will see you in the meditation cloud, my friends Om Shanti, peace.