Dr. Richard Davidson

Is there anything— Well, the kind of practice that I most often do is actually with eyes open.

Really?

So this is the protocol question, I guess.

You know, I would say it's really important to start modestly and we often will ask a person, what's the minimum amount of meditation that you think you can commit to every single day and do it for 30 days consistently?

Five minutes.

Perfect.

Whatever that number is, perfect.

Start with that.

And then the next question is, are you comfortable doing it formally as a seated practice or would you prefer to do it while you're walking or while you're doing another non-cognitively demanding activity?

It could be commuting.

It could be...

washing the dishes.

There are lots of those kind of activities that we often do on a daily basis that you can actually intentionally use your mind in this way while you're also doing those activities.

And by the way, we've shown, we actually have really good data on this, that at least for beginning meditators,

it doesn't matter if you're doing it as a formal meditation practice or as an active practice, the benefits are absolutely comparable.

So if you do it for 30 days and you do it just five minutes a day, you will see a significant reduction in symptoms of depression, symptoms of anxiety and symptoms of stress.

We've shown that repeatedly in randomized controlled trials.

You'll see an increase on measures of well-being or flourishing and we can talk about what those actually are.

You can even see just with this amount of practice a reduction in IL-6.

IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine that is important in systemic inflammation.