Zindel Segal

Sure.

A lot of my interest in working with mindfulness meditation to help people dealing with depression found its way into neuroimaging because at that time there was a compelling story of antidepressants changing the brain.

and serotonin deficiencies being a kind of ironclad argument for antidepressants.

And the idea that somehow meditation could also help people was bolstered by the fact that the neuroimaging findings showed that people who practiced mindfulness, people who practiced meditation,

also had changes in brain regions that were important in affect emotion regulation.

I didn't have the expertise to conduct those kinds of studies, but I was able to connect with a colleague at the University of Toronto.

Adam Anderson and his star graduate student happened to be Norman Farb.

I'd say it's an efficient place.

I'd say it's a very self-focused place.

And I think that if we ever need to step out of those habits, it becomes very hard because we've relied on them, and very often we have very few opportunities

ways of thinking differently outside of habit.

That's a huge focus in our book, which is to suggest that there are ways of stepping out of habit that are actually quite close at hand, but it's almost like a failure of imagination to be able to conceive them in the moments when we need them.

Yeah, I mean, automatic pilot, all of these terms are very familiar to us because they've been used to help us understand how we can do a lot of things and not have to devote much attention to them.

But when those things that we're doing roll into problem-solving emotional situations or complex interpersonal relationships,

Habits themselves may not serve us any longer if we need to look at different options or consider other ways of responding that are different from ways that we've responded in the past.

And I think that that's really where it starts to break down.

In those moments, what do we reach for?

Usually it's other habits.

There are other things we can do, but those are the first things that pop into our minds.

Yeah, languishing is a term that actually was popularized during the COVID epidemic to suggest the state in which people are just getting by, not a lot of satisfaction, not a lot of engagement with what they're doing, but surviving difficult circumstances, and often by retreating, avoiding, and living lives of sort of quiet desperation.