Huberman Lab
Science-Based Meditation Tools to Improve Your Brain & Health | Dr. Richard Davidson
16 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What benefits can beginners expect from just five minutes of meditation daily?
We actually have really good data on this that at least for beginning meditators, 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 You can even see just with this amount of practice a reduction in IL-6. IL-6 is a pro-inflammatory cytokine.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Richie Davidson. Dr. Richie Davidson is a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He is a pioneer in the study of how meditation impacts the brain, both during meditations, but also how it changes your brain over time, what we refer to as neuroplasticity. Today we discuss the incredible health and neuroplasticity benefits that come from regular meditation, including very brief meditations of just five minutes per day.
Dr. Davidson also dispels many common myths about meditation. For example, contrary to what most people believe, The point of meditation is not to clear your mind or to feel inner peace during the meditation, but rather to observe your thoughts and any stress you might experience during the meditation.
And in doing so, it's kind of like the final hard repetitions of resistance exercise or the burn you might feel during cardio, which comes from lactate. In that sense, the stress you feel during meditation and your ability to observe it acts as a sort of lactate of the mind that in turn makes you adapt. It makes you more stress resilient, focused and peaceful outside of the meditation.
Dr. Davidson also explains how your brain changes during different types of meditation, such as open monitoring meditation or eyes open meditation, walking versus seated and standing meditations and more. I've been doing meditation over many years, but this conversation with Dr. Richie Davidson changed my daily routine.
Afterwards, I immediately started implementing a five minute per day meditation of the sort that Dr. Davidson describes specifically for stress resilience. And I have to say it's had a profound impact on my levels of mental clarity, focus and sleep and stress, just as he explains.
In fact, it's proved to be one of the most beneficial practices I've taken on, especially on days when I wake up with tons to do, a little bit stressed or a lot stressed, and if I didn't sleep quite as well as I would have liked.
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Chapter 2: How does Dr. Davidson define states of mind and traits?
I am a longtime fan of your research, of what you've built at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the books you've written. We'll talk about your new book. I didn't even know you had a new book. This wasn't a book tour invite. I had seen you give a seminar at Stanford, and I said, great, here's my opportunity to finally get you on the podcast.
But you really transformed the way that I think about not just meditation, but all states of mind. and how that relates to our individual traits and how those can change over time. Today we'll talk about concept and protocols. But I'm curious, how you think about states of mind generally. I think it's really important that we frame the discussion with this because we all know what sleep is.
Most people have heard that sleep has different components, REM sleep, et cetera. We know what it is to be awake, stressed versus calm, but how should we think about states of mind? And then once you tell us how you think about that, perhaps then we can better place this thing we call meditation into a particular bin.
So thank you first for having me, Andrew. And I just want to say I've been a long-term fan of yours, so I'm really happy to be here. In terms of states of mind, I think that at the outset, it's really important that we also remind listeners that there is a thing called traits too. And so we can't talk about states without also talking about traits. And we'll get to traits in a moment.
But I think with regard to states, we can think of them as organized patterns of activity in the brain that have corresponding organized mental activities. correlates, if you will, or subjective correlates. And there are certain states that occur with regularity that are part of our biological rhythms.
And so most human beings will have states of wakefulness, of deep sleep, and of REM sleep every day. and that is regulated by well-known kinds of biological rhythms. And there are other kinds of states that are sometimes described that are states during what we normally think of as waking, although I think honestly the concept of state is often used loosely without rigorous...
boundary criteria for what constitutes a state and how it might be distinguished from another state. There are certain states which, if they occur with regularity, will lead to a trait. They'll lead to a shift in the baseline for the next state. There was a paper I wrote many, many years ago with my dear friend and colleague, Daniel Goleman, who I wrote the book Altered Traits with.
And the origin of Altered Traits is really in a sentence that we wrote in a paper 20 years earlier where we said the after is the before for the next during. as the before for the next journey.
Let's drill into that for a second.
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Chapter 3: What are the different types of meditation discussed?
which is sort of chronically having a low threshold, you can think of a trait in certain cases as altering the threshold for the elicitation of a state. So a trait of irritability would be a trait where you have a lowered threshold for the elicitation of anger, for example.
Yeah, I love that example because... I know that many people will resonate with it because so much of what we see online nowadays is designed to capture our attention by engaging a negative affect, mild anger, frustration, or even outrage.
There's other content online too, of course, and this podcast is online after all, and many other sources of what I consider benevolent educational information. It is so true that what we experience in one portion of our day impacts how we are in the rest of our day. And perhaps the simplest correlate for all of it, for me anyway, is sleep.
If I sleep really well for three or four nights in a row, I wake up in a certain state that certainly makes my day go differently. And the inverse is also true if I don't sleep well. I feel like we have such great nomenclature and understanding of... brain activity and how that impacts emotionality for sleep.
We know that REM sleep-based dreams are very vivid, slow-wave sleep-based dreams are less vivid perhaps. We know the electrical activities associated with those different states of sleep. I'm aware of a lot less information about brain activities and clear definitions of waking states of mind. Do you mind if we talk about this for a little bit?
It's been a few years since I've heard about, and I don't think we've ever really talked on this podcast about alpha waves, beta waves, theta waves. Maybe you just educate us a bit on some of the waking brain states that we've all experienced, perhaps are in right now, but we just don't hear about that much anymore.
So yeah, we can talk about those oscillations of brain electrical activity and there are broad suggestions for what kind of state they may reflect. And I'll go through that, but it's also important to recognize that you can be showing alpha activity in one part of the brain and beta activity in another part of the brain simultaneously.
And so it's a bit coarse to talk about these as general characteristics, but there could be times when we see predominantly one oscillation or another, and so talking about generalized states in that context may be more reasonable. So with that as a caveat, let me say that in humans we see a broad range of frequencies that go from approximately 1 Hz, one cycle per second, to approximately 40 Hz.
And from roughly 1 to 4 Hz is delta activity that is typically not seen during waking, it's predominant during deep sleep. And there is data that suggests that the density of delta activity or slow wave activity during deep sleep is actually diagnostic of how restorative that sleep is, which is a whole separate set of issues and super cool.
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Chapter 4: How can meditation practices influence anxiety and stress levels?
Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $350. I saw a paper recently that described a, and forgive me if this was one of your papers, I don't think it was, described a pre-sleep meditation that one could do to significantly increase the amount of growth hormone that's released once one gets to sleep.
And I thought, and I thought this can't, and then I realized this makes total sense, right? I mean, it has to do with, I forget the sentence you wrote, but that how we exit one state impacts how we encounter the next one and perhaps even our trait within that next event of life.
So we'll definitely get back to this when we talk about protocols, because I think that people vastly underestimate the extent to which different let's call them meditations, for lack of a better word right now, how that can impact how we show up to work, how we show up to relating, how we show up even to sleep. And it's not just about being calm so you can fall asleep.
It turns out this meditation that was described boosts growth hormone in an incredible way without altering some of the other features of sleep.
I saw that paper too, it wasn't ours. But yeah, super interesting, I agree. Yeah, so just to continue with the brain oscillations, I talked about delta. The next faster brain rhythm is theta activity, which is roughly between 5 and 7 Hz. Theta activity is often seen during transition from wakefulness to sleep. And it's associated with these, as you were saying earlier, these liminal states.
It's also been associated with certain kinds of meditation. Alpha activity is roughly between 8 and 13 cycles per second or hertz. And it's often characterized as, quote, relaxed wakefulness. Beta activity is...
typically defined as roughly 13 to roughly 20 Hz, and it's associated with activation if there is a cognitive task that a person is engaged in, you will typically see increases in beta activity, particularly in the cortical regions that are engaged in those cognitive tasks. And then finally there's gamma activity. Gamma activity is especially interesting.
We see that in meditators, long-term meditators. Gamma activity has as its peak frequency roughly 40 Hz. It is seen in a number of contexts. One of them is during what some have called insight. And insight is where I think most viewers have had the experience of working on a problem and all of a sudden they just have an aha moment and things sort of gel, they congeal, they come together.
And there have been some clever experimental designs where investigators have created tasks that increase the likelihood of aha moments. They're sort of trivial in the experimental context, they're simple cognitive tasks where all of a sudden you just recognize the answer. It might be something like a crossword puzzle and you're trying to get a word to fit and suddenly you get the word.
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Chapter 5: What is Dr. Davidson's morning meditation routine?
You know, my practice has changed many times over the course of these years and very different traditions in which I've practiced.
What about time of day? Is it typically?
Morning. It's always been morning for me.
You get up, use the bathroom, have a drink of water and start or you go right into it?
No, I get up and I make myself these days a cup of strong black tea and I drink the tea, which takes maybe 15 minutes, and then I meditate.
Got it. Do you set a timer or a chime?
Yeah, I do set a timer and I meditate at various lengths, but my modal time sitting is about 45 minutes a day. Sometimes it's longer, sometimes it's shorter, but usually around 45 minutes a day. And maybe three or four days a week I do a really short practice at night, maybe five minutes before I go to sleep.
since everyone that takes on the five minute a day, 30 day meditation challenge will do it, once they reach 30 days, does it make sense to update that to a longer meditation or would you just suggest that people stay with that as long as possible?
What I would suggest is check in with yourself and see how you're feeling about it and how it's resonating with you. And if you feel like you can't really do much more, just stick with five minutes a day and keep doing that. The important thing is to stick with the daily practice.
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Chapter 6: How can beginners effectively start a meditation practice?
It's so interesting. I mean, I don't want to contort the message you're offering because it's a powerful one about bringing awareness to the things that we have to do anyway and allowing that to make us more effective and happier and more present. But there's also this... idea around disciplines and the word discipline is kind of heavy.
Nobody really likes it because we got disciplined or something. I used to pride myself on working longer hours than everyone. And as the years have gone on, I pride myself in just, I can, consistency is my superpower. I may not show up with the most intensity every time, although sometimes, but intensity kind of waxes and wanes.
There's something about just showing up anyway and just doing it anyway that is so powerful. And I sometimes wonder whether or not the mind is just, it's our foe until we embrace that piece. It's kind of a little bit of what you're saying.
Yeah. And I love the consistency theme and also the discipline. And yes, I think you're naming something real and important. And there's a delicate calculus that ranges between kind of letting go and discipline. And each person, I think, falls at a different point in this continuum. And what works for one person may not work for another.
You know, with regard to meditation, I always say that what's best for one person isn't necessarily what's best for others. And we have to discover what works for us. You know, what we do know is that in terms of meditation, that consistency is really important.
You know, I was never a particularly good athlete or bad athlete, but I've just been really consistent at exercise. And I mean, I play fewer sports these days than I did. But just continuing to show up allows you to be the person among your peers. Not that it's competitive where everyone else seems to have quit. And they're talking about how much this hurts and that hurts.
And you're like, and all you really had to do is just kind of keep going. And I sometimes think that the people that are max intensity and they, you know, it's like gold medal or bust, they're always the ones or often the ones that we don't hear from anymore. They're like gone.
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Chapter 7: What are the four key pillars of human flourishing?
Burnout. Yeah. So I love the examples of the Dalai Lama and, you know, the Michael Jordans of every domain. But I don't know. I mean, I'm more interested in being the person that at, 50, 60. I mean, you're in your mid-70s. You look incredible. You're super vital, cognitively sharp. You're in shape. You're excited about life. You're not afraid of death. Clearly, you're onto something.
And I doubt it's just the black tea. I'm guessing it's, to some extent, I mean, there you have all the other aspects of your life, but this consistency of meditation practices.
Yeah, no, I think it's been super important. I do think that the discipline that you're talking about is really important and it is part of it. But again, I think we need to find the right balance for each person and initially...
it's really important to have people invite them to taste this with the lowest possible friction so that they can really experience the benefit and then it can gradually progress and they can harness some discipline which eventually will be important.
I'd like to talk about online culture and social media just briefly, because I don't want to demonize it. I teach on social media. This will be aired on various online platforms and clips of it will appear on social media. But I have this sneaking suspicion that by going online, the mind starts to believe this thing that's not true, that
if we're not online, either posting or looking at what people post or both, that somehow will disappear. And it gets to this idea of the anxiety that one feels when you just go into your own mind and it's chaos in there for so many people. It's like it's chaos in here and then just learning to sit with that.
I think a lot of people go into the world because the chaos of the world can occupy their attention and then it's not about the chaos that's in them.
Exactly.
Again, I don't want to demonize online platforms because I use them, I educate on them, I learn from them, and I gain entertainment from them too. But I wonder whether or not the net effect of social media at the internet over the last, let's say, 10 to 15 years has been to trick the mind at an unconscious level into thinking that, If we're not on there, we're going to miss out.
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Chapter 8: How do psychedelics and meditation intersect in modern research?
One is stimulus captured attention. And the folks who design products online have been really good at capturing our attention. And our attention gets hijacked by that. And And it leads to the kind of inference that you're talking about which is that people feel that they may not exist unless they're online.
And I read some survey study that was done within the last year that reported that the average American opens their phone 152 times a day. I think most people would agree they don't need to open their phone 152 times a day. but we do it for those kinds of reasons. And I often say we are all part of a grand experiment for which none of us have provided our informed consent.
And I think it's serious and I think that we don't know what the long-term consequences are going to be but we do know that the short-term consequences at least in certain cases, are not very good. And I'm someone who is also like you, Andrew, a great believer in the potential value of technology.
And I believe that technology is basically neutral and we can use it for the good and we can also, it can be used for harm. But the previous Surgeon General of the United States, who I miss, Vivek Murthy, issued a health advisory in 2023 on social media. The title was Social Media and Youth Mental Health. And he has scary data that was reported in that report.
Some of the data show that the psychiatric problems in adolescents scale linearly with the hours of social media consumption per day. And so it is really eroding the mental health of our youth, not to say of our adults too.
Yeah, I think a lot of adults now are hitting those, hitting the black ice of internet usage. Like even among peers of ours, you know, professionals, I mean, it was wild to see how many people who were...
Chairs of departments, brilliant creators, academics, people from all domains of life demolished their careers by getting caught up in stuff online and not being thoughtful about what they were posting. You just go, I can't believe it. I mean, they threw away their professional lives with their thumbs. It was wild, right, if you think about it.
And this is happening less nowadays, but just people just nuking their careers that they had spent 20, 30 years building. These were very successful, very smart people, but somehow got caught up in it. We see that less, but I do see a lot of people getting into the whole polarization thing. thing to the point where there really is no common ground online. It's impossible.
You can't take a nuanced perspective on something. I try, you know, I said, oh, I thought the new food guidelines could afford to include a few more vegetable suggestions and some fermented foods and like immediately that The fact that I didn't completely attack it was I got attacked for that. But then I got attacked for the other side for not completely embracing it. So it's like you can't win.
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