**Hack Your Brain: Meditation's Secret** - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

Okay, so let's talk about, like, meditation and this idea of mental strength. It's kind of wild, you know? Emotions are basically just something we evolved to help us predict how stuff's gonna affect us in the future. But, uh, in today's world, it feels like our emotional reactions are often, like, way overblown or even just totally wrong.

And that brings up the question: why is meditation so powerful? It's because our nervous system, that's the thing controlling everything, right? Well, it has these two parts: the autonomic nervous system, which runs automatically, and the somatic nervous system, which we can control. And there's a tiny bit of overlap, and that's where breathing comes in. We breathe without thinking, but we can also consciously control our breathing.

And that's key because a lot of meditation techniques focus on breathing. It's like a secret entrance into that autonomic nervous system. There are tons of examples in both medicine and spiritual texts of people who can really control their bodies on a deep level, controlling things that are normally just automatic.

And the power of our mind is huge, I mean seriously huge. Our forebrain sends signals to our hindbrain, which then manages and distributes resources throughout the body. So, how does that even work? What's so special about it? Well, you can actually influence that whole process just by breathing. Relaxed breathing tells your body that you're safe, which means your forebrain doesn't need as much energy. That extra energy can then go to your hindbrain, and it can redistribute those resources where they're needed most.

Now, this isn't saying that you can just think your way out of any disease, but you can redirect energy from worrying about the outside world to, like, your immune system. It’s all about boosting your body's natural abilities.

You know, I really recommend checking out this podcast episode with Tim Ferriss and Wim Hof. Wim Hof, that guy is, like, a miracle worker. They call him the "Ice Man," and he holds all these records for being in ice baths and swimming in icy water for insane amounts of time. He really inspired me, not just because he can do these superhuman physical things, but also because he's, like, a genuinely kind and optimistic person, which is pretty rare, right?

He's a big advocate for exposing yourself to cold, because he believes we've become way too disconnected from nature. We eat when we're hungry, we bundle up when we're cold, we're always trying to stay comfortable, and our bodies have forgotten what it feels like to be cold. But, you know, cold exposure is actually really important because it activates our immune system.

So, he suggests taking long, cold ice baths. Now, I grew up in India, so, yeah, ice baths, that's not exactly my thing. But Wim really inspired me, so I decided to try cold showers. And, you know, using his breathing technique, the Wim Hof Method, I actually managed to do it. It's all about doing these powerful breaths to get more oxygen into your blood and raise your core temperature. Then, once you've raised your core temperature, bam, you can handle the cold shower.

The first few times were pretty hilarious, I was all stiff and shivering, and I could only stand under the shower for a little bit, just trying to relax. But now, I've been doing this for months, and I can just crank the water all the way cold and step right in. I don't even give myself time to think about it. If I hear that little voice in my head saying, "Oh, the water's so cold!" I know that's exactly when I need to step in.

And it taught me this really important lesson: a lot of our suffering comes from avoidance. The pain of a cold shower mostly comes from creeping in and tiptoeing around the cold water. Once you're under it, it's really not that bad, it's just a little cold. What your body feels and what your mind imagines are totally different things. Acknowledge that you're cold, face it, deal with it, accept it, but don't suffer mentally. Two minutes in a cold shower isn't gonna kill you.

Doing this every morning is a great way to remind yourself of that lesson. And now I've completely cut out hot showers from my life. One less thing I need, you know?

So, let's move on to meditation. I think of meditation as a mental fast. You know, too much sugar can make you physically overweight, too much mental distraction can overload your brain.

Taking time to be alone, to really think about stuff, to journal, to meditate, that's how you work through all those unsolved problems and clear up that mental overload.

Do you even meditate? I feel like meditation's like dieting, everyone has their own way of doing it. Everyone says they're dieting, but not everyone really does it. And, honestly, not that many people meditate regularly. I've tried at least four different types of meditation.

The one that works best for me is called "choiceless awareness," or sometimes they call it "non-judgmental awareness." It's basically, when you're doing everyday stuff, preferably out in nature, not talking to anyone, you just practice accepting the present moment without judging anything. You don't think, "Oh, there's a homeless person, I should cross the street," or "That person's jogging and looks out of shape, I'm in better shape than they are.”

I noticed that whenever I saw someone with not much hair, my first thought was like, "Haha, look at that guy, he's losing his hair." Why did I need to feel good by making fun of someone else? Why did I need to feel like I had a good head of hair? The answer is that I'm also starting to lose my hair, and I'm worried I'll go bald. So, I was trying to feel better by comparing myself to people who are balder than me. I realized that, like, 90% of my thoughts are driven by fear, and the other 10% are probably driven by desire.

With choiceless awareness, you don't make decisions, you don't judge anything, you just accept everything. If you can do that for, like, 10 to 15 minutes while you're walking around, you can reach this state of real calm and gratitude. It works for me.

Another method is transcendental meditation, which is using mantras, repeating sounds in your head to kind of create a white noise that drowns out your thoughts. And then there's just being super aware of your thoughts. When you observe your thoughts, you realize that a lot of them are rooted in fear. And the moment you recognize the fear, it kind of loses its power. After a while, your mind just quiets down.

And when your mind quiets down, you start to notice all the things you usually take for granted. You start to think, "Wow, this place is so beautiful. I have clothes, that's amazing, and I can go to Starbucks whenever I want." You look around and see that everyone around you has this whole, vivid life going on in their heads.

In our daily lives, we're always talking to ourselves, lost in our own stories. This kind of awareness helps you to step outside of that. Even for just 10 minutes, it makes you realize that we're actually pretty high up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and life is actually pretty good, you know?

Here's a life hack: when you're lying in bed, try meditating. Either you'll get into a deep meditation, or you'll fall asleep. Either way, it's a win-win.

The fourth kind of meditation that I learned is just sitting there with your eyes closed for at least an hour every day. You just let everything happen, no fighting, no struggling. If thoughts come up, you just let them come up.

Throughout your life, you experience all kinds of stuff, good and bad, and most of it gets dealt with and resolved. But some things just stick with you. And over time, they pile up like vines, wrapping around you and holding you back.

All those unsolved pains, mistakes, fears, and desires become part of you, clinging to you like vines. They make you lose that childhood curiosity, that ability to be present, to enjoy things, that inner happiness.

So how do you get rid of these vines? That's where meditation comes in. When you meditate, you just sit there, not fighting your thoughts. And then, all that stuff starts swirling around in your head. It's like you're facing this huge inbox full of unread emails, going all the way back to your childhood. Issues pop up, one after another, and you have to deal with them.

You have no choice but to address them, and it doesn't even take any effort, you just have to observe. Now, you're an adult, those events are distant in time, you can see them with a bit more objectivity, and you can start to face them, to resolve them.

Slowly, you'll clear out so many of those deep-seated, unresolved issues. And eventually, all the issues will be resolved. And when you sit down to meditate, your brain will be in this "inbox zero" state. When you open your mental email and there's nothing there, it's an incredible feeling.

It's a state of happiness, of peace, of joy. Once you have it, you don't want to let it go. If you can just sit there with your eyes closed every morning and have an hour of that happiness, it's invaluable, it'll change your life.

I recommend meditating for an hour every morning, because less than that, you don't really get into that deep state. If you really want to try it, commit to it for 60 days, an hour a day, first thing in the morning. After about 60 days, you'll get tired of listening to yourself. You'll have worked through so many issues, or you'll just be sick of hearing your own thoughts, you'll see through the fears and the problems.

Meditation isn't hard. All you have to do is sit there and do nothing. Just sit down, close your eyes, and tell yourself, "I'm just going to rest for an hour. This is my hour away from the craziness, and I'm not going to do anything."

"If thoughts come up, let them come up. I'm not going to fight them, I'm not going to think about them further, I'm not going to accept them, and I'm not going to reject them. I'm just going to sit here for an hour with my eyes closed and do nothing." How hard is that? How can you not do nothing for an hour? Is it really that hard to give yourself an hour of rest?

Have you ever had that moment where you realize that you can actually control how you understand things? I think one of the big problems is that people don't realize they have that control over their own perceptions.

I think everyone knows it on some level. The appeal of drugs is kind of mental, right? People take drugs, alcohol, psychedelics, marijuana, because they're trying to control their mental state and their reactions. Some people drink to numb themselves, some people do drugs to escape, others use psychedelics to feel more connected to the present and to nature. So, there's a mental appeal.

In a way, society has these symptoms of addiction. People pursue thrills, flow states, orgasms, just to get out of their minds, to escape that voice in their head, that overactive sense of self.

My minimum goal is not to let that sense of self keep growing and intensifying as I get older. I want it to shrink, to soften, so that I can just be more present, accept nature and the world as it is, and appreciate everything like a kid.

And to do that, you have to realize that you can observe your mental state. Meditation doesn't magically give you superpowers to control your inner state, but it does make you aware of how out of control your mind actually is. Your mind is like a monkey, running around the room, screaming, throwing stuff, creating chaos. It's completely out of control, like a total maniac.

You have to see that maniac running wild, and you have to be bothered by it. You have to get tired of it, and that's when you can separate yourself from it. That separation is freedom. You realize, "I don't want to be that person, how did I get so out of control?" That realization brings you peace.

Insight meditation is like running your brain in "debug mode." Eventually, you realize that you're just a subroutine in a larger program.

I consciously pay close attention to my inner monologue, although I don't always succeed. If I use computer programming as an analogy, it’s like I try to run my brain in "debug mode" as much as possible. It's almost impossible to run in "debug mode" when you're talking to people or in a group because the brain has too much to process, but I can do it when I'm alone. Like, this morning I was brushing my teeth and I started imagining a podcast. I started imagining Shane asking me questions, imagining how I would answer them. Then suddenly I realized that I was just fantasizing and so I switched my brain to "debug mode," just watching the instructions flash by.

Then I thought, "Why am I fantasizing about future plans? Why can't I just stand here and focus on brushing my teeth?" I saw that my brain was racing toward the future, I saw that because of the self, I was imagining future scenarios. And I thought, "Do I even care if I embarrass myself? Who cares? I'm going to die anyway. Everything will go to zero, I won't remember any of this, so it's all meaningless."

Then I stopped thinking and went back to brushing my teeth. I started noticing how nice the toothbrush was, how good it felt. The next moment, I started thinking about something else. I had to audit my brain again, and ask, "Do I really need to solve this problem right now?"

Ninety-five percent of what your brain thinks about doesn't need to be dealt with immediately. Your brain is like a muscle, you need to rest it, keep it calm, and only engage it fully when a specific problem arises.

In this conversation, I can't run my brain in "debug mode." I need to be completely present in our conversation, give it one hundred percent of my attention, not be thinking about "Was I brushing my teeth correctly this morning?"

High attentional focus is an ability and it's correlated with the ability to be more relaxed, more present, happier, and of course, more effective.

High attention focus is like extracting yourself from a particular framework, so you still have your mind, but you're just seeing things from a different perspective, right?

Buddhists discuss awareness and self. I like to use the language of computers and geeks to analogize these Buddhist ideas. What they're really talking about is that you can think of the mind and consciousness as a multi-layered mechanism. At its core is a kernel-level operating system, on top of which run applications.

I'm really returning to the awareness level of my brain's operating system. At that level, I'm tranquil, peaceful, happy, content. I'm trying to maintain awareness mode, instead of activating my monkey mind because it's always scared and anxious. The monkey mind certainly has its value, but I only want to activate it when I need it. When I need to bring it on, I want to be able to focus on that. If that mind is running twenty-four hours a day, it's a waste of energy and my entire state is dominated by the monkey mind. I don't want to be in that state all the time. I want to be in other states as well.

And I want to add that whatever you pursue, whether it's spirituality, religion (including Buddhism), or anything else, eventually you will realize that you're not just your thoughts, you're not just your habits, you're not just your preferences, you're a level of awareness, you're also a body. In modern times, people are too disconnected from their bodies and not aware enough. We live too much in our internal monologues, which are generated by our brains. And those are shaped by society and our environment, since we were young.

Everyone has their own unique genetic cocktail. When you're a kid, your genetic cocktail reacts to the external environment and your brain records all of those experiences, both good and bad. After that, you use those memories to predict all future events and continually try to predict and change the future.

As you get older, you accumulate a huge mass of preferences. Those habitual reactions eventually become out-of-control freight trains that control your emotions. But emotions shouldn't be controlled by unconscious reactions, they should be controlled by our consciousness. We should study how to control our emotions. It's very empowering when a person can adjust their state at will. You can simply think "Now I want to be in a curious state" and actually enter that state. Or you can think, "I want to be in a state of grief right now, I'm grieving a person I loved and I want to give him my full sorrow. I really want to feel this. I don't want to be distracted by the computer programming problem I have to solve tomorrow."

The brain itself is just a muscle, it can be trained and regulated. But it’s outside of our control because of the arbitrary disruptions and random shaping of society. If you examine your brain with awareness and intention--which should be an ongoing, continual practice--you can analyze your thoughts, your emotions, your ideas, your reactions. Based on that self-analysis and self-understanding, you can reconfigure your system. You can rewrite your program according to your needs.

You know, meditation is basically shutting out the noise of society and actually listening to yourself.

Meditation "works" only when it’s done for its own sake.

Hiking is walking meditation.

Journaling is writing meditation.

Taking a shower is accidental meditation.

Sitting quietly is direct meditation.