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Willoughby Britton

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107
first
2023-11-22
most recent
2023-11-22
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1
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podcast

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  1. “A couple years later, I was on a meditation retreat, and I mentioned the data that I had found, which is basically that it was causing cortical arousal and insomnia. And the meditation teacher sort of chastised me and said, I don't know why all you clinical psychologists are always trying to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows that if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping. And I was like”

    2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “The hypothesis was not at all what I expected. So we actually found that no matter how you measured arousal, cortical arousal, brain arousal, meditation was associated with increasing it, not decreasing it. So it was causing insomnia in people. And we looked at percentage of slow wave sleep that went down. We went and looked at how fast the brain waves were. Those went up. And the correlation was with the amount of practice was 0.8. So like no matter where you went, there it was. And this is my first confession is that I didn't publish the data. You know, I was like an evangelist for meditation because this is something that had really helped me and I really wanted to like use my science and my position as a scientist to promote this thing. And so I didn't publish the data. At some point when I was coming, I came to Brown to do my residence.”

    2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “And at the time, this is around 2000, there really wasn't great research. A lot of the meditation research was on self-reports. There wasn't a lot of brain data available. And so I was going to be one of the first people to record overnight sleep polysomnography. So this is brain-based sleep and prove that meditation was improving sleep. Because of course it was. I mean, it's relaxing, you know, et cetera. So that was my dissertation. And I spent like 200 nights watching people sleep. And at the end of the day,”

    2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “On sleep. I was working in a sleep lab, and sleep is illegal, altered state of consciousness, and it's linked with every type of possible health issue. And so if you want to study altered states of consciousness, it's a good one to study because it's not like psychedelics that get banned. Everyone does it. Happens every day.”

    2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And then I had this experience, and it kind of culminated in my graduate career looking at alter states of consciousness in a clinical psychology program at the University of Arizona, which happens to be at the time the only place in the world that had a consciousness studies center. So I was doing that. And actually, my sort of professional life I actually studied near-death experiences for my master's thesis and my own personal trauma and meditation practice was something I was doing on my personal time. It was not part of my scholarship. But I think at some point during graduate school, like those two lives were so divided that I needed to combine them just to be like an integrated human being. And so for my dissertation, I did a study on the effects of mindfulness training.”

    2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Practical way to manage all of the emotions that we're having. And it was great because it was allowing them to be there too. It wasn't suppressing them. Ironically, that particular book that he wrote, I only got about halfway through it because the whole second half I just could not relate to because it was like the spiritual roller coaster and like Kundalini Awakenings. And I was like, I don't know what that is. So I'll just put that down. Just take what you need, whatever. And then that came back fast forward 15 years. It was like, oh, right. That second half of that book, let me go back and read that. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So going into graduate school, I was also very, very interested in consciousness always and always interested in just what are we doing here? What's going on? What's looking out of my eyes and like just very curious. And so that was already happening.”

    2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “So I think, like many people, I had a life crisis that precipitated the need for something really different in my life. One of my childhood friends committed suicide when I was in college the summer between my junior and senior year. It was devastating and completely dysregulating to see a person just disappear from the world. It wasn't in my repertoire of possibilities that somebody could just not be there anymore. So I had, you know, probably diagnosable PTSD at that point. And I really didn't want to take medication. I was only 20. My dad sent me a path with heart by Jack Hornfield. That became my Bible for the next probably decade. And so for those of you who don't know Jack Hornfield's a very famous meditation teacher, and he's written many books in this particular one, like many of them, start off with just what the mind can do.”

    2023-11-22 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #705: Dr. Willoughby Britton — The Hidden Risks of Meditation, Overlaps with Psychedelic Risks, Harm Reduction Strategies, How to Choose a Retreat, Near-Death Experiences, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT