Dawson: my wife just shook me awake at 1245 a. m. she said something's really wrong And so I dashed outside and saw this wildfire just sweeping down the valley toward our our home and we We just got out of there as quickly as our legs would carry us.
Chrissie: we solve for joy, we get there and then we try to stay, in a steady state with it. Even in the face of adverse circumstances. I think that Bliss Brain is such a vast contribution in the field of work contributing to solving for joy.
Dawson: Meditation gives you resilience and it gives you the perspective to make wise choices and meet those challenges life throws at you.
Chrissie: You're listening to Solving for Joy. I'm your host, Dr. Chrissie Ott.
Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Solving for Joy podcast. I am overjoyed to be joined today by Dr. Dawson Church. Dr. Dawson Church is a bestselling science writer and researcher. He has authored three award winning books that explore the intersection of neuroscience, healing, and personal growth, the genie in your genes, how emotions impact gene expression, mind to matter, how the brain constructs reality, And Bliss Brain, most recently, focusing on the neuroplasticity and its relationship to meditation and positive emotional states.
It was an absolute joy to read, and I'm really excited to connect with you and have this conversation. Dawson, welcome.
Dawson: Chrissy, I love your work, your emphasis, your focus. It's an absolute unqualified joy to be here.
Chrissie: Three cheers for joy. Um, Dawson, I often start this conversation looking for the synchronicities and how we found each other. Um, I was really pleased to get, uh, an email from your team. And as I began to learn more about you, I couldn't help, but just be in a little bit of awe and wonder about the synchronicity because without knowing that you start your book with. A chapter about post traumatic growth, following the devastating fire that you survived in 2017. I had just released a podcast about a devastating flood that I and my family, uh, were impacted by and rescued from in 2019 and talked about post traumatic growth in that episode, just before reading your chapter. Just a little bit magical.
Dawson: Life is full of those synchronicities and we look at them. And when I was writing my earlier book, Mind to Matter, I thought that when I wrote the chapter on synchronicity, I thought, oh, there's not much science behind this. I'll mention Carl Jung, throw a few pages about his synchronicity theories in there and leave it at that. And when I got deep into the Evidence behind it that became the longest chapter in the book, and there's tons of science showing how synchronicity works and the scientific evidence for it. So, absolutely, we live in a synchronous universe
Chrissie: that makes me very excited to go and read that chapter. Can you say a little bit more about what we could know about this synchronicity in the universe that we live in?
Dawson: I'll jump right to the end of that chapter, and there are small local synchronicities. And so, in the book, and in all my books actually, I talk about local mind. And everyone knows what local mind is. That's the thing that, um, is most associated with your brain, your physical brain. And we know we have a mind. We use it to solve certain problems. We use it to do various tasks in our lives. And then, there is Non local mind. And non local mind is that consciousness greater than oneself. And there's amazing research showing that, um, Our brains function as transducers of non local mind into local reality. And when we meditate, we are essentially, for a while, Shifting our focus from local reality and local mind and local consciousness into non local mind. And so you surrender, you connect with that. infinite presence greater than yourself. You of course experienced absolutely unspeakable floods of ecstatic joy when you surrender and do that. And so you then are letting go of the small self and then being one with that great consciousness that underlies the whole universe. But the way this shows up in the chapter in the book in science is really interesting and. The main research I talk about in that chapter in global terms, again, there are a lot of little mind, local mind synchronicities we can point to and find and look for and trace, but the one really remarkable piece of evidence near the end of the chapter is about the activity of the sun. And a historian called Russian historian called called Tchaikovsky began to notice this and chart this in the 1970s. And he went back 300 years and looked at sun spots because astronomers have been recording sunspots for roughly three centuries. So we know when there are these intense bursts of solar activity. And he then mapped it historically against historical events. And it turns out that there's a correlation between wars and major battles within wars and also major social upheavals and sunspot activity. When it's big, there are more of all of those dramatic human events than before. And then at the Princeton lab that, um, that Roger Wells used to run, they looked at the correlation between historical events and various other, uh, the probability of, uh, Of of those things happening and in human physiology, and they found a link again. And then in the very final part of the chapter, I have a graph. The graph shows solar activity, sunspots, solar activity for 30 days, and it goes up and it goes down. It's different every day. Right below it, there's a second line, and that is a line that shows heart rate variability in people who are highly centered, who are centered in their hearts, who are heart coherent. And Every day, month, for the whole month, the two lines are parallel. The solar activity and the individual human activity is in sync. And the point I make at the very end of the chapter, I say that, um, think about it, okay, when we are in tune, when we're in flow, when we're in that cosmic rhythm, we're in tune with these great cosmic cycles because the solar flares are in turn being affected by much larger galactic cycles.
So we're now in tune with with all of this cosmic energy flow and ebb. And as we are in tune with that, we're automatically in tune with every single other person on the planet is in tune with So you meet somebody And you feel a sense of synchronicity. You meet somebody and you feel as though you're one right away. I can tell you when I first began talking to you, which was just a few minutes ago, I felt that sense of connection. I felt a connection with everybody here. So, synchronicity is, is on that enormous scale and comes down to the very tiniest parts of our lives. And I'm going to mention one more story about tiny.
And that is that one day I was at the grocery store and I had my shopping list. I was buying stuff and a little intuitive nudge said, buy Kleenex. And I thought to myself, I don't think I need Kleenex. I'm thinking about, you know, I got a box of Kleenex in the bathroom. I got a box of Kleenex in the bedroom. I know I saw a third box of Kleenex in the guest room. And, um, so I don't need Kleenex. So no, I'm not going to buy Kleenex. So I ignored my little intuitive voice and when I got home, uh, walked into the bathroom and sure enough, there was Kleenex sticking out of the box. So I grabbed it and pulled it out. It was the last Kleenex. I walked into the bedroom, pulled out that Kleenex. It was the last Kleenex. Walked into this guest room. I don't have to tell you the end of the story. That was the last Kleenex in that box as well. Oh my goodness. He went down to these little tiny intuitive nudges. And what I said, I stood there, In, in, in the guest room, like screaming at heaven saying, you mean, God, you care about me so much. You care whether or not I live in my life. Oh, my goodness. And it, it does. I mean, we live in this universe of caring and synchronicity and, and love. And so, yep, it cares about you down to the smallest detail. Whether you're listening or not, though, that's a big variable.
Chrissie: That's lovely. That's right. Whether you respond or not is another thing altogether. Um, I remember the first time I heard the phrase non local mind, Dawson, and it was when I was doing a month long, uh, elective on campus at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, which is presumably right down the road from you. Five miles away from me, yep. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and. Again, speaking of synchronicity and overlap, um, one of our core instructors was Dr. Wayne Jonas, uh, and he may be somebody that you're acquainted with through the National Institute of Integrative Health as well. But such a small, such a small world. Um, we were introduced in this in person residential elective during our fourth year of medical school. We lived there on ions. Um, we, we like to jokingly call it hippie doctor camp, um, because it was about as non med school as you could be. It was really, you know, it was put on by the American Medical Student Association, humanistic medicine, um, branch. And. Co designed with these medical students who really recognize that they needed healing. They needed to understand concepts like the wounded healer and archetypes. They really needed to understand what it was like to live in community for a month and, um, it was. It was a very profound healing for those of us involved in Global One, as we called our first iteration, and in Heart, the iterations that came after and are still going on today, with the support of some of the very original faculty, which was really wonderful. So we were introduced to non local mind. Uh, we worked with Larry Dossi and others during that month. Um, and we're exposed to some pretty big concepts that once you have really deeply thought about them, it's hard to ever be the same. I think of it as a blue pill, red pill. Moment. Um, and it really opens my mind to concepts that are beyond the Cartesian plane. Um, thankfully, right. And, um, to what some would call WU, but I have made an acronym out of WU, which is wildly open to outcomes. And I am here for that.
Dawson: Can we make that training mandatory for every medical student?
Chrissie: Your lips to God's ears, right? I think it would be so wonderful. We are still in touch this, you know, 22 years later that group of people, I mean, we've really consolidated some pretty incredible relationships during that time. And I understand that you also studied at Baylor University, Baylor College of Medicine is where I studied medicine. Not exactly the same, but still an unusual amount of overlap here. Love it.
Dawson: Yeah, and that, uh, concepts like that really just change the whole way you think about the world, as you mentioned, and being aware of the distinction between local mind and non local mind, and then realizing that you can develop a relationship with non local mind, this whole branch of, of psychology called the relational spirituality, and, um, um, It got going in the 1990s with a series of amazing visionary studies of gene expression. And they found in these studies that when people have a relationship with something larger than themselves, that when that local mind has a relationship with non local minds, it's not just an abstract, uh, intellectual, uh, Comprehension that oh, there is as Larry Dawsey's book is called one mind, not just an intellectual understanding of that or affirmation of that, but an actual relationship with that, then that changes everything. everything, and it changes a whole slew of genes in your body. So relational spirituality is associated with massive epigenetic effects in your body. And so to live your life as a local Expression of non local reality is a complete game changer and things happen in local reality that, you know, some of them seem good, some of them seem bad, um, and yet you're aware it's just local reality and that there's a non local reality and that, um, when we meditate, When we tune to that non local reality, we're, we're letting go during that hour of meditation or half hour or even five minutes of meditation, however long it is, of this clinging and, um, the, in Sanskrit, they talk about this clinging we have to our local reality and our local illusion itself.
And, um, when we let go of that and we allow ourselves to dissolve into non local reality. First of all, we feel wonderful. It just, we realize we're one with the universe, and we're suddenly in harmony with the universe. We're in harmony with the world's solar patterns, and our lives become much easier. And they don't become perfect, and it's not like we have no more problems, but they become way, way, way easier. Yeah, and then we start to move into flow and flows that daily experience of connection as well. So this awareness and living life in sync with non local mind and aware of your local experience as a localized expression of non local mind is incredibly powerful. Ruby says you are not a drop of the ocean of consciousness. You are the ocean in a drop and we are. And, um, when you, you live this way, a ton of your anxiety goes away, a ton of your obsession with who you are. And, uh, that clinging to local self goes away.
Chrissie: The selfing circuit. I mean, I loved Loved the verb, selfing, I, I thought that was something that, uh, you know, dropped into my mind some period of time years ago, like, Oh, less selfing. And I heard you write about it and I was like, yes, it was like the theory of multiple discovery. I was like, yes, this is it. And you know, when you say game changer, when you live your life that way, lit up by the enlightenment circuit. And the happiness circuit, um, I would say the, the alternative to that, when you live only knowing. That there is local reality and local mind. It's a short changer, right? Then we get more activity in our selfing circuit and more suffering, more samsara, if you want to speak in the, you know, Tibetan Sanskrit, uh, version of suffering as a human being. Yeah,
Dawson: yeah, we get that. And it changes our brain. And so in people with that connection, the mid prefrontal cortex right in the center of the fart over here, just so you know, he pointed to the third eye location. So you can't see Dawson right now, but he just basically pointed to where we would imagine the third eye being. Yeah, just, you know, put your fingers for your eyebrows, go back an inch, and that's your mid prefrontal cortex. And in people in deep meditation and mystics, that part of the brain is very quiet. That's the part that does selfing, that constructs our sense of self. And when we're self absorbed, self obsessed, narcissistic, then that part of the brain is highly active. But in meditation, it goes dark. And in people with major depressive disorder, it's highly active. A new study came out actually this last week, saying that in depressed people, parts of the salience network double in size, get twice as large in the surface of the cortex, actually crowding out parts of the brain that normally are used for executive function.
And those, what's salient is, salient to the people with depression is self. They're highly self absorbed and they're also miserable as a result. So, um, there are all kinds of other Adverse brain changes that occur and that's the other big message of bliss brain is that when you are using these spiritual and psychological practices, you're literally triggering neurogenesis on a large scale in your brain and the brains of people who do this on a regular basis after a few months look very different from the brains of people who stay stuck in that selfing mode.
Chrissie: As an example, like my example, my lived experience of that Dawson, and I'd love to hear your lived experience of this too, is that during the flood of tropical storm Imelda that is referenced in this episode that I mentioned, um, I was. We were rescued in a, in a boat. There was a lot of drama and I was awake at two o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the morning, trying to problem solve for multiple people, multiple situations, and I knew that all I could do at that point was meditate. And my meditation practice during that time was very strong and very regular, and I know that my meditation practice gave me the flexibility to not collapse into, uh, the distress that was obviously part of the day, um, and part of the week, and part of the, you know, the relative reality was being served up was quite dramatic. And yet. That flexibility grounded me and made many more creative responses possible. Um, Was that similar to your experience of the fire?
Dawson: Yeah, after the fire, I mean, the fire was shattering because my wife just shook me awake at 12 45 a. m. and I was groggy and looking at the clock and thinking, wow, what's going on? And she said, something's really wrong. And so I dashed outside and saw this wildfire just sweeping down the valley toward our, our home. And we were We just got out of there as quickly as our legs would would carry us. We were half dressed. We're just clutching our cell phones, running for the car and driving at high speed down a very long driveway to get out. And then the trees began catching on fire, and it was just a crazy time. And again, it kicked off about a year, year and a half of real, really other adverse events, a big financial crash, a health crash. So it wasn't just the fire and losing our home and everything, our office, but it was also all those other other losses.
But when we got out, the next day I woke up, we were at a hotel at the coast, many miles away. And I said to my wife, it's an emergency. We need to meditate. right now. And when we did that, when we meditated, I felt myself literally drop into my body. And I realized I've been in a dissociative state, the same state that traumatized people go into where they leave their body and their psyche is somewhere hanging out in the ethers up there. Meditation allowed me to drop it. So it gives you resilience and it gives you the perspective to make wise choices and meet those challenges life throws at you.
Chrissie: Indeed, you wrote in Bliss Brain, um, there was a quote about saying yes to life in spite of everything, which I think is such a powerful turn of phrase and just resonated so deeply with me.
Dawson: Absolutely. And there are adversities in everyone's life. And even if you have the perfect life at some point, your body will grow old and die. Like, you know, we look at people in the blue zones and blue zone research is really interesting and what people do there. And I really recommend that you Pay attention to all the factors that support a great life. Obviously, I recommend EFT tapping. I recommend meditation. I recommend a spiritual practice, developing your spiritual intelligence. But, um, also, diet is foundational. Uh, exercise is vital. Both aerobic and anaerobic exercise. Social touch and contact. A study was published in the last week and it showed that people who just give themselves hugs have a big Really some oxytocin along with getting a hug from somebody else. Just a self hug is able to do that.
Chrissie: So, yes, let's let's do a self hug now, everyone. Absolutely, put your hands on your upper arms and just give yourself a nice big, we call it the butterfly hug in energy psychology and, uh, So, um, all of these things are powerful and, and, uh, really make a difference in our lives. So do those things as well. Get good medical care. Like I have a fantastic doctor as well as a wonderful set of alternative practitioners. I see. So use all of these things and pay attention to your spiritual life because if you get that right, suddenly everything else becomes easier. I agree with you. I've come to think of my meditation practice as spiritual hygiene. Um, and you know, I wouldn't skip brushing my teeth. Um, I'm not as regular with meditating as I am with brushing my teeth, sadly. Um, but I'm a human, right? So I have a waxing and waning relationship, but I do think of it as hygiene. And I know that I am in better shape when I am regular with a deep meditation practice.
Dawson: recent study. So I write about this in my book, spiritual intelligence, which isn't isn't out yet. It's gonna be a year before it comes out. But what I found in writing spiritual intelligence was I write a lot about brain growth and spiritual intelligence. neurogenesis. And one of the astonishing studies when it comes to meditation, and actually there have been several of them published in the last three years, is of Alzheimer's patients. And what happens in Alzheimer's, so your brain, the average human brain between the age of 40, and the age of 85, shrinks an average of 25%. You know, that's a lot of shrinkage. It shrinks about 5 percent a decade.
Chrissie: Yes, I'm familiar with that from looking at CT scans for, you know, patients admitted to the hospital and we're like, volume loss appropriate to age is a very common, um, observation in radiology reads.
Dawson: Yeah, those CT scans can tell you the biological age of that patient, independent of chronological age. People can be 60 years old, have a 70 year old brain or a 50 year old brain. And so in these Alzheimer's studies, the researchers were measuring the rate of both cognitive decline And brain shrinkage so that the average brain shrinks between 40 to 85, 25 percent. The Alzheimer's brain shrinks up to 70 percent. And in, in Spiritual Intelligence, my new book, I have an image in one of the chapters of Two postmortem brains of 65 year olds, one normal, one Alzheimer's. The Alzheimer's one looks like a little walnut rattling around in the skull. It's not very big. And that's what your brain looks like, but it shrinks that much.
And so, um, researchers in these Alzheimer's studies were looking at the slope of cognitive decline and tissue loss in the brains of Alzheimer's patients. And they put one group, The experimental group on meditation routine meditation practice a really rigorous one half an hour a day using a body based meditation And I kind of emphasize enough the value and the importance of body based meditation, mind based meditation does not have the same effects as body based meditation.
Chrissie: So like Reggie Ray's work, very somatic.
Dawson: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, you have to use, you have to engage the body. So, um, What they were thinking was that, well, we'll put them on the six month meditation routine, we'll give them a second MRI scan, and then we'll, we'll measure their brains, and maybe it's going to slow the rate of tissue loss. And they rolled out the results, aggregated them all into composite scan, and they found that it did not reduce the rate of tissue loss, it reversed the Tissue loss in Alzheimer's patients. So I know I talk way too fast when I slow down like this is really important. It's important to you for brain health is that the meditation practice as Alzheimer's does 60, uh, 30 minutes a day. Six months, literally their brains grew, the executive parts of their brain grew, and the emotion regulation parts of their brain grew, the learning and memory parts of their brains literally got bigger as a result of meditation.
Chrissie: That's awesome. That is so tremendous. Can you imagine a pharmaceutical promising that type of result and what we would pay for that? Um, and here it is free. And then also because it's free, sometimes undervalued and under, um, absorbed. So exciting. I would love to ask you about how you found EFT and how you moved from what might have been early skepticism to being such a proponent and popularizer of this technique and EFT for our listeners stands for emotional freedom technique. It's also known as the tapping solution in some circles. So tapping, um, I'd love to introduce our audience, uh, you know, to it and we'll add some resources in the show notes, but tell me a little bit about your story, finding it and accepting it.
Dawson: I was, uh, really into gestalt therapy in the nineties and I took a lot of training, gestalt therapy, and, um, I found that people made progress using it. And a Gestalt therapist said to me, like around 1999, 2000, I am having my clients tap on acupressure points, and they're getting better. And then I heard more therapists saying that later on. But this first therapist who told me about it, he, uh, he gave me a one minute video. piece of paper showing the acupressure points. And one day I was really stressed about something. So I tapped myself and my anxiety dropped 50%. Now I was like, Whoa, I mean, I know gestalt therapy is good, but I'd never experienced a 50 percent drop in anxiety in five minutes. And it happened just tapping on acupressure points. So now I've done this with literally 10s people.
Through our nonprofit veteran stress solution. We've done it free for over 20, 000 veterans with PTSD. We're doing it with people in Ukraine. We're doing with people in Palestine. We're doing it with people in various disaster zones in the world. And what it is, is for very, very quickly regulating negative emotion. And we have people think about the bad stuff. Think about, I mean, right now, just just before we began this recording, Chrissy, I got an email from a contact in Ukraine saying, here's what we want to work on with you during our zoom call next week, sirens. all the time. I live in the middle of Ukraine. I'm way, way away from the battlefield.
But these drones are reaching all the way to the other end of the country. And we're terrified even here, there's nowhere we're safe. So this list of things that that bothers them. So people think about that. When they think about that the middle of their brain, the emotional midbrain gets the limbic system gets highly active. And so on an EEG, You see this intense activation of the limbic brain when you are either under stress or remembering a stressful event. You then tap and apply EFT and it's like magic. Suddenly that limbic brain calms down because it's now getting two different signals. One is the signal of the stressor. I'm remembering the sirens and the second signal is from the body saying you're safe. because this feels soothing to tap on the exact pressure points. So people tap on the points, it sends a second signal into the brain that reassures the brain at a fundamental somatic body level, that everything's okay, right now you are not under a real threat right now. And that thought that memory of the sirens is not approximate threat to your survival. And so it breaks the association between the memory of the siren and going into full fledged final flight. And once you break that association one time and we do this with Rwanda genocide or orphans, we do this with with people who were veterans in Iraq or Afghanistan and it just When broken, when the association is broken one time, it stays broken, and now when they remember it later on, the limbic system does not light up.
It breaks the association once, our body is smart enough to remember that this memory is not a real threat to my survival. And that's the way EFT works very, very quick, very simple. I wrote the manual, um, many years ago. Um, it was developed by a clinical psychologist called Roger Callahan in the early 1980s, it's been around in the form of acupressure for thousands of years. So it's nothing new, but we're just rediscovering now that these ancient techniques like acupressure rapidly regulate negative emotion.
Chrissie: So is it kind of like, You are telling your brain, even though you have this memory of sympathetic, uh, stimulation, parasympathetic is here for you. It's kind of like, even though sympathetic, parasympathetic exists. Now, how does a person know for sure that they've done it right? Um, there are several tapping points. Um, there are different, you know, uh, verbal prompts to, to say internally to oneself. I wonder, um, if you could speak to the importance or is, is it essential to have that verbal prompt? Or are we not? I mean, is it possible to do it wrong? Tell me.
Dawson: Uh, it's, it's, it's hard to hurt yourself, um, tapping. So it's hard to do it wrong. Uh, we have a protocol called clinical EFT, which I helped develop around 2005, 2007. So all the studies, there are over 200 studies of EFT. They always use that same, um, protocol. And it's worth learning the protocol because we know clinical EFT works. I've been on YouTube and there are literally thousands of tapping videos, but they're often made by people who've just maybe, you know, watched another video or read a book or something. They haven't learned clinical EFT, so that the actual method as based in research is really powerful. There's a lot of variance on it. And we, we, we don't know about them because they aren't researched. But the researched version really works and works effectively and works quickly. And it's really easy. So you remember the event. It is good to throw in some verbal reinforcement of the event. And paradoxically, the verbal reinforcement is not reassuring.
And I've done this in front of medical conferences and psychology conferences. And the clinicians there are kind of horrified when I'm having people say, Okay, how much blood was there? And I'm asking them detailed questions. I'm having them talk about it. And now they're getting the going, you know, from a seven in terms of emotional triggering to a 10. Why would I be such a terrible clinician as to drive people higher into distress? It's because I want all those neural pathways lit up. That's a conditioned response. When they tap and calc condition them, their numbers plummet. And so now that veteran has remembered all the blood and gone down to a zero, broken the association between the memory and the stress response.
And that then stays broken. So a lot of our clinical EFT techniques, they're the opposite of positive psychology, they're highly negative psychology, we actually have people remember all the whole the worst stuff in their lives. But when you do it and tap, then you rapidly regulate and the body tends to remember. So yeah, it is useful to actually learn the routine, get the EFT mini manual, try it yourself. Do yourself practice. It is really simple. Only takes a few minutes to do. If you are dealing with traumatic stress or something that is a big life event, then don't try doing it yourself. Go on our website, find a trained therapist who can do it with you.
Chrissie: Yes. Do it with a professional support person. Absolutely.
Dawson: Yeah. Very intense trauma, complex PTSD, persistent life patterns. You want to have a professional there, but for the average small stuff we all face in life, Do it yourself. Tap yourself and you'll find it. And how you know it's working? Your numbers go down. Were you an 8 out of 10 with a memory before? What are you now? If you're working with a professional, a trained EFT, clinical EFT practitioner, they'll be asking you, what's your number? Is it going down? Is it going up? It often goes up. It's going up because now you aren't dissociating, you aren't out there, you're dropping back into your body, you're feeling the full horror of what happened to you.
And then you're tapping and often numbers go up, they may go down. And again, trained professionals can help you interpret all of this stuff. Eventually, though, your numbers are highly likely to go down. And then you just feel dramatically better. And when you think about it, then three months, six months, 12 months later, you still feel good in your body.
Chrissie: Thank you for that summary. That's so interesting. Um, I haven't delved deeply into EFT myself, uh, yet. I've known about it for a long time, but just haven't helped myself to a full Serving and, um, this is inspiring me before we press record. We were talking a little bit about EFT and suicidality. And with the fact that physician suicide and suicide among nurses and other health care professionals is higher than the general population in the United States. Physicians die by suicide at a rate of a little over 1 per day. And nurses are worse. We really are motivated to. to get tools into hands, uh, to help decrease this. So could you share just a little bit about what you have observed in the studies about suicidality among, um, veterans or other groups?
Dawson: So veterans also have very high rates of suicide and we have a program called the Veterans Stress Solution at StressSolution. org that gives free PTSD treatment to veterans. We've worked with over 20, 000 veterans over the last 15 years and we've also done several control trials of this population. And we find that as people do this, their levels of triggering go down. So it is used as an immediate intervention. Like for example, um, I'm now working with some groups in the army to help train active duty warriors to apply EFT themselves to, um, address the situations where they're in crisis, that they can at least have this tool of tapping and then also train, uh, professionals, medical professionals and mental health professionals to apply it as well in, in the field and also in the VA. So, um, it is, There have been several studies of suicide rates. There was one done in India. Among young adults have found that, um, when they took a population of people who had high levels of suicidal ideation. And again, in suicide research, um, there are different levels, like feeling suicidal generally is one level.
Deciding when and how and where, that's a higher level. And another study was done at a clinic. in Novato, California. And, uh, the researchers there, this is an addictions clinic where people addicted to fentanyl, opioids, to, um, various illicit drugs, street drugs, to, uh, alcohol, to binge eating. And, um, they found that, first of all, the research in EFT founds, finds that It dramatically reduces cravings for all of those things.
So cravings go way, way, way down. But on their suicidality measure of both inpatients and outpatients admitted to this rehab facility, there was an 83 percent reduction in suicidality, massive drops in anxiety, massive in depression, and very low relapse rates. So people hardly ever Go back into rehab off. They've been through a tapping program. So it is a remarkable tool for addressing even serious mental health issues.
Chrissie: That's incredibly profound and I also just want to acknowledge what a, um, what a grasp of the data in these studies you have at your disposal, because we have not planned this unscripted conversation and sharing some pretty specific numbers and locations and I, I enjoy that. Um, it looks like you do too.
Dawson: Oh, you know, I mean, all of this is just so much fun to participate in, to read and to share. So, I love, I love these, I mean, these numbers are stunning. They stand out to me. When I, Christy, when I got my first results back from the University of Arizona, which I was working with way back in 2004, 2005, and, um, of the very first EFE study I ever did, I got the results back from their research psychologist, and I just emailed it back and said, Uh, something's wrong with your data. I'm reading the spreadsheet. Depression, anxiety, they don't drop this fast. Uh, so, something's clearly wrong with these numbers. Ha ha ha ha. I didn't believe it. I mean, I didn't believe my own, the numbers from my own research. Now, when I was dealing with my very first cortisol study around 2007, I was waiting for data back from the lab to present at a medical conference.
And, um, the, the data wasn't forthcoming. So normally it takes like three or four days to get data, cortisol data back from a lab. And it had been a week, and I wasn't getting my data, and I had this deadline for this conference. And so, uh, a week went by, two weeks went by, I'm not getting anything from the lab, and I'm, they aren't returning my, my emails. So I eventually phoned the head of the lab and said, Look, I have a presentation to do, I need, where's my data? And the head of the lab said, Dr. Church, I'm very sorry, but, um, there is something anomalous about your samples. Uh, cortisol does not drop that fast in the human body, and we've been recalibrating our machinery and running the tests over and over and over again, trying to find out where the error is, and we can't find one. And, of course, there was no error. Cortisol In normal medicine doesn't drop that fast, but after tapping, it just plummets. So, um, you cannot write this stuff. Um, how long was the intervention in that study? One hour. And the drop in cortisol was 24 percent in an hour. Cortisol is very stable throughout the day. So, uh. He was looking at the time samples one hour apart, 24 percent drop. No way.
Chrissie: Talk about jump time. That is so exciting. Um, I would love to turn towards your, um, eco meditation technique. Eco meditation is Dawson's, um, like easy access kind of to a meditative, um, Practice and one of the things that keeps many people away from meditation are the, you know, beliefs are things that we've heard in culture about meditation, but I'm curious. Um, I'm curious for my own benefit, if you would talk us through the steps and maybe make a comment about what brain waves you see most actively. In those different steps, because I'd love to see those two next to each other.
Dawson: Yeah, it's really cool. So I developed eco meditation because, um, I had a hard time meditating and most, most people do. And then I was looking at research and there were all these like. techniques that were available. Mindfulness is a great technique by a feedback, near feedback, hard coherence, hard math, quick coherence technique from hard math, tapping, self hypnosis. Um, and so there are all these different styles. And one day I thought to myself, you know, it's kind of like being, being a little boy in an ice cream store and looking at, you know, 30 flavors.
Oh, and I guess this one or two thought, what if I be a rebel? What if I stack make a giant ice cream with tapping and then throwing self hypnosis, neurofeedback, biofeedback, heart coherence, mindfulness, let's put it all in a huge big stack and, and just gorge myself and all of them. And I found that God didn't strike me dead, breaking all the rules and doing them all at one time. In fact, I felt quite wonderful. I felt like, well, I'm really meditating now at a much deeper level. And it's easy because it's so easy to do with heart coherence technique. All you do to get heart coherent is you breathe six seconds in and six seconds out. That's all you do. Just do that. And automatically you're in heart coherence. Picture being of unconditional love.
Chrissie: Okay, quick question about heart coherence and 6 6. What are your thoughts about 6 6 versus You know 1 to 2 so inhale for a ratio of 1 and exhale for a ratio of twice that is that Also going to lead to heart coherence because I know that it's also a parasympathetic vagal tone technique in breath work
Dawson: Yeah, and there are tons of different breathing techniques. Also, the box breath, Andrew Wiles, very big advocate for which is breathing out, holding, breathing and holding. And it's often done in four or five, six, four, four seconds, five seconds, six seconds rhythm. There are, I mean, and in pranayama and yoga, there are, you know, Many different, different techniques.
Also, um, Jamie Beale and Stephen Cutler in the Flow Genome Project have, uh, a whole, like, set of practices for breathing. Uh, there's also, of course, Stan Graf's holotropic breathwork. There, there are so many things. Oh my goodness, we could go so deep into either, any of those, yes. So, so rather than getting lost in it all, I just say six seconds and six seconds out because it's something that people can do.
Also meditation studies, they, the researchers often use the length of in breath and out breath as a proxy for the depth of meditation. And so you may start out at six and six, but you're likely to move it to six and seven. 7 and 7, 8 9, and eventually some of the data is even at 20 and 20. And I find that naturally I tend to slow way down some days.
Chrissie: Yes, yes. Okay, so not problematic to go beyond the 6 and 6, but starting with slow, slowing down is the message. Okay, I'm sorry to take you off track. Thank you for sharing that.
Dawson: But I think six is you nail it for sure. And then more than that. And so what then tends to expand in our brains is initially is alpha waves. And so we have these fast waves of everyday consciousness beta waves, where our neurons are firing between 12 and 30 cycles per second. And so that's where our busy minds normally are. If we are anxious that a size of that wave gets bigger. And so we have more bigger beta waves. If we're anxious when we meditate, our beta wave starts to shrink and our alpha waves, which are between eight and 12 cycles a second, they start to get bigger.
And so that's the first thing that people When they're doing this form of meditation, stacking all these things on top of each other. And I named this eco meditation, ECO, eco meditation. And so it's just the stack of a few different techniques, and it takes five minutes to do them all. Doesn't take a long time to do that.
We then see this big expansion of alpha, then the ratio of Delta, our slow wave, which is the basic wave of sleep, deep sleep tends to get bigger. And also our theta wave, which is highly active in intuitives and highly active in healers. Our theta waves expand as our beta waves shrink, our normal wave shrink. And then in meditators as an expansion of gamma, and gamma is associated with creativity with new ideas. With a sense of satisfaction, with compassion, gathers the wave of compassion, altruism, gratitude, happiness, all these positive emotions are linked to to gamma creativity big time. So that that brain wave gets larger when we do that.
I have diagrams and all my books of what what happens to your brain waves when you go through this process. But you have this beautiful pattern off while we call the awakened mind pattern. And it's the pattern of Deep meditation and a flow state. So you get there and we can measure your awakened mind level when you're doing ego meditation.
Chrissie: I want to measure my awakened mind level. This is this is so fun to learn more about Dawson. Thank you for explaining that again in detail. I've been playing with a pulse electromagnetic field device, a portable one. Um, and it has settings related to different brainwave states. And I can tell you anecdotally that when I meditate with it set on the gamma wave function, I slip into that slipstream. So rapidly, and as we were talking about entrainment and synchronicities earlier, I wonder if somebody who knows about all of these things, um, has experience or just something to say about working with electromagnetic field, manipulating devices like that. I'm, I'm really just. Super curious and having some interesting experiences.
Dawson: Yeah. So I write about that in my, uh, early book called soul medicine, and I wrote it with my mentor, Norm Shealy, who's the founder of the American holistic medical association. And, um, Norm is just a walking encyclopedia. And he invented one of the early tens machines and tens and pens are. Two technologies that are widely used and have been shown to affect mood and also regulate the body in various ways. So, um, we have information on these devices there and they're, they're just getting better and better and better. Like I used to use the Muse headband and the Muse was good for that. There's also some great software you can get for the Muse and there are many other kinds of. gizmo out there that'll help you regulate your brainwaves.
I tend to focus personally, though, on what you can do yourself, how you can regulate yourself, just with your own breath without any kind of aid. That's also why, um, like there are people who are super into substances, I mean, plant medicine and things. And then there are people who are into gadgets. And then there are people into just what I can do with my own body.
I'm kind of a body guy. I don't really get into gadgets or, uh, or drugs or plant medicine. You know, I don't have research bandwidth to look into all of them. So I mentioned some of them in my books. Um, yes. But, uh, I, I want to kind of sit, sit down in meditation without anything at all and see how I can bring myself there in the way that, say, an early human being would have done 10, 20, 100, 000 years ago.
Chrissie: Yeah. Well, thank you for that. Um, one more question. So you talk about the default mode network in bliss brain and, um, describe it in this, uh, you know, mnemonic way, the DMN, the demon. Because you think of it as kind of the monkey mind, right? The, the, the busy beta wave driven version of things. Um, now I am reflecting and I, I don't have a source of the ready, but some resources that I have heard suggest that there is, um, some importance to spending. Even more time in default mode network instead of task driven mind. So I've thought, um, that maybe that's the boredom mind. That's the mind where maybe, maybe creative ideas may drop in. Maybe it's the mind of daydreaming. Um, and I felt like that was different in the way that you were looking at it. I'd love to somehow bring those ideas together or figure out if they're just different aspects.
Dawson: Yeah, it's both and. And so the default mode network is active when we're not doing a task. And it's a set of regions in the very center of the brain, center line of the brain, all the way from the front to the back. And it's quiet when we're actively doing stuff. So your You're building a spreadsheet, you're, uh, repotting your begonias, you're, um, petting your dog, you're, um, making dinner, you're doing activities, it's not, not active. And what activates it is when you do nothing, when you rest. And so, um, that, then your brain isn't doing a task. And so it soaks up all of the oxygen and nutrients that aren't being used by your body. a task. And that's what when it kicks on. So in high creatives, when you're in that state of not being engaged in a task when you're when you're not stressed, when you're when you're relaxed, in in high creatives, it tends to come on and then do interesting things like feed you creative ideas. But in most people, It feeds you misery.
It feeds you memories of the past. It feeds you fears of the future. It's rehearsing all of the bad stuff that happened in the past to make sure you don't repeat it in the future. It's the playground of the negativity bias. Absolutely, because when your ancestors were having that spare downtime 100, 000 years ago, the most positive adaptive thing their brains could possibly do was to review the threat that almost got me today, and how it might recur tomorrow.
So the brain defaults to negativity. And so we then reflect on that we regurgitate all of those old negative memories. And so the default mode network is highly active in depressed people. That mid prefrontal cortex is just buzzing with activity, hook up people with major depression to an EEG, you find a lot of activity in the default mode network, hook up a monk or a nun to an EEG.
And you find that it not only is it not just normal, it's just quiet, it's not active at all. So it tends to be really silent in people who are centered, who are meditators, and then it's really, really active. And the more anxious and depressed people are, the higher the activity of the default mode network.
So it's a wonderful resource if we aren't in the habit of using it for negative rumination. But for most people, one Harvard study gave people App on their cell phones, and they beat them at random intervals and said, What are you doing? And how happy are you right now?
Chrissie: Oh, yeah, that reminded me of the How We Feel app. Are you familiar with that app? It does that. It's like, what are you doing right now? What do you, I love that for checking.
Dawson: Yes. Yeah, this is a very early iteration of that. And what they found was that 46 percent of the time when people were relaxing, they were miserable. They weren't at work. They weren't, they had no stress in their lives and their brain went. Their default mode network went straight to negative rumination. So that's the way it is for most of us.
Chrissie: That is so powerful and so fascinating. And what does the brain do when we're doom scrolling Dawson? But is that the demon too? Are we default? Are we feeding the default mode network when we're scrolling on social media?
Dawson: Yes, it's an interesting phenomenon is that there's that stress level. And, um, what, what I do, these cortisol tests was so interesting, is I've done a bunch of them with people in, in really luxurious settings, like five star hotels, where there's a conference going on. And when you're in the middle of, you know, some paradisal setting with eight swimming pools and heated, you know, hot tub and all these, there's This wonderful food and, and you're, you're testing people at a conference and their cortisol level looks like they're being chased by T Rex in the jungle.
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. We're just addicted to our own stress levels. So you read one negative story, your cortisol goes high, that tells your body, Oh, well, I better look for the next stressor. And you look for the next story and you just keep on doing it endlessly.
Chrissie: Yeah. And it invests in more selfing, right? More selfing, more stress, more selfing, more self cherishing as, um, I love that you brought back the caveman brain we inherited because your line about our inheritance just kind of sparked my association. We can do more with our inheritance, right? Just like we would do more if we inherited land or property or, um, financial resources, right? What we receive is this brain. How we care for it is how it Blossoms, right? And, and this podcast is about solving for joy, um, and all the ways that we do it happily, or, you know, through mistakes and learning, learning what doesn't work. Um, so. I'm just so grateful to have had this conversation with you and talk about bliss brain and to ground these ideas in the science. to make them more accessible, especially to people who have, um, an initial sense of resistance to it. But I, I just loved the connections that, um, were made. And then that my brain was making in response to the connections that were made as I went through all of these chapters.
And I want to acknowledge the extended play idea where you have so many extra resources online for each chapter. People can go really deep. Um, have guided practices, have journal practices, so many rich resources. I can see that your heart of compassion is really about pushing this information out into the world so that it can have the greatest possible ripple of benefit.
Dawson: Yeah, I love, uh, that we have these networks inherent in our brains. In my new book, Spiritual Intelligence, I cover the four circuits of the Enlightenment network. Every single human being has this hardware. For most people, it's turned off by stress, but it's right there and it drives us into ecstasy if we just turn it on. So I have a passion for, uh, seeing people learn that and then learn the tools that it takes to turn it on. It's not that hard. Tapping in two minutes will take somebody from a high stress reaction into calm and then the ability to stay calm. Meditation will set up that habit of calm in their brain and their body.
And so we have these amazing new tools now that we didn't have. A friend of mine was saying the other day, he'd spent some time with his parents recently, and he said, they don't have tapping. They don't have meditation. They just suffer. And we just had a moment of like, just sadness for those parents that are just You know, previous generations didn't know the stuff.
Now we know it. It's so it's free. It's all over the web. I mean, eco meditation is so I mean, people are making their own tracks of it and their own voices, their own recordings of it. So it's all over the place and tapping there just we estimate 40 million people worldwide are tapping. So, um, it's Prevalent and we have all of these tools.
Now. There's no reason to live in that stressed caveman brain state We can turn on the Enlightenment Network and the level of joy Chrissy it's it's impossible to explain like those gamma Waves of happiness and gratitude and and compassion in some of these studies of meditators long term meditators They go up 25 fold It's not 25%, 25 x, the average amount of gamma people get in their their brains.
So these long-term meditators are in heights of ecstasy. You literally, I mean, there aren't even words in Engli in English to describe them. Sanskrit has a whole bunch of fun words like prea and vka and ananda just describe these states of, of, of ecstasy that we, westerners don't even know are there. So I'm so keen for people to.
Have the initial experience to try eco meditation to tap away their stress and to start to experience these states and then they reshape your brain for more of the same and after a while you're living such a remarkable life of happiness. You can't imagine anything else. So that's the birthright we have literally with these circuits in our brain and the the mission here is to inspire people, just turn them on,
Chrissie: just turn them on. Joy will be the result. It is our birthright. Um, you talk about positive state stability, which I think is a beautiful translation really of equanimity. Um, and that was another highlight for me just thinking, you know, yes, we solve for joy, we get there and then we try to stay, um, you know, in a steady state with it. Even in the face of those adverse circumstances that we talked about. So I think that Bliss Brain is such a vast contribution in the field of work contributing to solving for joy. And I'm, I'm just so honored to get to talk to you about it and share it with our listeners.
Dawson: It's been an absolute joy to connect with you and with everyone there. And, um, I feel we've, we've really made the case for moving into the inherent joy that is designed right into your brain.
Chrissie: Yes, perhaps for you for the 4 millionth time. Thank you for doing it with me. Thank you all for tuning in today spending time with myself and with Dawson Church, and we cannot wait to join you next week with a conversation that I will have with author, Becca Clarren and we will discuss her book, The Cost of Free Land, detailing her own family's narrative as homesteaders in South Dakota, benefiting from land grants from the recently claimed land of the Lakota. So, stay tuned for that. It's also a fantastic conversation. We're so grateful to have you here.
I want to take a moment to acknowledge my incredible team. Our music today is by Denys Kyshchuk,, cover photography by the talented Shelby Brakken. This podcast is produced by the amazing Kelsey Vaughn. Post production and more are handled by Alyssa Wilkes and my executive assistant, Rachel Osborne. A special shout out to my steadfast friend and director of operations, Denise Crain, and to the one and only loyal champion number one fan, Suzanne Sanchez. Thanks again for tuning in. May we continue caring for ourselves and others, and may we continue solving for joy.
