The Mindfulness Movement

Our lives are filled with distractions.

Email, Twitter, texting.

We're constantly connected to technology,

rarely alone with just our thoughts.

Which is probably why there's a growing movement in America

to train people to get around the stresses of daily life.

It's a practice called mindfulness.

I believe that the entry point

for living a more conscious life is mindfulness.

I would urge you all

to start practicing mindfulness right away.

What is your favorite thing about racing?

I think the mindfulness of it

is what I really enjoy the most

because you really have to be focused on the here

and the now.

When this year's top buzzwords are compiled,

mindfulness will surely be close to the top of the list.

So Angie, in the video you talked a little bit

about mindfulness, so could you tell us a little bit more

about what it is and how it works?

And what we're talking about

is called mindfulness meditation and people who do it

believe that it makes their brains healthier and fitter.

I grew up in Alaska.

My mom left when I was eight

and my dad took over raising my brothers and I.

We moved to the homestead where my dad had been raised.

He was raised in an abusive household and went to Vietnam.

Picked up some more trauma.

He began drinking to try and medicate his anxiety

and it didn't go well for him.

He became abusive and I ended up moving out at 15.

I knew when I moved out at 15

that statistically I should end up repeating the cycle.

As much as we get a genetic inheritance,

we get an emotional inheritance.

If you look at my family's emotional inheritance,

it leads to substance abuse or alcoholism or physical abuse.

I didn't want that to be me.

I wanted to avoid being a statistic.

After I graduated high school,

I ended up in San Diego where my mom was.

I went to take care of her.

I was working in a computer warehouse.

My boss took me aside to have a talk with me

and I realized he was propositioning me

and I turned him down.

When I wouldn't have sex with him,

he wouldn't give me my paycheck.

I wasn't able to make rent

and so my mom and I began living in our cars.

My car ended up getting stolen

and I ended up being homeless for a year.

I was having panic attacks and stealing.

I wasn't doing well.

Somewhere between the age of 15,

when I said I would never be a statistic, to 18,

three short years later, I was a statistic,

I was homeless and gonna end up in jail or dead.

I quit believing in myself.

So I had to get very, very serious about my thoughts.

Two-three-four, what is your position?

Be aware of two IEDs

near a house on the main road.

The combat mission may technically be over,

but for anyone who thinks the danger is over,

consider that there have been 560 IED explosions in Iraq

in just the past month.

I had spent a lot of time after 9/11 in war zones.

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq.

Many times in Iraq.

Do you feel like the war is over?

We're combat troops, we're still here,

we've still got a job to do.

I had come home and gotten depressed.

I was insufficiently self-aware to even know

that I was depressed and I made the very dumb decision

to self-medicate with recreational drugs

including cocaine, ecstasy.

Even though I hadn't been doing drugs every day

or anything like that,

it was enough to artificially raise the level of adrenaline

in my brain to change my brain chemistry

and made it much more likely for me to have a panic attack.

Now one of the world's most commonly prescribed medications

may be providing a big bonus.

Researchers report people

who take cholesterol lowering drugs called statins

for at least five years

may also lower their risk for cancer.

When I was anchoring the news updates

on Good Morning America,

that's the person who comes on at the top of the hour

and delivers the headlines,

and just a few seconds into my spiel

I just lost it.

But it's too early to prescribe statins slowly

for cancer production.

My heart was racing, my lungs seized up,

my palms were sweating, my mind was racing.

I actually just couldn't breathe, I couldn't speak anymore.

So I had to quit right in the middle

and that was really embarrassing.

That does it for news.

We're gonna go back now to Robin and Charlie.

The backstory was even more embarrassing

because when I went to see a doctor about it

he asked me a bunch of questions.

One of the questions was, "Do you do drugs?"

And I said, "Yeah, I do."

And he leaned back in the chair and gave me this look

that communicated the following sentiment:

"Okay asshole, mystery solved."

I loved to run.

Whether it was cross country, playing basketball, jumping,

and just be engaged physically.

There's something magical about that.

There's something magical while being in flow

where things are just happening

and it's like you're not there

but you're right in it, you are it.

So when I was in college I was actually rooming

with Dr. J at the time, Julius Erving, back at UMass.

It was preseason, just playing with the team,

and I got injured.

I had an ankle injury and it pretty much ended my career.

I didn't really know who I was

if I wasn't playing basketball

because I was one of these quiet types

that let my game do my talking for me.

Being an athlete all my life and loving to run

and loving to compete and having the camaraderie

of being with a group of people that had a common purpose,

that was very challenging for me

to get away from all of that.

And that's when I started the pain medicine.

I started abusing that

and then getting into drugs and alcohol.

My parents split up when I was four.

My mother died when I was nine.

I lived with my father's parents after that,

whom I hardly knew.

My father came back briefly.

I hadn't seen him since I was four and by now I'm like 11

and he was like a different person.

Took an overdose of sleeping pills.

He didn't die but he spent the rest of his life

in some mental health facility or another.

I'd lived in five different family configurations

and every one of them had been switched

because of trauma or loss or something like that.

And so I was terribly unhappy and afraid and angry

but I didn't quite know what was going on within me

I just knew it didn't feel really good.

The pace of life seems to be accelerating.

We've got a major accident H-1 east side.

It's actually the most polluted city in America.

We're more connected to information

but less connected to each other.

In these increasingly uncertain times,

a growing number of people have discovered

a surprisingly effective antidote.

Mindfulness.

Mindfulness comes in two forms.

One is a specific type of meditation,

mindfulness meditation.

Every time you put your mind on your breath

and then it wanders, that's what the mind does,

and you notice it wander and then you bring it back,

you're strengthening the neural circuitry

for paying attention.

This is quite a parallel with going to the gym

and lifting weights.

Every time you lift that weight, every repetition,

strengthens that muscle just a little bit more.

Among novice practitioners,

we saw changes in the brain

after just two weeks of practice.

This was a kind of proof of concept study

that underscored how quickly these changes can arise.

Strengthening that mental muscle

builds an ongoing quality of attention

simply known as mindfulness.

The way I define mindfulness is paying attention

to our present moment experiences with openness

and curiosity and a willingness to be with what is.

So it's a quality of attention

that we can have at any moment

whether we're walking down the street or talking to a friend

or eating or brushing our teeth.

We can bring that quality of awareness to our experience.

We just start making better decisions for ourselves.

In other words, we start taking better care of ourselves,

we feel better about ourselves,

we generally feel better about other people.

We just become more relational, more empathic.

So I think that's all good.

When you're aware of a sensory experience

while you're having it without the compulsive activity