The Shannon Harvey Podcast

If you're interested in learning how your brain works and how to use that knowledge to make healthy changes in your life, then this week's podcast is for you.

This episode is my extended interview with Dr. Judson Brewer, who is an Associate Professor and the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center at Brown University.

You might remember a scene in my film, My Year of Living Mindfully, where I call Jud via Skype to ask if my insomnia has improved because of the placebo effect or if mindfulness has really started "working".

As an addiction psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studies how we form unhealthy habits and routines, Jud is researching mindfulness-based techniques to help us change for good.

I know this sounds crazy but over the course of my latest project – My Year of Living MindfullyI spent more than $30,000 on scientific tests. A lot of people have asked me why I went to such lengths to get objective measures to see what, if anything, changed as a result of my daily mindfulness training. And my answer is simple. Because I believe that science matters. You can read a piece called Why I Stopped Looking for Miracles and Started Reading Scienceto get the full story on this, but in essence, it wasn’t until I was in my late 20s, after I’d been sick with an autoimmune disease for a number of years that I finally realised that I needed to apply the critical thinking skills that I’d learned as a journalist to my health. And when it came to my experiment to see if daily mindfulness training could really improve my health and wellbeing – I felt that objective, hard science was important. This week's podcast episode is my extended interview with science journalist, Daniel Goleman, whose 1995 best-selling book, Emotional Intelligencehelped make the science of emotions mainstream. More recently Dan co-authored a book called Altered Traitswith neuroscientist Professor Richard Davidson, who was in episode four of my podcast. The two friends met in their university days at Harvard and in the book, wanted to set the record straight on what we do and do notknow about mindfulness. As a fellow journalist who has dedicated his life to writing about psychological science, Dan was a great starting point as I began to navigate my way through the sometimes murky waters of mindfulness research. As you’ll hear throughout this interview, he also offers some helpful advice to people who are at just getting started with mindfulness training.

Usually I share interviews with scientists doing research that can shed light on how we can live better, healthier lives. But this week you'll hear from a different kind of expert – a mindfulness teacher who has made a big impact on my life.

Timothea Goddard led the eight week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course that I participated in during the production of my film My Year of Living Mindfully.

Tim (as she’s affectionately known to us Aussies) is a psychotherapist who has taught more than 2000 students and trained more than 200 new mindfulness teachers. But you might find what she has to say about mindfulness rather surprising.

In this episode you'll hear –

• Why trying to find bliss in the present moment is a myth (and a problem, especially if you have anxiety, depression, trauma or chronic pain)
• How the marketing hype about mindfulness often gets it very wrong
• That pretty much everyone finds mindfulness training difficult and boring
• Why learning to turn towards our painful emotions and experiences can be life changing
• And that life sux, but why we shouldn't take it personally

Tim offers mindfulness courses online and in person, and also runs retreats through her organisation Openground. She also runs rigorous mindfulness teacher certification courses through the Mindfulness Training Institute – Australia and New Zealand. If you’d like to know more about MBSR from the man who actually developed it, head to the very first episode of this podcast series and look for my interview with Jon Kabat Zinn.