attention to my breath, they could try to force themselves to quit smoking. And the majority of them had tried this before and failed -- on average, six times.
Now, with mindfulness training, we dropped the bit about forcing and instead focused on being curious. In fact, we even told them to smoke. What? Yeah, we said, "Go ahead and smoke, just be really curious about what it's like when you do."
And what did they notice? Well here's an example from one of our smokers. She said, "Mindful smoking: smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, YUCK!" Now, she knew, cognitively that smoking was bad for her, that's why she joined our program. What she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit.
Now, she moved from knowledge to wisdom. She moved from knowing in her head that smoking was bad for her to knowing it in her bones, and the spell of smoking was broken. She started to become disenchanted with her behavior.
Now, the prefrontal cortex, that youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective, it understands on an intellectual level that we shouldn't smoke. And it tries its hardest to help us change our behavior, to help us stop smoking, to help us stop eating that second, that third, that fourth cookie. We call this cognitive control. We're using cognition to control our behavior.Unfortunately, this is also the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed out, which isn't that helpful.
Now, we can all relate to this in our own experience. We're much more likely to do things like yell at our spouse or kidswhen we're stressed out or tired, even though we know it's not going to be helpful. We just can't help ourselves.
When the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we fall back into our old habits, which is why this disenchantment is so important.Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand them at a deeper level -- to know it in our bones so we don't have to force ourselves to hold back or restrain ourselves from behavior. We're just less interested in doing it in the first place.
And this is what mindfulness is all about: Seeing really clearly what we get when we get caught up in our behaviors,becoming disenchanted on a visceral level and from this disenchanted stance, naturally letting go.
This isn't to say that, poof, magically we quit smoking. But over time, as we learn to see more and more clearly the results of our actions, we let go of old habits and form new ones.
The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what's actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment.This willingness to turn toward our experience rather than trying to make unpleasant cravings go away as quickly as possible. And this willingness to turn toward our experience is supported by curiosity, which is naturally rewarding.
What does curiosity feel like? It feels good. And what happens when we get curious? We start to notice that cravings are simply made up of body sensations -- oh, there's tightness, there's tension, there's restlessness -- and that these body sensations come and go. These are bite-size pieces of experiences that we can manage from moment to momentrather than getting clobbered by this huge, scary craving that we choke on.
In other words, when we get curious, we step out of our old, fear-based, reactive habit patterns, and we step into being. We become this inner scientist where we're eagerly awaiting that next data point.
Now, this might sound too simplistic to affect behavior. But in one study, we found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard therapy at helping people quit smoking.So it actually works.
And when we studied the brains of experienced meditators, we found that parts of a neural network of self-referential processing called the default mode network were at play. Now, one current hypothesis is that a region of this network, called the posterior cingulate cortex, is activated not necessarily by craving itself but when we get caught up in it, when we get sucked in, and it takes us for a ride.
In contrast, when we let go -- step out of the process just by being curiously aware of what's happening -- this same brain region quiets down.
Now we're testing app and online-based mindfulness training programs that target these core mechanisms and, ironically, use the same technology that's driving us to distraction to help us step out of our unhealthy habit patterns of smoking, of stress eating and other addictive behaviors.
Now, remember that bit about context-dependent memory?We can deliver these tools to peoples' fingertips in the contexts that matter most. So we can help them tap into their inherent capacity to be curiously aware right when that urge to smoke or stress eat or whatever arises.
So if you don't smoke or stress eat, maybe the next time you feel this urge to check your email when you're bored, or you're trying to distract yourself from work, or maybe to compulsively respond to that text message when you're driving, see if you can tap into this natural capacity, just be curiously aware of what's happening in your body and mind in that moment. It will just be another chance to perpetuate one of our endless and exhaustive habit loops ... or step out of it.
Instead of see text message, compulsively text back, feel a little bit better -- notice the urge, get curious, feel the joy of letting go and repeat.
The First Joke
by Melissa
Born from cultures we can only read about and making fun of customs we donβt always understand, many of the worldβs oldest jokes, to a modern audience, simply arenβt that funny. That said, humans being humans, with the oldest joke that has survived through today, it would appear little has changed in the interim- it, naturally, being a fart joke. To wit, recorded on a Sumerian tablet somewhere between 1900 and 2300 BC, the first known joke is as follow:
Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart on her husbandβs lap.
The second oldest documented joke moves away from potty humor in favor of a sex, recorded about 1600 BC on the Westcar Papyrus: βHow do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.β
The third oldest known joke was recorded on a Babylonian tablet dating to about 1500 BC and, given some of the context is missing, is interesting today mostly for its construction, being the oldest known βYoβ Mommaβ jokeβ¦ (We havenβt really changed all that much, have we?):
β¦of your mother is by the one who has intercourse with her. What/who is it?
*No answer*
From this point, occasional surviving jokes pop up here and there, and even references to no longer surviving joke books. The first known of these is a collection of jokes from a social club in Athens that was reportedly compiled at the request of Philip the Great of Macedon (382β336 BC), but unfortunately has been lost to history. Several hundred years later (and a few more known references to lost joke books
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