the same parts of your brain as taking psilocybin mushrooms.

On top of this, meditating has been shown

to lower depression, anxiety and stress,

and it increases confidence, your immune system,

and it also raises your levels of empathy.

Instead of me just telling you about successful people

who meditate, I'm going to just show you four clips

of four incredibly successful people in their chosen fields

who practice something called transcendental meditation,

which is just a form of meditating.

- I meditate every day.

I meditate every day, and it helps me,

it's like having an anchor.

If I don't do it,

I feel like I'm constantly chasing the day.

- I've been a TMer for about five years now

and it is one of the important tools

I've adopted in my own life.

- So everyone in my life meditates.

I am a big proponent of meditation

and for radio, I feel it added tremendous creativity

and having that morning and afternoon.

In fact, to this day, after I do the radio show,

my head is pounding so bad from the headphones

and the loud noise and five hours of headphones and talking.

I mean, it's exhausting.

I go and I meditate and I walk out

and I have the whole rest of my day.

- And you gave a great definition of what meditation was.

- Yeah, I said that it's like you have a cell phone

and then somebody gives you the charger

and you go, oh, now this thing,

I can get this thing up to a hundred any time I want.

- Yeah, fully juiced.

- Yeah, fully.

- The power of fully juiced.

- Yeah, yeah.

- [Narrator] So after watching that,

I think we can all agree

that meditating is at least a little bit helpful.

But what exactly does it do for us?

Because there are so many benefits to meditation,

I don't have time to go through all of them,

but I am going to go over my top five

personal favorite reasons to meditate.

The first main point is that meditation improves

learning, memory and self-awareness.

Long term practice of meditation increases

grey matter density in the areas of the brain

associated with self-awareness,

compassion and introspection.

Grey matter is made up of the cell bodies

of nerve cells.

So basically, the more grey matter you have

in a certain area of your brain,

the smarter you'll become in that certain area.

And in my opinion, self-awareness

is the number one most important trait

when it comes to being successful in business,

relationships, school, or really anything at all in life.

The second reason is that mindfulness meditation

decreases feelings of loneliness.

A study from the Carnegie Mellon University

indicates that mindfulness meditation training

is useful in decreasing feelings of loneliness

which in turn decreases the risk

of morbidity and mortality.

As I've said in the past, I believe a big reason

why people don't get into the right relationships

is because they're often looking for another person

to complete them.

But when you practice meditating and you decrease

that feeling of loneliness and you decrease

that incomplete feeling,

you're much more likely to find the right person

who will make you truly happy.

The third benefit of meditation is that it lengthens

your attention span, and I think today,

with all the distractions in our lives,

this is more important than ever.

To put it simply, if you do something called

focused-attention meditation,

you're basically training your attention span,

similar to how you would train your biceps in the gym.

If you do this on a regular basis,

you will be able to focus on a certain task

for much longer without getting distracted.

It does not have to be a lot of meditating.

In fact, a study has shown that if you practice

meditation for only four days,

this actually could be enough

to increase your attention span.

The fourth reason is that meditation helps fight addictions.

Now when I say the word addictions,

I don't necessarily mean big addictions

like being addicted to drugs or alcohol

but I'm also talking about small addictions

like constantly checking your Instagram,

constantly checking your Facebook messages

or even your emails

or simply just being addicted to your phone in general.

The mental discipline you can develop through meditation

may help you break dependencies

by increasing your self-control and awareness

of the triggers for addictive behaviors.

One study that taught 19 recovering alcoholics

how to meditate, found that participants

who received the training

got much better at controlling their cravings

and it lowered the stress associated with the cravings.

And again, this is linked to building

that grey matter density in the self-awareness

part of the brain.

The fifth main benefit of meditation

is that it reduces stress and anxiety in general.

A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison

indicates that the practice of open monitoring meditation,

which again, is just a very basic form of meditation

reduces the grey matter density

in the areas of the brain related with anxiety and stress.

Meditators were much more able to attend

moment to moment focus.

So all that means is if there was a problem

that entered the meditator's life,

it is much easier for them to move on

to the next thing and it's much easier for them

to address the problem.

While someone who doesn't practice meditation,

oftentimes, they get so hung up

on that one problem or issue,

it could ruin their whole day

and even ruin their week sometimes.

I can honestly say that meditation has changed my life

and I'm not trying to sell you anything.

I'm not trying to get you to download some app.

I am just sharing with you how much of a positive impact

meditation had on my life

and I really would encourage you to at least try it out.

And in the future, I'm going to make a video

on how exactly I meditate.

If you're interested in meditation after watching this,

I really would appreciate it if you shared the video

with a friend or even left the video a like.

And as always, thank you so much for watching this video

and I'll see you in the next one.

(mellow music)