Meditation: My Key to Peace, with Andy Puddicombe

Headspace Studio. (soft music) Hi, it's Andy here and welcome to Radio Headspace into Wednesday morning. So, today, I talk a little bit about the science of meditation, of mindfulness, but more particularly of aggression. Well, you can look it at the flip side, of compassion. We do a lot of science. At Headspace, we have over 70 clinical trials and already 25 of those are finished. They're published and you can read about them on the website. But there was one in particular, a few years back that caught my eye and I think it's interesting 'cause it's about our sort of impulsivity. It's about our reactivity and ultimately about our aggression. And we might think aggression, we might think about that only in a sort of a physical context or maybe sort of a verbal context. But actually there are many ways that conflict can arise in the mind and many ways that it can be expressed in our life. Anyway, in wanting to understand how meditation, how headspace could impact people's levels of reactivity of aggression and by consequence, how that would impact their empathy and compassion, there was a particular study that was set up. Maybe I think there were about 50 people involved, maybe a few less. So, this group of 50 or so people were divided into two groups. Now, one group, the control group, were given some other sort of exercises to do for three weeks. And the other group was given meditations, some headspace to do for three weeks. And the idea was to see how it would impact this sense of reactivity and aggression. Now, over the three weeks, they were also asked to come up with their life goals and how they would deliver that in two minutes. And at the end of the three weeks, they had to go into the laboratory and they had two minutes to deliver kind of what they thought was important in life and where they were gonna go in life. And they had to deliver this to an individual sat in front of them. Now, this individual, unbeknown to them was an actor or actress, and at the end of the two minutes, the actor actress had been prepped to say, "Eh, I'm not that impressed" or "I don't really like it." The usual sort of feedback that, yeah, ordinarily most of us would find very uncomfortable. We might find ourselves responding to with a sense of negativity, perhaps even sort of mild aggression. So, anyway, this went by. And after this, the participant was then asked to prepare a small cocktail on a teaspoon. They were given three ingredients. I think it was lemonade powder, there was chocolate syrup, and there was hot chili sauce. They were asked to use as much or as little as they wanted of each. Now, this may sound strange, but actually hot sauce, this hot chili sauce is actually used as a proxy for aggression in...