#15 Buffering the Negative Effects of Chronic Stress with Meditation

Hello, my fellow mindful, loving, and compassionate listeners. In this episode, I'm gonna talk a little bit about an area that I am not an expert in, but I would like to incorporate more of in my life. And that is buffering the effects of stress with meditation. I've spent much of my efforts focusing on eating a good diet, getting micronutrients and fiber, trying to get plenty of exercise and good sleep, all in attempt to improve both my physical and mental performance, as well as extend my healthspan, which is the youthful part of life. where we are physically and mentally fit. The one part of my life that I have spent less time trying to improve is buffering the effects of chronic stress.

While I'm currently not an expert on meditation, I can speak to some of the literature surrounding it. I have practiced it a little bit and noticed some of its benefits, but please be aware that by listening to this podcast, you're also a part of my own self-development journey. Part of the reason I wanted to do this podcast actually is to convince myself to meditate more. In this podcast, I discuss some of the mechanisms by which chronic stress affect the brain and brain aging, the gut and inflammation, the immune system and telomeres, and how meditation can buffer the effects, the negative effects of stress and improve cognitive performance and brain aging, as well as biological aging in general.

But before we get started, my newsletter is where you can find my written articles, So if you would like to learn more about any of the topics I discuss in any of my videos and podcasts, my newsletter is the place for you. You can sign up at foundmyfitness.com. If you'd like to get notes on this specific podcast, you can go to foundmyfitness.com/meditation-report. Once again, that's foundmyfitness.com/meditation-report. Lastly, if you're listening to this, it's because this episode and all of my podcast episodes are sponsored by generous people much like yourself. For that reason, if you haven't already, I'd like to encourage you to kick a few bucks per month in the coffer so I can afford things like, well, keeping the lights on and the occasional production help.

This stuff takes a lot of time, and even a few bucks per month from enough people can make a really big difference. To help me keep beaming out great information for free to the masses, head over to foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor. That's foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor. Crowdsponsor. Okay, let's embark on this journey by trying to be healthier and happier together, shall we? All right, let's get things going. Stress can be good or it can be bad. Stress that is beneficial called eustress and stress that is not beneficial but is negative is called distress. I've talked a lot about the hormetic benefits of beneficial stress like exercise, heat stress from things like using the sauna, cold stress from things like ice baths, cryotherapy, plant polyphenols found in green tea, turmeric.

And the reason they're beneficial is because they activate the body's stress response mechanisms. Even some forms of psychological stress can be beneficial. For example, if you push yourself a little beyond what is comfortable, whether you're trying to reach a goal or work on a project, this type of challenge can be beneficial as long as it does not cause overwhelming anxiety. The way in which the individual deals with the psychological stress depends on a variety of coping mechanisms. And those coping mechanisms also depend on a variety of other factors, including genetics.

But when stress becomes so overwhelming that rumination occurs, so you start to worry about past experiences that have occurred, or you begin to worry about future things that have not occurred yet, but you're planning This can cause anxiety and ultimately depression. So, it's this rumination on either the past or the future that is a major part of, and is considered to be chronic stress. I know personally, I experience rumination in the form of worrying about project goals, things in the future. I have a lot of eustress, so I push myself beyond— Mm-hmm. My comfort zone. I'm constantly working on many different projects, and it's a good thing. I challenge myself, I learn a lot. But there have been periods of my life when I take on too much, and this, you know, it turns into anxiety.

And that's when I begin to ruminate, and it's just not a good thing. It's actually been shown that rumination is associated with very high levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Wow. Chronic stress is really, it's like a potent drug that perturbs and changes many biological processes in the body. It has a profound effect on the brain, the gut, the immune system, and on hormones. Many of us are on high doses of it for prolonged periods of time. And the dangerous thing is, is that we don't really know that we're taking a daily dose of it. Right. Mostly because it's invisible. So one of the major stress hormones that mediates many of the negative effects of stress is called corticotropin-releasing hormone.

And it is one of the key mediators of stress response, whether we're talking about social stress or we're talking about work-related stress, fear, Or, you know, the stress even associated with giving a public speech. So corticotropin-releasing hormone is released by the hypothalamus region of the brain, and it has a direct effect on many different tissues in the body. So stress-related release of corticotropin-releasing hormone has a direct effect on the brain. It has been shown to increase the production of amyloid beta plaques which aggregate and form these plaques outside of neurons and glial cells in the brain.

Glial cells are supporting cells for the neurons, and so these plaques, the, the aggregation of these amyloid beta outside the neurons, disrupts and breaks synapses that form between neurons, which is how neurons communicate with each other. And the main function of a neuron is actually to form a connection, which is a synapse, with another neuron. So when this is disrupted, the neurons lose their purpose, and when they lose their purpose, they die. They undergo cell death. So these amyloid beta plaques lead to neuronal cell death. They also disrupt energy metabolism in neurons and in glial cells, leading to production of reactive oxygen species, which lead to more amyloid beta plaque production in this whole vicious cycle. All right. So I've digressed enough on amyloid beta.

There are many different ways in which stress affects the brain, which I will not talk about today. Stress also has a profound impact on the gut. The gut is actually the major source of inflammation in the body. In a previous episode, I spoke with Justin and Erica Sonnenburg about how diet impacts the gut microbiome. and what effect this has on the immune cells, which the gut is the largest host of, and on inflammation. So diet is not the only factor that affects inflammation in the gut. Stress does as well. I know that I have experienced gut issues during periods of stress, and most notably when I first started graduate school. It was a very intense period of time in my life, very high stress.

I was in an I was in a new city, it was a new culture, and I was alone, and I was taking on a huge workload. So stress has been shown to increase the permeability of the gut, and one of the mechanisms by which this occurs is through, once again, the release of corticotropin-releasing hormone, which makes its way into the gut Perhaps through the vagal nerve, the direct line between the gut and the brain. There are specialized immune cells present in the gut called mast cells, which have receptors for corticotropin-releasing hormone on them. So once that hormone is released and it makes its way into the gut, it binds to the receptors on these immune cells, on these mast cells, and it immediately activates them. And as soon as they become activated, it's wartime.

I mean, it literally starts a war. These activated immune cells start firing chemical warfare. They release pro-inflammatory cytokines like tumor necrosis factor, like TNF-alpha. They release things called proteases, which chew up and degrade some of the proteins that hold the gut epithelium together. Literally just causes intestinal permeability. So, you know, this is also known, you know, in the, in the pop culture as leaky gut. But when this intestinal permeability occurs, this allows bacteria that, you know, the microbiome, these bacteria that are in your gut, and also bacterial antigens to cross, cross the epithelial barrier and to activate more immune cells. So then more immune cells become active, and this causes more inflammation, more release of these pro-inflammatory molecules.

Inflammatory things cross over the blood-brain barrier; they cause neuroinflammation. You get the point. This is just one way that stress can trigger or exacerbate intestinal symptoms and inflammation. Inflammation has been identified as one of the key drivers of the aging process. In fact, a recent study looked at a variety of biomarkers and old people, age range between like 85 and 99, centenarians, which are 100, and also looking at semi-supercentenarians, which are about 105 years old plus. And they looked at supercentenarians, which are people that are older than 110 years old. Yes, people can actually live that old, to be that old.

So the study looked at a variety of biomarkers in these different age groups, and they found that the That low inflammation was actually the only biomarker that predicted survival in all different age groups, in the people that are old, the centenarians, the semi-supercentenarians, and the supercentenarians. So this is obviously just an association. You can't really— there's no causal factor identified here. So often we turn to animal studies to establish causation. Particularly in aging studies because aging studies are— it's very hard to establish causation in aging studies in humans because, I mean, humans live, you know, an average lifespan of 80 years old. So that's a pretty freaking long study.

Anyways, mice have been engineered to have low levels of chronic inflammation and these mice actually age much faster than normal mice and they die sooner. something like 30% sooner. And not only do they die sooner, but they experience degeneration in multiple organs much sooner. Along the same lines, another study showed that for every doubling of inflammatory biomarkers like C-reactive protein or IL-6, there was a significant increase in mortality and specifically in cardiovascular disease-related mortality. Again, inflammation is linked to aging. It's linked to a variety of different age-related diseases. Not so long ago in a podcast with Ron Krauss, I talked about inflammation and its association with cardiovascular disease.

So inflammation is definitely not good and stress increases inflammation. Correct. Literally at the mechanistic level of increasing gut permeability and causing endotoxin release, causing inflammatory cytokines to be released. So you get the point. Stress also accelerates telomere shortening, which is linked to biological aging, and I will explain a little bit about that in more detail in just a little bit. Stress also weakens the immune system. Resolving the damage that is done to the body's tissues as a consequence of inflammation, so stress causing this inflammation at the level of the gut, which then is damaging other tissues because that's part of what inflammation does. In this case, the inflammation being induced from the stress is a very energy-consuming process.

What happens is energy is triaged away from the immune system, and consequently, because, you know, because your body's like in repair mode, it's trying to repair all this damage, repair the gut. You know, it's one of the most important things to keep strong is the gut. It's trying to repair this damage that's being done to your tissues. So this is, this is a very energy-consuming process. However, the immune system and activation of the immune system to fight off real bacterial or viral invaders is also a very energetically consuming process. So if energy— you only have so much energy that you make, and if your energy is being triaged to repair, repair, repair, you know, then your immune system is, is not going to get the energy it needs to be as robust as it could be.

So, you know, I'm sure many of you— I have also experienced it many times when I am stressed, when I have lots of things going on, that's when I can come down with some nasty virus. And that's pretty much the only time that happens. So anyways, immune system, you know, activation requires a lot of energy and it's a very, you know, energy-consuming process. And so that's how stress also can can dampen the immune system. There's also other mechanisms that I'm not going to talk about today. But I do want to shift gears. I want to get to the meditation. I want to get to how buffering some of these negative effects of chronic stress on the body, on the brain, and on the aging process in general can occur through meditation.

Meditation is supposed to bring about this concept of mindfulness where you focus your thoughts and emotions in, in the present moment. I know personally I find that when I meditate, I also become very mindful of my own behaviors and, and the intents for my behaviors. I find that it helps me become much more aware of the decisions I make and why I make them. And I think that when you understand your own intentions for your actions, it not only helps you make better decisions, but it also helps you better understand other people's actions. And in this way, I think it promotes empathy and also compassion, because when you understand why people behave the way they behave, you're less likely to become so irritated or angry or frustrated, you know, with them.

Because you kind of can understand why they're acting the way they're acting. So I think that being more mindful allows you to, in a way, forgive people, forgive people for their actions, forgive people that have wronged you, for, you know, people that have been engaged in some sort of bad behavior, etc. And this is really important because if we get back to that rumination, The dwelling on negative emotions, you know, rumination and that dwelling on these negative emotions prolongs the negative mood. And that creates the chronic stress. It creates distress, that negative type of stress. You know, so I spoke personally, the type of rumination that I most frequently experience is the rumination that is work-related, goal-oriented.

You know, I tend to take on many, many different projects, many different tasks, and that can become overwhelming at times. But there's also that type of rumination that is associated with social experiences. And, you know, that also creates this bad type of chronic stress. And I think that one key way in which mindfulness may protect from the negative effects of that stress is by decreasing rumination. And in fact, this has been shown. Studies have linked meditation to decreased rumination, including a randomized trial that showed mindfulness training reduced ruminative thoughts and also distraction. And this reduction in rumination is thought to be key in reducing chronic stress and reducing distress.

In fact, people that engage in meditation long-term, like Buddhists, monks, they actually claim that during meditation, love and compassion permeate the mind. And I have not— maybe I've kind of experienced it. I don't know if it's permeated the mind. I think that I've had moments of clarity when I've been able to analyze my own behaviors, and at that moment, I'm connected to the human experience in general, and maybe that's sort of what they're talking about. I don't exactly know, but I guess there is a specific kind of meditation known as compassion meditation, where you challenge your emotions, your feelings, your ideas of other people with the goal of becoming more compassionate and altruistic. And I am not an expert on what compassion meditation is.

I'm just really speaking of my firsthand experience. Okay. Mostly I achieve that through analyzing and challenging my own emotions, my own experiences and feelings, and, and that, and through that, I am able to understand other people's emotions better, I think. But what do I know? Also, studies have shown that normal people that do not usually meditate do become more altruistic after this kind of compassion meditation. So that is documented as well, empirically. Yeah. I think that any type of behavior that decreases rumination and encourages altruism is a really good behavior to engage in, and in fact should be mandatory. I think all people should somehow engage in it. All right, so let's dive a little bit deeper into the effects of meditation and being mindful on the brain.

One of the interesting mechanisms by which meditation changes the brain is through the production of gamma waves in a certain region of the brain. So as neurons fire in the brain, they produce certain brainwaves. And I am by no means an expert on brainwaves and what they mean. I know a very little bit from just what I read. And so that's all I'm really going to talk about. But gamma wave oscillations in the brain have been shown to be indicative of neuroplasticity, which is linked to being able to learn new things and change Synapses as a consequence of new behaviors. Neuroplasticity makes your brain more resilient because it is the quality of being able to— it is the quality of being capable of change. And that is a mark of youth.

So young people will always have a greater degree of neuroplasticity compared to old people. But I think it's really empowering to know that neuroplasticity can be modulated up or down, you know, particularly later in life by our lifestyles and from behavior by doing something like meditation. One study found that 50-year-old individuals that have meditated for a pretty long time had brains that looked like 25-year-olds. I'm a little skeptical of this. I mean, that's pretty robust to say a 50-year-old has a brain that looks half its age. These people had more gray matter in their prefrontal cortex. Gray matter is associated with working memory and executive decision-making. Gray matter is also where the omega-3 fatty acid DHA is enriched.

As we age, our brains atrophy and we lose a lot of that gray matter. Still, I'm a little skeptical of this study because let's face it, A 50-year-old brain that looks like a 25-year-old brain is quite striking, to say the least. This is really just an association. It shows a statistically significant correlation. It does not itself demonstrate causation. I mean, these 50-year-old people that meditate could also be eating fish oil and eating a great diet full of micronutrients and exercising, and you get the point. What did convince me was a follow-up study that came out where people that have never meditated before were put through an 8-week mindful meditation program. After 40 minutes of meditating a day for about 8 weeks, 4 different brain regions had increased in brain volume.

Holy crap! 4 different brain regions had increased in brain volume after 8 weeks of this meditation, of this 40-minute meditation a day. So now you've got my interest. The brain regions that increased were the hippocampus, which is involved in learning and memory, the pons, which is a part of the brainstem and is where many, many neurotransmitters are made, the parietal junction, which is associated with empathy and compassion and other emotions. Also the posterior cingulate, which is involved in mind wandering and self-relevance. Those all increased in volumes after 8 weeks.

In addition, the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that's involved in the fight-or-flight response and also plays a very important role in anxiety and fear, the stress response, you know, stress response in general, that part of the brain was decreased. And that decreased activity also correlated with a reduction reduction in stress hormone levels. So I always think that's pretty good evidence that meditation probably does slow down brain aging because, A, it's increasing brain volume in 4 different regions of the brain, and it's decreasing amygdala activity, which is involved in that fear, anxiety, You know, the emotional responses that are tied up to rumination, to stress, and it decreases stress hormone levels.

So, you know, stress ages the brain, stress, you know, ages other tissues in the body, it increases inflammation. And I'm going to get to the biological aging right now. So not only does meditation slow cognitive aging, but it also slows biological aging. Wow. It's actually been shown in multiple studies that meditation slows the shortening of telomeres. Telomeres are— I've talked a lot about telomeres, but just for those of you that don't know, they're kind of like tiny caps at the end of our chromosomes. Chromosomes are thread-like structures that contain nucleic acids, which are DNA and protein, in a nucleus of the cell, and they contain all of our DNA. So telomeres serve a very important role in protecting the chromosomes, you know, protecting the DNA in those chromosomes.

So whether it's protecting it from your own metabolism, which generates byproducts that can damage your DNA, and there's no getting around that, you have to breathe in oxygen, you have to eat to make energy, and coupling those 2 processes together, you know, the oxygen sometimes gets turned into highly reactive molecules like superoxide, hydrogen peroxide. Inside of your cells. And guess what? This causes damage. Telomeres soak up that damage. They take the hit so that your DNA does not. This is a protective mechanism to prevent you from getting potentially cancer-causing mutations. The trade-off is that it accelerates telomere attrition, which is also the path to what is called cellular senescence. Which I'll explain.

So, every— inside of every, you know, inside of every cell, your telomeres get shorter every year without any external damage happening. This is just normal biology. And this is partly due to a quality of the DNA structure known as a 3' overhang, which does not allow the entire length of the telomere to be copied during DNA replication. Every time your cells replicate to make new cells, to replace those old cells, to keep whatever organ functioning, you know, your favorite organ, your liver, whatever it is, you have to make new liver cells to keep it going. You have to copy all of the DNA in that cell, including the telomere DNA. And so, the structure of this telomere DNA has something called a 3' overhang, which is kind of a funny structure.

it's like a tiny piece of the telomere then does not get copied. So that little piece of telomere DNA does not get copied. So the next cell has a telomere that's just a little bit shorter than the cell before it. And now when that cell has to copy its DNA to make a new cell, this whole thing goes on again. So the next cell has a telomere that's just a little bit shorter than that cell. And this goes on year after year. And, you know, subsequently your telomeres get shorter and shorter and shorter until there's no telomere left, at which point the cell either becomes senescent, which means the cell is not dead, but it's no longer functioning either. And instead it's just sitting around inside of your organ doing nothing but secreting damaging pro-inflammatory crap.

which causes more damage to nearby cells and thereby accelerates telomere shortening on the nearby cells. So once you have, once you reach a certain age and you start to have a cell that's telomeres have reached a critical, critical shortening point and it becomes senescent, that senescent cell then starts this vicious cycle of Telomere shortening because the senescent cell secretes all these pro-inflammatory cytokines and inflammatory molecules, which shorten telomeres of nearby cells, then thereby advancing their respective cellular ages. So that's kind of why, as you start to get older, it's like, like you seem to start to use— at a certain point, you start to like age exponentially. All these things start to compound together. Anyways, I'm going off on I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm going on a tangent. In addition to the senescent cell, there are 2 other possible outcomes as a consequence of critical telomere shortening. Okay. So the critical telomere shortening, one, the cell becomes senescent. So it doesn't die. It sits there, secretes damaging things. 2, once the telomere inside becomes really short, it activates this genetic pathway to die, the cell death pathway to die. Which in some cases is better than a senescence because at least the cell's dead and not sitting there secreting all this pro-inflammatory crap. But in the case of a stem cell, this leads to tissue aging because if you have a critically short telomere on a stem cell, the stem cell dies. You no longer have the stem cell, and stem cells are what repopulate any given cell population in an organ.

So depletion of stem cells ultimately lead to organ dysfunction. And stem cells do age slower than most other cells in our tissues for a couple of reasons. First is because they have an enzyme that is active called telomerase, which is able to rebuild the short telomeres by adding DNA nucleotides onto the end of the telomere. For this reason— actually, it technically ends RNA, but anyways, for this reason, telomeres on stem cells tend to be longer than non-stem cells. So let me kind of just explain. I talked about how every time your cell divides, a little bit of that telomere DNA doesn't get copied, so your next cell has a telomere that's a little bit shorter.

Well, that's not so much of a problem if, you know, your telomere is a little bit shorter, but now you have this enzyme that's active that goes, oh, I need to fill in this little, you know, hole here and make the telomere a little bit longer. So it literally just sort of replenishes that, you know, telomere that was shortened to its full length. And that's the case with stem cells. It has an enzyme that's able to do that, telomerase. Okay. Other cell— other stem— there are some other cells in our body that also have telomerase, our germ cells, so sperm cells, ovary cells. Also, some of our immune cells have telomerase that's active.

All of our cells have the gene that encodes for telomerase, but it's epigenetically silenced in many of these tissues, and there's a biological reason for that. Why most of our cells, you know, with the exception of the cells I just talked about, stem cells, germ cells, some of our immune cells, do not express telomerase. The reason they do not have it, they have it, but it's epigenetically silenced, is because high levels of telomerase actually immortalizes cells, which could be a good thing or it could be a bad thing because if you have a bunch of damaged cells that become immortalized, this turns them into cancer cells. So depending on whether or not the cell was damaged in the first place, becoming immortalized can turn into cancer cells.

And this leads me to the 3rd possible outcome for a critically short telomere. So I mentioned the senescence, where the cell doesn't die, but it secretes a bunch of pro-inflammatory molecules. I mentioned the cell death, in which case can lead to tissue aging, and if it's leading to death of your stem cells. The 3rd possible outcome that occurs when telomeres become critically short on any given cell in any given organ is actually reactivation of telomerase. So telomerase is epigenetically silenced in most cells, in our liver cells, in our kidney cells, in our breast tissue, in our prostate. in our bladder, you know, ovaries, etc. When a telomere becomes critically short in one of these cells in these tissues, it can reactivate the telomerase.

And this usually happens in older age because telomeres don't get critically short until we are, you know, into our 5th, 6th decades of life. When the telomerase becomes Active or reactive, as it's called. This is actually called alternative lengthening of telomeres, and it usually happens in cells that have accumulated a lot of damage, and it allows the cell to override a cell death mechanism. So your body detects that there is damage in the cell. It says— it's like a warning goes off, a warning signal goes off. This is bad. the cell goes, this is damage, I don't want this around, I'm gonna kill myself because I don't want this cell to become cancer.

But the cancer is, you know, always smarter, and it finds a way to say, wait a minute, I don't wanna die, I'm gonna activate this really cool program that the cell has the capacity to activate to make me immortal. Boom, it reactivates telomerase and it Just keeps living. So this is actually a mechanism by which some damaged cells transition into a cancer cell and become immortal. Well, they become immortal until the cancer kills its host. But so it's also why precautions should be taken for therapies claiming to very robustly and constitutively activate telomerase, such as TA-65. So, you know, TA-65, on the one hand, it could be a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it's great for people that don't have a lot of damaged cells because it's potentially going to lengthen your, you know, critically short telomeres, therefore give, you know, different tissues in your body more vitality, you know, make them youthful again. That's great. What's not great is taking TA-65 after a lifetime of botching your cells and damaging them. Taking something that's going to reactivate telomerase in cells that have a lot of damage is not a good thing, in my opinion. Okay. Short telomeres have been linked to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer. The list goes on.

Chronic stress dramatically accelerates telomere attrition, and many studies have found there are— there's a strong and statistically significant association between chronic stress and accelerated telomere shortening. Many, many, many, many studies have shown that. But I want to get back to meditation. So studies have been done by Elizabeth Blackburn at UCSF and other collaborators of hers showing not only does meditation buffer the stress that shortens telomeres, but it actually can activate the gene that encodes for the enzyme telomerase, which I just mentioned a few minutes ago. It does not reactivate it all the time, you know, like in the alternative pathway that cancer cells use, but it does it for a short period.

And that's pretty freaking cool because being able to reactivate telomerase for a short period of time can help to reverse aging in some tissues. For those of you that do not know the name Elizabeth Blackburn, she's actually won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for having discovered the enzyme telomerase. So she's kind of a big deal. So ultimately what this means is that meditation not only reduces the stress, the rumination, the factors that accelerate telomere shortening, but it can also increase telomere length and reverse telomere shortening through the activation of telomerase. So there you have it, folks.

Stressing the body through exercise, through using the sauna, cryotherapy, ice baths, plant polyphenols, and even psychological stress, like setting goal-oriented challenges, can be good because it builds stress resistance, the body's adaptations to stress. And that's what retards aging. The activation of stress resistance pathways through hormetic stress may actually be at the heart of many, you know, mechanisms of anti-aging. However, intense psychological stress, whether it is work-related or social-related, can lead to feelings of being overwhelmed and that big bad word rumination. And this is distress, is negative stress, is chronic stress.

And that has been shown to increase stress hormones that have negative effects on the brain, on the body, and it accelerates the aging process in general. Engaging in mindful meditation promotes healthy stress coping mechanisms. It decreases rumination. It retards brain aging and biological aging. Different people prefer different ways of meditating. Some people like to do yoga. I'm one of those people. Some like to chill out in a flotation tank for an hour. That's also pretty cool. I've done that once. I really liked it. Others may like a more guided practice. If you want to try meditation and would like to just dip your toes in the water, you can try out the app Headspace, which is an audio guide to meditation with a couple million users.

Also mentioned on my podcast interview with Tim Ferriss. Or you can give transcendental— and I always have trouble saying this word— transcendental meditation, which is a technique where you— it involves like using the sound of a mantra. And I've never done this, but it's practiced, I think, for like 15 or 20 minutes once or twice a day or something like that. You can Google it. Personally, my favorite form of meditation is immersing myself in nature. And just being mindful and chilling out and taking some time to unplug and smell the flowers and just listening to my mind. So this concludes this episode of the FoundMyFitness podcast.

Just a quick recap from this episode, you know, intro earlier, you can sign up for my articles, my podcast transcripts, or even the notes for this very podcast. At foundmyfitness.com/meditation-report. That's foundmyfitness.com/meditation-report. Again, this podcast would not be happening if it were not for the support of awesome people, probably much like yourself. Please help me keep it going. Even as little as $5 a month can make a really, really big difference. Find out more about my crowdsponsoring at foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor. That's foundmyfitness.com/crowdsponsor. Thank you all for listening and have a groovy, mindful day.