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The Neuroscience of an Anxious Generation · The Inner Well Podcast

• The Inner Well Podcast: We all contain a space within that when enlivened and nourished will support us with unwavering stability, expansion and peace of mind. Join us each week as we dive into honest grounded conversations about transcendental meditation, consciousness and growth and what it means to live an integrated life supported by a foundation of creativity and calm. This is the inner world. Welcome to the InnerWell podcast. Today, I have two wonderful guests with us to talk about the challenges and opportunities that are available with students today. This month of August, we're talking about young people, students, and the challenges that they face in our modern world, and how TM ⁓ can be a really profound and powerful technique to support them at this really critical age in development. so we have with us Dr. Bill Stickstrud and Dr. Christine Abrams. I'll introduce them quickly and then we'll get right into a conversation. ⁓ So Dr. Stickstrud is a licensed clinical neuropsychologist and the founder of the Stickstrud Group. For four decades, he was a faculty member at the Children's National Medical Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at George Washington University Medical School. He is a co-author of three widely acclaimed books, The Self-Driven Child, What Do You Say? and The Seven Principles for Raising a Self-Driven Child. His work focuses on stress, motivation, and self-determination in children and adolescents. And his first book has reached families in 21 countries, has been published in 20 languages, and sold over a million copies worldwide. Dr. Christine Abrams is a mental health counselor licensed in both Florida and New Jersey. She's a parent coach and has a program called Label Free Parenting. She is also a certified consciousness advisor and TM teacher, Transcendental Meditation teacher. She came to TM as a self-described skeptic in 2019 after years of unsuccessful attempts at other meditation practices. She was drawn in by the evidence base and so transformed by the results of her practice that she became a teacher and now directs the Cape Coral Florida TM Center. So welcome. So great to have you both here. Dr. Stixdrewd, I'll start just by asking you've spent... decades working with kids, and especially those who are struggling under the pressure of modern childhood. And what is it that you're seeing today and what's changed in the last 10 to 15 years? So I think the most dramatic thing is this spike in mental health problems that we're seeing in children and teenagers and particularly in young adults. ⁓ know, the Surgeon General in 2023, referred to the status of youth mental health as the defining public health crisis of our lifetime. And a study the same year out of Harvard found that young adults' mental health is twice as bad as adolescents' is. And about a third of them meet the criteria for major depression ⁓ or generalized anxiety. And also, I think a lot of it was changed is kids are sleeping. less and less and less. A study just came out that a quarter of high school kids now sleep five hours or less, which is an enormous problem because they not to feel tired, they on average they need nine and a quarter. I think there's also been dramatic escalation in the academic pressure. And I personally feel that the main driver of this increased mental health crisis. this increase academic stress and pressure. The last thing is the technological changes, obviously, that have their own benefits and challenges, including the kind of entertainment, social media, and AI. It is such a changing landscape. When I first started discussing this topic with the other co-hosts of the podcast, we were talking about how we can't even imagine. what it would be like to be a student today with all of the pressures of social media and being so constantly plugged in, let alone AI. That's a whole nother layer. ⁓ And Christine, what are you seeing kind of on the ground in your work with students and parents? it's before I moved to Florida, I was the director of school counseling in a school district. So I got to see firsthand what was going on and to echo what Bill said, pressure. Right? Kids had to get A's. They had to get into Ivy League schools. And sadly, our district moved from regular teaching to one-to-one devices. Even though most kids had devices at home, they felt, we need to have them in the classroom. So not only were these kids on their devices at home, but they were on devices all day. And they had no outlet. They're also scheduled from morning until late at night with sports, homework, and everything. There's no free time. There's no play time. There's no time. to be in that genius lounge where you have nothing to do and you have to make stuff up, right? And so, yeah, I was seeing the same thing in my mental health practice too. I have young adults who are highly anxious. And so it's really trying to overcome that fear of living. It's quite profound. I spoke with Christine and some other members of the school district in 2018. I was gonna go up and give some lectures up there. And just before I met her, I remember her saying, The kids here are joyless. It's just all about building a college resume. There's just no joy. So can you walk us through what this chronic stress actually does to a developing brain? Yeah. So if you're under stress for a long time, it's just not good for a brain at any age. mean, we know just physically it shrinks your prefrontal cortex, which is the most recently evolved part of your brain that does all the executive functions, the planning, the organization, the working memory, the flexibility. And it shrinks your hippocampus, is your major memory center. And it makes your amygdala, the part of your brain that senses and reacts to threat, bigger and more reactive. And as Robert Sapolsky says, more hysterical in the way it reacts to things. This makes you more anxious and more stressed. Part of the reason I'm so committed to young people learning TM and parents doing it, is that if a kid develops an anxiety disorder, or gets depressed, it changes the brain in a way that doesn't doom them to a life of misery, but it does increase the risk that they're going to have recurrent anxiety or bouts of depression into adulthood. So for example, if a gets depressed, even if they get better, they tend to have more vulnerable to insomnia. they tend to be somewhat more pessimistic. And things that used to be on a pleasure scale, they used to be a nine or a 10, now it's a seven. So it's still enjoyable, but it's not that same level of enjoyment it was before they got depressed. And so 20 years ago, I was talking with one of the world's experts on mental health. And he said, our highest social priority should be preventing mental health problems in young people. Because then we prevent... ⁓ mental health problems the course of their life. And so, yeah, I think when I first started reading about what stress does to the brain, it's not pretty. And it's not only at the upper levels. The younger kids are stressed too, which is really amazing to see at the elementary school level that kids have stress and anxiety, which was unheard of before a certain period. I just presented to a bunch of school psychologists in a local school district here, and they're talking about how the kindergarten and first grade kids are just so dysregulated, that their ability to tolerate stressful situations, ability to manage themselves is just so hard that everybody's really struggling to deal with it. When do you think this shift happened, Christine? You mentioned that, you know, this hasn't always been this way. What do you think led to that? It's interesting. mean, I think part of it has certainly been the devices that are in everybody's hands. And I know that Bill has asked some kids, know, do you, is this helpful to you? And kids know it's not, but it's like an addiction. I think for me, when I was a school counselor in 2007, something happened and the kids didn't want to graduate. They came to me one after the other. We don't want to graduate. So we're going to make sure we fail. They were terrified. of like launching. I don't know what happened in 2007, but that seemed to be the case among a lot of school districts and the mental health got worse. And then we started to bring in mental health counselors to manage all of this. And I think what many parents know is that a book came out a couple of years ago called The Anxious Generation, which argued that this big spike in mental health problems in young people from about 2013 or so was attributable primarily to cell phone and social media. Those things happen in fact, but I think there's equally good evidence that it has to do with academic pressure and with kids not playing anymore. There's a new book coming out in August called Restoring Childhood by Peter Gray, just making the case that children learn to be adults through playing, especially it's true for all mammals. And young people are on teams now by the time they're three or four or adult led kind of things. They don't do the kind of child led play and exploration that they used to do. So I think there's a lot of reasons. And one of my friends did a study, done several studies of think 18 high schools. And he just asked the kids, why are you so stressed and anxious? And the top 12 factors the kids cite have nothing to do with social media and cell phone. It all has to do with homework, academic pressure, disappointing my parents, not getting into a good enough college. And I think Bill's right, there's no plan anymore. And think about it, kids need to take some level of risk. That's how you become an adult. And it's just not allowed anymore, which is really sad. It sounds like a lot of what we're calling behavioral and motivational problems in kids is actually a stress and nervous system dysregulation problem in disguise. Everything is a manifestation of your nervous system in many ways. And so with motivational problems, mean, part of the challenge, there's so many kids who... are just disengaged. There's a lot of school refusal, who are, the majority of high school students now that say that the primary feelings they experience in school are tired, stressed, and bored. ⁓ And so we know that the optimal internal motivations, that intrinsic or internal motivation where you're doing something that's important to you, or you enjoy doing it, or you're interested in doing it. ⁓ And we know that the brain functions completely differently. with that kind of intrinsic motivation than doing something because you're a reward for it or you're to lose points if you don't do it. So the motivational problems are definitely related to neural circuitry that has to do with doing things that are of interest to you, that seem important to you. And if most kids feel tired and stressed and bored, we aren't doing a very good job of actually realizing these kids have brains. We've got to teach to their brains. And for behavior problems, yeah, most behavior problems are because kids don't have the self-regulatory skills to manage themselves, which often has to do with kids whose prefrontal cortex doesn't regulate their stress response very well. And when we're in the right mind, we have of control of our own lives. We feel confident, we feel engaged, we're goal-directed. The prefrontal cortex is regulating the rest of the brain, including the stress circuits. So when you see behavior problems in kids, it's usually a function of immaturity in the prefrontal cortex ability to regulate the stress response and motivational circuits. Yeah, and I agree with Bill. I mean, if you've ever sat through a high school day these days, it's amazing they make it through because it's completely regulated. They have no input into what they're learning or how they learn. They have different learning modalities and they're not honored at all. And it is boring. It's just not interesting, you know? And I mean, you can get this. And at the school where I worked, we had a group of kids who were behavioral issues. And so they group them together. And I spoke to the teacher. said, look, we can get all that content in there, but have them pick projects. And that, you know, that's critical thinking. That's putting pieces together. You got to make it relevant, right? And nothing's relevant. It's like you got to learn this. It's awful. Yeah. Yeah. I think if you went into most, certainly most secondary schools. and saw the way the kids are taught, the way they're handled. You'd think nobody here has ever heard the kids have a brain, or they know nothing about their brain. To Bill's point of self-directed learning, that can be incorporated. And it'll make it so much more enriching for the children than what they have now. That adds to stress too, because some of the kids' school is just not their gig. It just doesn't fit for them. And that's why you need these alternatives out there to help these kids. And they're bright. They're all bright, they all have something to offer. Bill, it sounds like this is the central theme of your work with the self-driven child. Can you tell us more about what led to that and why you're so passionate? The two problems that young people experience that I've been addressing most over the last 15, 20 years. Number one is this mental health crisis. And people were... talking about this in 2005 at least, is certainly more than 20 years ago. It's escalated since then as I said earlier, but that's been one. And the other is this, I see kids who, lot of kids who have learning disabilities or ADHD, and they just don't work very hard. They don't work very hard to develop themselves. And my co-author who does SAT, ACT prep and sees these very, very tightly wound, highly driven kids who would sacrifice anything. to get into an elite school. And their motivational system is not healthy and it's not sustainable. They're just driving themselves in a way that is unhealthy. And so I studied what causes these mental health problems and this disordered motivation. And all the arrows point in the direction of a low sense of control. And the idea is that all mental health problems are related to stress. The most stressful thing in experience is a low sense of control. where something's happening and nobody knows what to do about it. There's nothing more stressful than that. And it turns out that virtually everything that makes people feel better and do better increases their sense of control, including psychotherapeutically, including sleep, including transgenital meditation, increases that sense of control. What it is, it's the subjective sense that I'm not helpless. I'm not hopeless. I'm not. stock, I'm not resigned, I'm not impotent, I can make choices, I can make decisions about my life and guide my life to a large extent. And also that I have confidence that I can handle hard situations so I don't have to worry that I go into a situation that I can't handle. So it's a combination of autonomy and confidence. And it's the brain state that supports that where the prefrontal cortex regulates the rest of the brain as I was talking about earlier. And that's when you're in your right mind. And a sense of control is the key to mental health. It's the key to that healthy self motivation. This is my life and I get to develop it. So that's been my passion. And it turns out you can see the sense of control, Donyell, in four month old infants. You can train an infant to take a rattle and just shake it and then give a little reward. And so when they show them the reward, they hook up the rattle and they shake it. If you give them the reward without having them shake the rattle, they get pissed. They want to do it themselves. And it's the driver of adolescence. Even in elderly people, if you have a grandparent who's in a nursing home, if they have the choice about one thing, do you want to have dinner at 4 4.30, or a visitor come, they live long. It's a really powerful biological and social. And just to follow on that, just a concrete example. I was working with a family during COVID and the young man gave up. He's like, I hate school. I don't want to go. Locked himself in the bedroom. He was very depressed. And his mom's like, he's got to go. He's got to go. He's got to go to college. And she was on and on. And I said, look, how about we do this? You let him withdraw. Withdraw? What will people say? I said, doesn't matter. He's your kid. Let him withdraw and send him to this alternative school that is self-driven, right? ⁓ he has no idea what he wants to do. He'll never, this is a way, I said, just humor me. Go for the interview, right? So she says to all right, we're taking you to this guy and he's going to interview you for this school. So they go and the guy sits down and says, so tell me, what, are you, any interest in anything? The kid says, yeah, I want to either be a real estate broker or a stockbroker. Mother almost fell off her chair. So the kid ended up leaving this high powered school, going to the alternative school. spent a year, and he was getting books on entrepreneurship and all this other stuff. And then he said, Mom, I'm ready to go back to the high school. She said, what? You know it hasn't changed. And he says, I know, but I'm a better student. I know what I can and cannot do, and I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to go there. I've learned how to learn, and I just want to do my senior year there and graduate. And he had a great year. The kid is doing so well, and it's because the mom had the courage to let him find his path. So it was really a good story, but he needed that control. those decisions to make himself. What a great story. I love that. Where does Transcendental Meditation play into all of this for you both? I know it's been an important part of both of your lives as individuals, but also your work. So I was a good college student, but I got very anxious my last two years of college. There's very things going on in my family. And so I started a PhD program in English literature at the University of California, Berkeley. And I was so anxious and so insecure. that I didn't turn in a single assignment for 20 weeks. But I see a lot of underachievers and I said, I went for 20 weeks, turned in nothing, top that. ⁓ But in any case, ⁓ three people told me I was the most nervous person they've ever met. And one person luckily said, if there's anybody on this planet that needs to learn to amate you. So I did. And a month later, after I flunked out of Berkeley, I was working in a warehouse, just as a teamster, just filling orders in a warehouse. And on a break, my foreman came up to me said, what do you want? He thought I was taking quail eggs or some kind of downers or Valium or something. I said, what are you talking about? He said, when you started here, you're the most nervous person I've ever met. Now you seem so calm. This was a month after I'd learned TM. And so for me, I had developed a facial tick that went away in a month. My foot would tap unrelentingly until after about a month or two, it just stopped. And when I went back to graduate school, it's not that I was never anxious. It's just I had confidence that I could handle it. I'd go in to take a test and say, well, I'll be a little anxious about it, but I'll just meditate later, I'll be fine. And so for me, it was so dramatically transforming for me as a person and also as a student. that all my career, I've been recommending to kids, particularly teenagers and young adults, and their parents. much of my focus in my work is on this idea, is on parents, because the Surgeon General, think in 2024, had an advisory that concluded that 48 % of parents say they're so stressed they can barely function, and 41 % say they're so stressed they can't function at all. And we're talking about what's it like living in a house where the parents are that stressed and the kids are this stressed. So said, do it yourself. Emotions are contagious. Your kids will feel your calm. They'll benefit from your calm. And I borrowed a term from a guy named Edwin Friedman, who was a rabbi and a family therapist and a business consultant, who said that organizations, systems from a family to a corporation, they function best. if the people in charge are a non-anxious presence, meaning somebody who's not highly anxious and emotionally reactive. And I thought, God, it's a period. You got an infant who is crying, it's a lot easier to soothe them if you stay calm. You got a four-year-old in a store tantruming because you won't buy him candy. It's a lot easier to handle it if you stay calm. And firstly, any situation you have to deal with as a parent, if you can stay calm, it's better. So my work now focuses a lot on getting parents to move in that direction, to let TM help them move in the direction of being a non-anxious presence in their families. Yeah. And Christine, I'm curious about your journey. Okay. So I've always been a seeker. I didn't have the anxiety issues. I was an excellent student. I'm type A, but never anxious. And I was just a seeker. I wanted to understand the universe and all of this. And so was doing a lot of meditations. I was doing contemplative meditation where you sit and you take a Bible passage or a quote and you just think about it. Or you ask, who am I? Who am I? Nothing ever came. You know, it was like a waste of time. And then I was told clear your mind, know, said, sit there, The mind didn't clear. I mean, it didn't, it was a killer ego. How am I gonna do that? Like, I don't even know where that is. So it was just such a waste of my time. And there was this woman in yoga who said to me, I'm learning Transcendental Meditation. I'm like, what? Why are you doing that? Please, that's silliness, right? I was so skeptical. I'm like, this is, they give you what, a mantra? What are they talking about? I can give myself a mantra. So I'm working at this school there, Striped, and I get a call from this guy who runs an alternative school. He says, listen, I need a real educator on my advisory board. Could you join? I'm like, sure. You know, why not? It's fine. It'll be fun. So he gives me Bill's book, The Self-Druven Child. I have a very nice cover. I stick it on the bookshelf. Six months later, he calls, hey, listen, we're trying to raise money to bring Dr. Stixrud to our school to speak. Do you think your district can help? I said, who's Dr. Stixrud? And he goes, you didn't read the book? I said, no, but I will. So I read the book. And he talked about TM. Now, you know, my little skeptical mind was like, All right, what is this? But he had all this data. And I'm like, okay, all right. I have spent more on Starbucks in my life. And this might be my golf moment where I hated golf because my father watched it, but then I had to take it when I was in the private sector to move up the ranks and I loved it. And I'm like, okay, it's another golf moment, maybe. So I go, I learn. I walked out of there. I'm like, wow, I just never felt. so settled and relaxed. And I had been a student of Vedanta for a year, so I knew about the self and all of this, but I never knew. I knew up here, I didn't know here. And so I thought, how do I teach this? Because I really want kids and parents to learn this. And then I became friends with Bill because he ended up speaking in my district and we had a phone call and I said to him, you're the man who has changed my life because he's the one through his book who introduced me to this. Thank you, Bill. You're welcome, Kristen. I was just talking to the parent a little while ago, who was very, when I first met her, was very anxious and very obsessive. It was really hard to get her off her phone. said, what about this, what about this, what about this? And she learned TM. And about three months later, I talked to her. She said, where did all that anxiety go? You know, so I will also mention that maybe 15 years ago, I collaborated on two studies of middle school kids with ADHD. practicing TM in schools. And they did it for 15 minutes twice a day in both studies. And we got really, really good results, not only in terms of behavior, but better executive functions, get more organized, they're more on task. And with the first study, we interviewed the kids and said, what do you notice from meditating? And this is after three months of meditating twice a day in school. And they all said, I'm much less anxious. They all said I'm better organized. And this one kid, talk about behavior problems, this one kid who was wildly impulsive, we asked him, said, well, before I started meditating, if I was walking in the hall and somebody bumped me, I just turn around and hit him. Now that I've been meditating though, if I'm walking in the hall and somebody bumps me, I stop and think, should I hit him or not? You know, we see this nice improvement in kind of behavioral regulation, that emotional regulation, as a prefrontal cortex stays online and gives you a little bit more. between stimulus and response. In the second study, we had an EEG component. Yeah, we saw these dramatic changes in the circuits in the brain that have to do regulation of attention with better focus and better sustained attention. And for many kids with ADHD, I'm not sure that meditation is going to get all kids off their medication, but it plays a huge role in improving their cognitive functioning. lower anxiety and it's a real plus for kids who have any kind of learning challenge or attention problem, as well as kids who tend to be anxious. And in that moment, right, it gives them a choice of how to behave. Exactly. Right, they're not, it's not an impulse anymore. It's not a habit. It's like, ⁓ now I don't have to hit that kid. I'm good. How empowering is that for an, even an adult. You know? It comes back to that sense of control you're talking about. That there is that space from which we can choose how we wanna show up to whatever the situation is. ⁓ And I think that choice is what you're referring to when you talked about control. That there is that kind of agency of not just being at the whim of reactivity that's caused by stress. Exactly, Danielle. And I remember being struck just ⁓ even before I started focusing on this sense of control so strongly in the last 15 years. So maybe 25 years ago, seeing a study, one of the earlier studies on TM, increasing what they call internal locus of control, really looks control, that my control is within me, I'm not a pawn of the universe kind of thing. And I surprised that that's a TM, if you try to control TM, it doesn't work. It's an effortless technique. But it does increase that sense of control because it makes your brain work better. It calms your stress response, keeps your free problem cortex online, allows you to solve problems better, come up with creative solutions to problems. You feel, okay, I have more choice here, I more options. You aren't as limited as you thought you were. I think that ⁓ meditation hugely contributes to that sense of control, which is the key to mental health, key to motivation. and hugely related to health and longevity. Yeah. I encourage all my clients to learn. Before the pandemic, I saw a kid who was a freshman here at the University of Maryland, and his older brother committed suicide. He left his note to his younger brother saying, success is overrated. And I saw the younger brother when he was a freshman in college, and he was very depressed. He was barely going to class. He was flunking a lot of stuff. And he was smoking pot all day, and smoking pot to go to sleep. He's a really good kid and really smart. And at one point I said, if there was something that made you feel calm inside and where you weren't thinking, you weren't constantly thinking about your brother or all the stresses in your life, that is actually good for your brain, would you be interested in it? And he was interested in TM and he learned TM and the changes in him were so quick and so dramatic that his mother learned. It helped her alleviate her grief so much. that she ⁓ wanted to become a TM teacher. But I've experienced is when young people do it, even when children do it, they get the same benefit as adults do. When the nervous system calms down, the brain works in a more orderly, coherent fashion, you have to decrease stress hormones, your stress response basically normalizes. You just function better at virtually any age. Yeah, and it's good for the body. Right? So you're not constantly stressed. And think about all the, you know, when Kaiser Permanente did their ACEs, ⁓ Adverse Childhood Experience Survey, they saw all these people with trauma later on in life had terrible outcomes, heart disease, diabetes, all of this. Imagine, you know, everybody has some trauma in their life, just doing this, this calms the whole system and can just lead to a healthier life in the long run. It just makes so much sense to me. I completely agree. I had the opportunity the first nine years that I was teaching TM, I was working a lot with young people in schools, in underserved communities, both in LA and New York, and all of these really profound experiences that you're describing. I got to see firsthand over and over again, and it was such ⁓ just a meaningful experience and so rewarding. had a lot of parents coming in recently and when they learn to say, I want to give this to my kids. Are there any people that you've seen struggles or populations you've seen most significantly benefit from TM? I've taught a number of people who have addictions to alcohol and it seems to work really well with people who are in recovery and want to stay that way. Unbeknownst to me, the gentleman who started AA evidently had learned TM, which I was, you know, surprised to learn. But one of my students told me. And it just really is a wonderful gift to people who have addictions or are in recovery. I think it's very powerful. And again, another reason to teach young adults and teenagers, because it's that time where they can become addicted to substances, to self-medicate because of the stress they're under. peer pressure, and this gives them some resilience to say, no, not good for me. It really is a powerful tool for treating addiction to the various substances. And also, as you said, Christine, for preventing, to two of the major risk factors for addiction, diversely anything, are low stress tolerance, difficulty tolerating stressful situations, and impulsivity. And what TN does is it increases your stress tolerance because it normalizes your stress response in the sense that you have baseline lower levels of stress hormones. When something really stressful happens, the stress hormones jack up the way they're supposed to do, but then they normalize quickly, which builds resilience. It builds resilience and that ability to keep your pre-cruel cortex regulating your brain so that when something stressful happens. You cope with it as opposed to freaking out or trying to avoid it like that. A wonderful man here who developed a treatment for alcoholism in the greater DC area is very successful. He has programs around the country now, who has incorporated TM and all those programs. it's just, mean, people relapse when they're stressed. And just having another tool, mean, have another something that normalizes your nervous system, allows you feel calm. and allows you to be less impulsive. You know, it really helps. I will also mention that ⁓ people who had trauma, I mean, did that, as you're talking about the ACEs, Christine, and the diverse, people have a lot of trauma. mean, some of the studies, the data is absurd. mean, there's study of women in Uganda who were raped, their husbands were killed, and ⁓ they, actually, they went to Uganda, they fled to Uganda, and they're, They're in some kind of refugee camp and they learn TM and within a month, they no longer have the symptoms of PTSD. mean, it's just, trauma can be very, very powerful. And the beautiful thing about treating trauma is you don't have to relive it. With TM, you just do the technique and the connections in your brain between the trauma and the way you feel now gets changed. without having to relive it. I'm focusing a lot now on young adults because they're just so unhappy. 70 % of college students say they struggle with mental health. 77 % of female college students struggle with mental health. young adults and young adult males are really having trouble. And partly because, partly what you were saying earlier, Christine, they identify themselves so narrowly with their achievement, their performance. And I remember one of the, I was 23 when I learned TM. So I was meditating, probably within the first couple of months of meditating. a car honked its horn. And I was so deep inside, it felt like the horn was in me. And I realized that it just, it's some basic, I didn't know anything about philosophy of meditation, but I realized somehow I'm not limited to this brain, to this body. That I'm somehow larger than that. I'm really interested in how TM can help people understand themselves in a different way and understand that the kind of, you talk about the inner well, the kind of the deeper levels of their own mind and become more familiar that at the very deepest level of your own mind, it's completely calm, completely happy, completely peaceful. And it's already there and the beautiful thing is about it. You don't have to work year after year to get there. The first meditation for many people, you're just there. It's already there. And then you like to identify with that and not the labels that people put on you. Exactly. I love the way you said that. It's already there. I taught an English teacher in town, a young guy who was just like, ⁓ these kids, he teaches high school. I said, I'm glad you came for T.M. And then followed up and I said, how's your class? He goes, they're so good. They're behaving. I said, because you're different. Yeah, I'm calmer. I said, you're not anxious, you're not... out there, ⁓ my God, you're driving me crazy, I'm so stressed. I said, you kept feeding off of each other, now you're setting the tone. And they're following. I said, how beautiful is that? And he was just like so happy. So he's not gonna leave teaching, he's gonna stay. And he's coaching, which is really good. So that was a wonderful example of how it just resonates with people around you. such an important point. If a student is listening right now, you know, a teenager or a college student, what... would you want them to hear? What I tell students is that if you learn to meditate and you do it regularly, you're going to feel like you have an unfair advantage. Especially when you go up to college and most kids are managing the profound stress and dysregulation in college through pot or lot of alcohol, and you're meditating, you're going to feel like you really have an unfair advantage. And I think that that that for young people taking care of their brain, mean, just that one of the things we didn't mention is just TM isn't a substitute for sleep. But almost everyone said that for the I've been meditating now for the first time in years, I've been able to sleep through the night. Their nervous system safe enough to that they could actually fall asleep. And so I want young people to hear that there's a technique, there's there's a way to have this profound experience of very deep the very deepest level of your own mind, which will make you feel calmer, happier, smarter, wiser, more intuitive, and better connected with other people in the rest of the world. Yeah. And I would want them to know, because they have so little control in their lives right now, that this is the ultimate control that they can have. And it will help them make better decisions, help them do better in school, and just help them... become more responsive to the world and less reactive, it'll also ⁓ pump up their creativity, right? And they won't be a victim to circumstances anymore. Beautiful. And that's, you know, what I would hope for all of them. I love that. And if a parent is listening, what would you want them to take away from this conversation? Learn TM. Because it will help you function. within the family. ⁓ And you'll be a great model for your kids, because your kids watch you all the time, and they're not great interpreters. ⁓ So if you present a model of calm, they will pick that up. And some of them might ask you, what's wrong, Mom? Have you been taking something? What's going on? Right? Because they won't know. ⁓ And just do it for yourself, right? Like, that's your moment. That's your twice a day moment to take care of yourself, because parents often don't do that. They're always busy working, taking care of the family, doing whatever they do. You need to pull back like they tell you on the airplane, put the mask on before you put it on your kid because you need to stay alive and you need to stay healthy and grounded. That's what I would hope for parents. 40 years ago, I met with his family, an eighth grade kid who was really depressed and the dad started crying. He said, this should be the happiest time in his life. I said, well, obviously you skipped eighth grade. after I said that, I said, when he stopped crying, I said, I think we can more convincingly help him feel better about himself if we aren't worried sick. And I think that most of the kids I see these days have anxiety-related problems. it doesn't generally occur to parents that one of the best ways for me to help my kids, my anxious kids, are for me to manage my own anxiety. In fact, a study came out in 1990. sometime in late 1990s. What do kids want most from their parents? It wasn't spending more time with me, spending more money on me, taking me places. I want them to be happier and less stressed. A study in 2016, what are the qualities that make an affected parent? The first one was showing love and affection. The second was managing your own stress and anxiety. So this idea, move in the direction, for what I want parents to hear, is move in the direction of being a non-anxious presence in your family. When you're not anxious, You're more loving, you're more affirming, you're more affectionate, you're more flexible, you're less controlling. So it's more easier to support that sense of autonomy and independence and control in your own kids. So well said. And I'll just wrap up with a last question for each of you. What gives you hope about this generation of kids? I just think that young people in general, developing brains, are incredibly powerful. I mean, you think about some of the major advances, maybe most of the major advances in math and science. You think about the creative artists, who their creative peak is really before they're 30. The developing brain is so incredibly creative, powerful, energetic, engaged, and capable. So if they start to sleep more and that they could care their brains, they had the capability to create paradise on earth. We have the technology, we have the inner tools to develop a really beautiful society. And the young people today are particularly interested in the health of the planet, realizing that this is our home. They're interested in justice and equality and really important things. So I think with a developing brain, take care of it well. Great, have an honor. I agree with Bill, and that gives me hope. think kids will find their way. mean, every generation has their mess. This one's not, you know, atypical. And I do think, and I know social media is not the root cause of all of this, but I'm very happy to see that some states are banning it in schools, which is great. I think that gives me hope because then they'll start to really become more social with each other and perhaps the anxiety will lessen just a little. And that gives me hope too. And I think parents are searching for ways to make their lives better and their kids better. And that gives me a lot of hope because... You know, all we know is what our parents did for us or raised us. And sometimes, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. So we have to be aware of that and jettison the part that's not working for us. But that's all very hopeful. Both beautiful visions. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today and share all of this incredible knowledge and experience. And this conversation gives me hope for all those... young people who are coming up in the world now. And I'm so grateful to have resources like both of you working in this field of championing mental health for particularly young people. Thank you for having us, Danielle. Yeah, Pleasure. Really pleasure. That's a wrap on today's episode of The Inner Well. Please subscribe and leave a review. Your support means the world and helps others find us. And if this conversation added something to your day, don't be shy. Share it with someone it might resonate with. Also, please follow us on social for more Between episodes and send in your questions, your stories, or the topics you'd like to explore with us. We genuinely love hearing from you and this podcast exists because of you. So keep showing up for yourself and we'll see you next week.