Take a deep breath, let your shoulders drop, and get this: All that rushing around, multitasking, and double-booking is making you less efficient. We have come to equate being busy with being productive. We have glorified being busy. We feel like downtime is wasted time. We’re wrong.
Like so many people, I used to feel that stress equaled productivity—that it was a necessary part of success. That was pre-meditation. The contrast with post-meditation couldn’t be starker. Now I see all that stress and worry as wasted energy. After a decade of meditating regularly, I was invited to give a keynote presentation at A-Fest, a biohacking conference in Greece. There were some heavy hitters in the room, and the presentation was being filmed and distributed to over 2 million people. It was my first keynote and my first time using slides; I had a feeling this talk could change the trajectory of my career, yet I felt so calm before I went onstage. Sure, there was a heightened sense of being alive, but before I had a daily practice, you could pretty much watch me vibrate before speaking publicly. Now I allow myself to be a vessel for knowledge to flow through and serve the audience. The worry and stress are replaced with confidence that Nature has my back.
My talk in Greece was a career highlight. I spoke in front of a full house, and my presentation ended with a standing ovation. People can tell if you’re there to serve them or to serve yourself. Stress keeps you in survival mode, which keeps you focused on yourself. Meditation helps you get out of that primal “fight or flight” mode, so you can give more generously and access creative ideas, even in high-stress situations.
What did it take for me to gain that confidence, to thoroughly prepare ahead of time, and to go out and nail the challenge? Setting aside time each day for mindfulness, meditation, and manifesting.
Yes, I’m talking about giving up some of your most valuable resource every day. We all kill plenty of time during the day doing other things—watching TV, checking social media, watching cat videos on YouTube—that don’t improve our productivity, so what’s another few minutes that will actually help you increase your performance capabilities and enable you to become a better, more efficient human?
Some of the busiest people you can think of make time for meditation every day. It’s not because they have copious amounts of free time. It’s because they have done the research on their own brains and bodies, and they now know the opportunity cost of not meditating. At Ziva, we love working with high performers, people who are lit up about their mission. Stacy London, from TLC’s What Not to Wear, is one of them. She uses fashion as a way to help people feel more comfortable in their skin regardless of their size, shape, or age. When she came to Ziva to learn meditation, she wasn’t convinced it could help her. “I was one of those people who always thought I didn’t have time to meditate,” she admitted. “Who has that kind of time, right? Now I realize that was such an excuse. The busier you are, the more beneficial this kind of meditation is.”
What most people haven’t experienced yet is that your mind and your body already have the capacity to meet—and exceed—all the demands you put on them. But stress straps us with emotional blinders that block, and ultimately deplete, our power to tap into those reserves of energy and ability. When we allow our brains to recharge and defrag, we are actually building our mental capacity and increasing our creativity. If you think of your job, chores, and demands as the race you’re running in life, then meditation is your training—the mental fitness plan that allows you to achieve at a high level in every aspect of your life.
Meditation helps you accomplish your tasks much more quickly and more elegantly. Think about that for a moment: For the thirty minutes you spend in meditation each day (total), you’re becoming a much more effective person. You’ll meet challenges and solve problems in much less time than they would normally take. When Michael Trainer, the national director of the Global Poverty Project and former executive producer of the Global Citizen Festival, came to me to learn meditation, he was surprised at what he gained. “A greater sense of equanimity, relaxation, clarity,” he reported. “I think it’s unequivocally one of the best investments you could make.”
Here’s the ROI on your thirty minutes a day of meditation: You’ll get more done, be more relaxed, and achieve goals you never believed attainable. You’ll increase your problem-solving powers, be more open to creative solutions, and have more energy to deal with adversity. Your capacity for handling setbacks will expand, and you’ll marvel at your ability to get things done.
As you’ll recall from chapter 1, the meditation portion of the Ziva Technique is called nishkam karma yoga, which is just a fancy way of saying “union attained by action hardly taken”—in other words, meditation for the busy person.
In this type of meditation, you’re basically giving your body and brain deep rest—rest that is up to five times deeper than sleep!—so it can release a lifetime of accumulated stress. People’s familiarity with other styles of meditation often leads them to think there’s a “good” or “perfect” way to meditate, which often creates frustration in us less-than-perfect human beings.
The reason I created the Ziva Technique—and one of the reasons it’s becoming more popular—is that you can do it anywhere, anytime, as long as you have a few minutes. You don’t need robes or incense; you don’t have to wait for quiet, or until you’re calm and everything is sunshine and roses. All you need is your mantra, some training, and a place to sit. We will keep revisiting this concept, so don’t worry about having to “clear your mind”—that’s a misconception about meditation. So, if you’ve ever tried meditation and felt like a failure because you couldn’t quiet your mind, don’t panic. As we discussed in chapter 1, the mind thinks involuntarily just like the heart beats involuntarily. This practice is mercifully simple, but the payoff is incredible.
People come to meditation for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes they’re dealing with anxiety, depression, migraines, or insomnia. Sometimes they’ve been diagnosed with an incurable illness. More and more, I’m seeing people come to meditation as a performance-enhancing tool. In fact, I like to think of Ziva as the meditation for improved performance—and it’s exactly this practice that I’ve adapted for this book.
Over the past forty years, neurological researchers have been proving what meditators have known for six thousand years. Science has found that meditation increases the gray and white matter in your brain. More specifically, it enlarges the structure that connects the right and left sides of your brain, known as the corpus callosum. That’s valuable because we tend to be very left brain–focused in our day-to-day lives. The left brain is in charge of critical, analytical thought—everything from language to balancing the checkbook and keeping track of responsibilities. But the right brain is the creative side. It’s where intuition, artistic ability, and creative problem-solving reside.
Meditation improves the connection between your analytical side and your intuitive side (that is, your critical mind and your creative mind), allowing your brain to start working in true harmony. When you meditate, your insula (the brain’s empathy center) improves communication with your dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain where you process information about unfamiliar people). As any relationship expert, therapist, or well-meaning but slightly pushy parent will tell you, communication is the key to a healthy relationship. When you enable two distinct but vital parts of your brain to connect, engage, and transmit information back and forth, you’re building essential communication between different aspects of your psyche. And I don’t mean wait-three-days-to-respond-to-a-text-and-then-send-an-ambiguous-emoji communication. I’m talking the kind of communication that happens when you sit down with your partner and look into each other’s eyes, baring your souls and speaking without reservation, fear, or pretense. I mean the kind of open and honest communication that tends to happen over a second bottle of wine or a third pint of Ben & Jerry’s (or both—no judgment). When the disparate parts of your brain are communicating at such an intense level, neuropathways become neuro-superhighways as you build, connect, and reinforce those connections.
These connections between your creativity and your analysis are the source of the all-important “sixth sense”: intuition. Intuition can help guide you to better, more creative solutions to your daily challenges; it can also heighten your awareness by making your mind more effective at both taking in and evaluating situations before you’re even conscious that you’ve given the matter any thought. You tap into a whole new level of efficiency because your creativity helps you problem-solve at work and in relationships.
For example, University of Arizona researchers had human resources managers try mindfulness for eight weeks and then analyzed their decision-making skills, their focus under pressure, and their overall stress levels. Compared to managers who didn’t take the class, the mindfulness practitioners had much better focus and could stay on task much longer. Best of all, they reported feeling less stressed in general.
Relieving you of stress and anxiety—which can undermine your focus and diminish your problem-solving capabilities—is what this book is all about. In one of the purest tests of what meditation does for the mind, Carnegie Mellon researchers asked thirty-five unemployed men and women to try meditation or, for comparison, relaxation exercises. These people, as you can imagine, were under tremendous stress as they desperately scrambled to find jobs. After just three days, the meditation group felt immensely better. Even more remarkably, brain scans found better communication between the areas of the brain that process stress and those related to focus and calm. When the researchers checked back in after four months, the meditation group had much lower levels of stress-related hormones in their blood. They felt more optimistic about their job search and more productive in meeting their day-to-day challenges and goals.1
These volunteers also had less overall inflammation, one of the great dangers of our modern diet and lifestyle. When you pull a muscle or bump into a doorframe, your body’s response is to rush biological healing mechanisms to the injured area. Blood flow to the injury increases as your immune system delivers the proteins and chemicals that will repair the damage. It’s a great system—unless it’s overtaxed. So many things in and around us provoke this inflammatory response: poor diet, stress, and toxins in our environment, to name just a few. For some people, this constant exposure can lead to runaway inflammation, triggering autoimmune disorders like allergies, diabetes, lupus, and Crohn’s disease. But you can tame the inflammation in your body through meditation. By reducing the acidic (and therefore inflammatory) effects of stress and improving sleep, your body is better able to heal itself and tamp down inflammation. The result is that you feel better, breathe easier, and manage weight and health with ease.
Lindsey Clayton, a celebrity trainer, was taking a big professional step forward when her health began to fall apart. “I was transitioning from musical theatre to fitness, and I suddenly found myself in a very high-demand job,” she explained. Lindsey loved the new career, which included starring in a TV show on Bravo, but she was putting in eighty hours a week with no days off: “I was becoming very successful very quickly, but I had stopped caring for myself. Staring in the mirror on New Year’s Eve, I could see the toll—it was written all over my face.” Her anxiety had reached an all-time high. She felt overworked, unmotivated, frustrated, and depressed. “My skin looked dry, my hair dull, and my eyes sad, and my knee was still swollen and painful from a four-month-old injury.” After almost a year of resisting a friend’s suggestion that she try meditation, Lindsey finally gave in: “I built up the courage to attend an intro talk at Ziva Meditation.”
After just a few sessions, she began to notice a difference—a difference that led to a life-changing experience. Her knee injury healed, her frustration dissipated, and she started working smarter instead of longer. Lindsey was able to cut back on her crazy hours while also getting even more work done. After learning to meditate, she noticed a dramatic improvement in her physical and emotional health: “I feel so much happier, and I can look in the mirror and see how much healthier my skin and hair are. Most important, I have the energy to create the life I truly want to live.”
When you’re healthy and your body is calm, you’re able to use your energy for your real work on this planet. Your life may continue to be “busy,” but it won’t be chaotic. You’ll find you can manage the problems and challenges far more elegantly, without the drama.
Why does meditation have such a pronounced effect on your work and personal performance? In a nutshell, it rewires your brain to be more efficient. The technical term is neuroplasticity, which is a fancy word for the brain’s ability to change itself. The brain can become more innovative and creative when it comes to problem solving. It can even appear in tests to have grown younger after years of practice. How does it do what scientists previously thought was impossible? Meditation relieves stress from the body by de-exciting the nervous system, which allows the brain to operate in its most effective way possible, rather than from perpetual crisis mode.
If stress is so bad for us as humans, then why does it exist in the first place? In order to understand this, we need to step back in time ten thousand years or so, to the days when humankind was still hunting and gathering for survival. There you are, minding your own business, picking berries and thinking about what you want to paint on the walls of your cave that evening. Suddenly, a saber-toothed tiger leaps out of the woods with the intent to kill. Your body automatically launches into a series of chemical reactions known as the fight-or-flight stress response.
First, your digestive tract floods with acid to shut down digestion, because it takes a lot of energy to digest your food, and you need all hands on deck to fight or flee. That same acid will then seep into your skin so that you won’t taste very good if that tiger bites into you. Your blood will start to thicken and coagulate so if you do get bitten into, you won’t necessarily bleed to death. Your vision will go from wide-scope to tunnel vision, so you’re not distracted from your opponent. Your bladder and bowels will evacuate so you’re lighter on your feet and able to move quickly. (Those nervous poos you get before a major presentation? That’s your body having a primal reaction and trying to protect you.) Your heart rate, cortisol, and adrenaline levels will increase. Your immune system goes to the back burner, because who cares if you’re going to get cancer if you’re about to be killed by a tiger? Again, you need all hands on deck to fight or flee this predatory attack.
This series of chemical reactions has been custom-designed over millions of years to keep your meat-suit alive, and it’s very, very useful if your most pressing demand is to avoid becoming lunch for Stone Age carnivores. But in the modern world, when you undergo that process several times a day, every day, it fries your nervous system, overtaxes your immune system, and leaves you susceptible to viruses and bacteria. What we fail to realize is that there’s a massive reservoir of calm and natural intelligence within us—including our body’s ability to heal and maintain itself—waiting for us to tap. When you properly manage stress, your body simply works better. It is this constant, low-grade, chronic stress that is making us stupid, sick, and slow as a species. Thankfully, this doesn’t have to be the norm.
This fight-or-flight stress reaction has become largely maladaptive for our modern-day demands. The good news here is that as we learn to meditate and make it a nonnegotiable part of our daily routine, we can not only get out of fight or flight but also start to tap into the massive reservoir of energy and natural intelligence that resides within us. When you properly manage stress (instead of letting stress manage you), your body and brain can take all that energy previously wasted on imaginary tiger attacks and start to channel it into all the things you want to create in your lifetime.
Once your brain reaches the right/left brain synchronicity that meditation offers, the world opens up to you. Solutions to everyday problems are much easier to find. I’ve heard it from students over and over again, and I’ve experienced it in my own life. It might be quickly solving a disagreement between your kids or your coworkers; it might be figuring out how to get through a demanding workday; it might be as simple as finding a rock-star parking space.
Major corporations are starting to realize what meditation can do for company performance, and they’re beginning to offer it to their employees. Aetna, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, offered mindfulness courses to its workforce, and more than a quarter of its fifty thousand employees signed up, reported the New York Times. On average, the people who took the course experienced a 28 percent reduction in stress levels, a 20 percent improvement in sleep quality, and a 19 percent reduction in pain. Crucially, the Aetna practitioners also became much more effective at their jobs, gaining, on average, 62 minutes a week of productivity and saving the company $3,000 per employee every year. Demand for the programs continues to rise; at Aetna, every class is overbooked.2 And all this came from them practicing only one of the 3 M’s you’re going to learn about in this book!
What creates this newfound ability to accomplish more? Meditation helps you access an internal resource I call adaptation energy. Adaptation energy is your ability to handle a demand or a change of expectation. It’s the energy we draw on to manage our ever-growing to-do lists—and most of us are running on empty. Don’t believe me? Let’s put this into a real-life scenario: Imagine waking up late on Monday morning—your alarm failed to go off. That’s a drag, but you can shrug it off. You cut your morning routine short and race out the door on time.
Adaptation energy: Your ability to handle a demand or a change of expectation.
But then you get stuck in traffic. Everyone’s slowing down to stare at a guy changing his tire on the side of the road. The backup has added fifteen minutes to your commute. Oof! You bang the steering wheel and burn up a bit more of your precious adaptation energy.
You park the car and then swing by the coffee shop to grab some java for work—only to find out they’re in the middle of brewing a new batch. “Here, have this chamomile tea on the house,” says the overly cheery barista. That’s the last thing you want, and now you’re fuming and left with even less adaptation energy in the tank. The day escalates from there: Your boss yells at you for being late; you miss a meeting that somehow disappeared from your calendar. When you get home, your spouse doesn’t understand why you’re in such a bad mood. Then you’re standing at the sink drinking some water—or perhaps something a little stronger—and the glass slips out of your hand and shatters on the kitchen floor.
Suddenly you’re either crying or punching the kitchen wall or both. And it’s all over a $2 glass from Crate and Barrel that you can easily replace tomorrow.
So what’s causing the involuntary reaction? It’s certainly not the stupid broken glass. It’s the fact that somewhere around two o’clock that day, you tapped out of adaptation energy. As a result, any future demands leave your body with no choice but to freak out. From that point forward, any problems—no matter how big or small—become overwhelming. Drop that glass on a day when you have sufficient sleep, few demands, and plenty of adaptation energy, and you’ll barely wince. You’re not choosing to flip out over something trivial; it happens because your well of adaptation energy is depleted.
So how do you refill your reservoirs of adaptation energy? Meditation. It’s the very thing that allows you to tap into the source of energy. If you have effective tools to manage your stress levels and anxiety, even the biggest “setbacks” can become opportunities for growth and innovation.
Yes, many people start meditation to become more productive. Once you start, you’ll want to keep doing it for the clarity and energy it gives you. If you’re unsure about those rewards or still believe you can’t devote time to sitting still, consider the remarkably busy—not to mention successful—people who do make time for meditation: Oprah Winfrey, Ray Dalio, Congressman Tim Ryan, Kobe Bryant, Tim Ferriss, Michelle Williams, Channing Tatum, Ellen DeGeneres, Meghan Markle, and Hugh Jackman, just to name a few. Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek and host of one of the world’s most popular podcasts, in which he interviews high performers, shared that 90 percent of his guests start their day with meditation.
Arianna Huffington reported from the World Economic Forum that the big news at Davos was that all the CEOs are outing themselves as meditators. Oprah Winfrey says that meditation makes her 1,000 times more productive. And the celebrities, entrepreneurs, and change-makers I’ve trained tell me meditation has increased their intuition, their energy levels, and, ultimately, their success.
Most important, you’ll find that meditation allows you to use your desires as an indicator of how best to deliver your gifts to the world. Instead of being under the illusion that your happiness lies on the other side of any person, place, or financial goal, you’ll realize that what you seek is already within you. Meditation will become not only a practice to transform your own life, but one you can use to transform the lives of the people and the world around you for the better.
We all want to perform at the top of our game, but how well we execute when faced with challenges is the single most significant separating factor between high performers and those who get stuck somewhere short of their full potential. We are all brilliant singers in the shower; everyone crushes the presentation in their living room the night before. But it doesn’t matter how well you perform until it’s go time. Having the tools to get your body and mind prepared to perform can make all the difference. That is what these pull-out exercises at the end of selected chapters are designed to give you. Some are “Eyes-Closed Exercises”—that is, directed-focus mental techniques. Others are “Eyes-Open Exercises”—these are designed to be practical tools for thinking about the topic in a different way.
These exercises are designed to help with real-life situations or to be used as a boost between your regular, twice-daily Z Technique times. Think of them as a quick hit of bliss or a midday reset to help you transform your fear into fuel and your stress into strength so you can actually start to enjoy high-pressure situations instead of running from them! You will learn how to use these supplementary techniques on your own so they become second nature, transforming your default stress response from “fight or flight” to “stay and play.” It doesn’t matter if you’ve won an Oscar, are an Olympic athlete, or have started your own business—everyone gets nervous in high-demand situations. Top performers are those people who are able to consistently flip the script on fear. Bravery is not the absence of fear; it is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
Some of the exercises are simply practical tips to incorporate into your day to reduce stress or improve performance; some use the breath to reset the brain and body; and others use visualization—helping you to see things in your mind that you want to show up in your life. As the late self-help legend Wayne Dyer said, “You’ll see it when you believe it.”
If you prefer to listen to an audio version and have me guide you through, many of the exercises are available at www.zivameditation/bookbonus.
Eyes-Closed Exercise
The 2x Breath
This simple but powerful breathing technique can keep you from spiraling into a cesspool of stress and help you become more present in the current moment.
You can’t negotiate with your stress. When you are in fight-or-flight mode, the amygdala takes over. The amygdala is an ancient, preverbal part of the brain. This is why it doesn’t work when you simply tell yourself to relax (or worse, when someone else tells you to relax). The part of you that is stressed doesn’t understand language. Instead, we have to shift the body physically or chemically. That is what the 2x Breath technique will do.
The magic is in doubling the length of the exhale. This calms the vagus nerve, one of the main connections between the brain and the body. As you relax it, information can start to flow from your brain to your body and vice versa, opening you up to solutions from Nature as they present themselves.
Take note of how you feel before and after this exercise. It is simple on purpose. Many of my students share that taking a few minutes to practice the 2x Breath is enough to keep anxiety attacks at bay if they catch them early enough. Now give yourself a big internal high five and go about your day knowing there is power and integrity in tending to your mental fitness.