Name: When & How to Practice Effective Meditation | Dr. Richard Davidson & Dr. Andrew Huberman
Uploaded: 2026-03-22T21:37:06.000Z
Duration: 12 min 30 s
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The second conditional

If one were going to choose to meditate and have the option to do it at a sort of liminal state between, let's say, being awake and going to sleep at night, or between sleep and shortly after one wakes up and starting the day versus in the middle of the day or in the middle of the morning, is there any advantage to placing meditation in one of these, what I'm calling liminal states or transition states between sleeping and awake in either direction?

Adverbs of manner

I would say probably for most people, yes is the answer.

But I think there's a lot of individual variability.

In general, I would say it's useful to meditate when you're feeling most awake and less sleepy.

Sleepiness is an important obstacle in meditation, and there's a lot to say about that.

I expected you to say that one should meditate at a time when the brain is closest to sleep because you want to be in a state of mind that's less about controlling your thoughts.

But then again, I could also see an argument for how meditation involves a redirect of attention.

What is the meditative state that one is seeking for, quote, unquote, effective meditation?

So first let me say that just like there are hundreds of different kinds of sports, there are hundreds of different kinds of meditation.

They have different effects on the brain and the body.

And so I think it's really important that we not lump all of meditation together.

So, for instance, if we were going to draw the parallel with exercise, maybe we'll do that several times today.

We can broadly lump exercise into cardiovascular and resistance training.

There's also mobility work, and then there's a bunch of other stuff with meditation.

And then we can go into specific practices.

So, and we've done that, we've published some papers that offer typologies for classifying different meditation states.

So one kind of meditation we call focused attention meditation, and

focused attention meditation is where you are narrowing your aperture of awareness to a specific object.

It could be an external object, it could also be an internal.

It could be, for example, your respiration, it could be a sound, and

And this is all broadly within the category of practices that we would say are cultivating aspects of awareness.

So another Awareness practice is what we call open monitoring meditation, and

open monitoring is where there is no specific focus, but

rather the aperture is broadened and there is no specific intention to focus on any one thing or another.

The invitation is to simply be aware of whatever is arising as it arises.

One of the aspirations there, or the invitations is not to try to get rid of thoughts, because our minds and our brains are built to generate thoughts.

So there's no goal, if you will, to get rid of thoughts, but

rather to if thoughts arise, that's another object that you can be aware of.

You know, we talked about sleep and sleepiness and that earlier.

The goal, if you will, is not to change or to fix anything, if you will.

The invitation is to shift from a mode of doing to a mode of simply being.

I want to talk about this thing about doing to being, because the language can sound a bit mystical and vague to people, but

as a longtime practitioner of Yoga Nidra, I've talked a lot about on this podcast.

There's this instruction inside of Yoga Nidra to shift from thinking and doing to being and feeling.

Which is beautiful language, poetic, et cetera.

But also, as neuroscientists and for the general public, I think it might be useful for us to just maybe just double click on that for one second.

As a neuroscientist, I think of thinking and doing as okay.

So the opposite of that would be stop moving the body, thinking.

Well, there's a whole discussion to be had about what is thinking in neuroscience, but

You wouldn't want to be ruminating on the past.

Presumably you would want to be more in a state of sensation and perceiving what's happening right now.

So is that an appropriate breakdown or is it wrong?

I'm not trying to score an A with the professor here.

I'm trying to figure out when we hear move from thinking and doing to being and feeling, what does that mean in terms of actionable steps that people can take?

Yeah, so I think that the way you describe it is basically accurate with a little bit of perhaps tweak.

So if one is invited to do this and one finds oneself ruminating or planning, for example, which is supposedly an activity you're, quote, not supposed to be doing, rather than trying to stop it, it's simply to be aware of it.

Wow, I'm now planning or I'm now ruminating about something that happened in the past, what really is most important is the invitation not to change it, not to actively try to shift it, but

And one of the, I think conjectures in all of this is that there's so much going on under the hood that we're typically not aware of.

You know, our lives are moving at such a pace that the information that is transpiring is occurring at such a rapid rate that we are typically aware of only a small fraction of that.

And this is a practice that's inviting you to simply be aware of that.

you know, not doing is a helpful kind of thing because if we're, if we're acting in the world, we obviously need to navigate and there are things we obviously need to do to be safe and to protect ourselves and so forth.

And so that will engage other mechanisms.

I'm interested in the possibility, or maybe you've seen this in the data that there are at least two different types of people, people who for instance, go through life feeling, doing, being, thinking and projecting things out into the world.

Or maybe they're quiet people and they don't project much out into the world, but

they're just doing their thing and they're not thinking about, they're thinking, they're not thinking about their doing, they're just doing.

Then there are people who are always multi tracking like, you know, they're self conscious, they're very self aware.

And I'm wondering whether or not a form of meditation where somebody arrives at the meditation very self aware, like oh, there's my thought about that again.

And working perhaps on not judging it could be beneficial, but

perhaps what that person needs or would benefit from was just being in a state of freedom from their self monitoring.

Whereas the other person perhaps could clinician here could afford to be a little more self aware and realize, oh, you know, I'm in this mode where, and

And you're naming something super important.

And you know, I think that the way you characterize the, the second person who is more self aware, it's, there's more than just self awareness in your description.

It's not just monitoring, but there's a kind of suppression almost.

It's a lot of work and it could be stifling for their creativity.

We had my friend David Cho on the podcast.

That was actually the first time we had met, but

we've become a good friends and he's a brilliant artist.

And he talks about how the best art comes from just forgetting what anyone thinks or wants.

You know, Rick Rubin talks about this just getting the audience out of your mind and just letting it flow through you.

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When & How to Practice Effective Meditation | Dr. Richard Davidson & Dr. Andrew Huberman

stuff

specific

perceive

meditation