Dr. Judson Brewer, MD, PhD is a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, author, and Founder of MindSciences, Inc. Dr. Jud, as he's known, has spent over 20 years at Yale, MIT, and Brown University researching how the brain forms negative behavior patterns, bad habits, and addictions, and has developed meditation-based techniques for creating lasting change. His work has received funding by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the American Heart Association (AHA). He is the Director of Research and Innovation at the Mindfulness Center and associate professor in psychiatry at the School of Medicine at Brown University, as well as a research affiliate at MIT. Dr. Jud has been featured on CNN's 60 Minutes, Forbes, TIME, NPR and has the 4th most popular TED talk of 2016 with over 10 million views. He also wrote a book called The Craving Mind, which I highly recommend and has trained US Olympic coaches. In this episode, we talk about thought addiction, using mindfulness to treat anxiety, eating disorders and smoking addiction, the neuroscientific mechanisms of addiction, subjective bias, and the latest cutting-edge research into the neuroscience of mindfulness. Dr. Jud's mindfulness-based treatments for smoking, emotional eating, and anxiety are apps called (respectively) Craving to Quit, Eat Right Now, and Unwinding Anxiety. FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Jiro Taylor is the Founder & CEO of the Flowstate Collective, a company dedicated toward helping leaders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs achieve self-mastery. He spent two years studying Zen Buddhism in Japan and instead of becoming a monk went into the corporate world where he was making millions in London and Hong Kong. Jiro's path took another radical turn when he reached a breaking point in 2008 and left his very financially-rewarding career. He then wandered the earth for 11 years exploring happiness through meditation, surfing and learning from masters of presence and flow. In this episode, we discuss Jiro's journey from great financial success and drug abuse into an eventual breakdown that led him to forge a radically new path in life, the shift from a life of doing to a life of being, self-knowledge, meditation, flow states, and breaking out of cultural narratives and conditioning. FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Mind Nuggets are mini-episodes on how the mind works and how to apply it for the best life possible. They are taken directly from the FitMind meditation training app.  Inner Chatter talks about that voice in your head that can prove so challenging sometimes, offering a skillful method for understanding and relating to it. Topics covered: • Mind-Wandering • Where do thoughts come from? • The first obstacle in meditation FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Dr. Willoughby Britton is a neuroscientist at Brown University studying the neurocognitive effects of mindfulness-based interventions for mood and anxiety disorders. She's currently the Director of Brown's Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory and has research service awards from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As a clinician, Dr. Britton has been trained as an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and has taught mindfulness to both clinical and non-clinical populations, as well as in federally-funded clinical trials. She also runs an organization called Cheetah House, a non-profit that supports meditators in distress. In this episode, we discuss the potential dark sides of meditation practice. In a western world where meditation has been taken out of eastern traditions and spread widely in a secular context, we need to be pragmatic and aware of the risks. Dr. Britton's research has demonstrated that some meditators experience adverse side effects as a result of their practice, and she helps us understand how to avoid such pitfalls. For example, she talks about the specific meditation techniques one should employ and also avoid if they have a history of trauma. It's important to note that this shouldn't scare you away from meditation, but rather help you to understand that meditation is fundamentally reordering of the mind, a delicate instrument that determines our realities, in ways that we can't take lightly. Dr. Britton's work is important because it challenges dogma and seeks to help a minority group of meditators who are experiencing some life-threatening adverse phenomena. And while she admits that there's much more research to be done, her early findings are both fascinating and essential knowledge for any meditator. FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Mind Nuggets are mini-episodes on how the mind works and how to apply it for the best life possible. They are taken directly from the FitMind meditation training app.  Modern Survival is all about our newest challenge as a species: the struggle for fulfillment. Topics covered: • Innate psychological needs • The modern meaning crisis • The evolution of happiness • Meditation as an antidote FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Dr. Ash Sangoram is a neuroscientist, neonatologist, former assistant Stanford Golf coach, and the founder of GoaLoGolf, an elite performance training company. Ash trained under two National Academy of Science neuroscientists and implemented this understanding of the brain into his golf practice to drop his handicap by 15 points while rehabilitating from a spinal cord injury. Ash is also an experience insight meditation practitioner, and he is currently working on bringing neuroscience and meditation principles into the Stanford golf program. Ash believes that meditation and elite athletic performance are inextricably linked, with neuroscience providing the glue that grounds how to go about practicing for elite performance. This is a wide-ranging conversation on how the mind works and how to optimize it. FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Mind Nuggets are mini-episodes on how the mind works and how to apply it for the best life possible. They are taken directly from the FitMind meditation training app.  Attention Economy is all about the value of attention and how to use it skillfully throughout the day. Topics covered: • Attention engineers • Subconscious programming • Attention Deficit Disorder • Eliminating low-quality, dopamine-rich information FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Loch Kelly is a meditation teacher and psychotherapist who combines western science and psychology with ancient eastern methods for training the mind. He's the Founder of Open-Hearted Awareness Institute and author of Shift Into Freedom and The Way of Effortless Mindfulness. Loch served on the New York Insight Teachers Council, studied extensively with Mingyur Rinpoche, and was invited to teach by Adyashanti, two very famous meditation teachers. Given his extensive experience meditating and decades studying with teachers in Sri Lanka, Nepal and all around the world, Loch was asked to collaborate with neuroscientists at Yale, UPenn, and NYU in the study of how meditation training can enhance the brain. In this episode, we discuss flow states, non-duality, and how to shift out of a thought-based operating system, and Loch leads a powerful guided meditation. FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Mind Nuggets are mini-episodes on how the mind works and how to apply it for the best life possible. They are taken directly from the FitMind meditation training app.  Pleasure vs. Fulfillment is all about why we ought to aim for lasting happiness in an age of instant gratification. Topics covered: • Psychology of YOLO • The Downstairs Brain • Struggling for fulfillment FitMind Neuroscience-Based App: http://bit.ly/afitmind Website: www.fitmind.com

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, founder of Ness Labs and former Google employee, discusses burnout, imposter syndrome, neuromyths, the cobra effect, joy triggers, FOBO, and time anxiety in this engaging podcast.