Scott Anderson, Ph.D.

Mention meditation to most people and they’ll picture mindfulness: sitting quietly, following the breath, noticing thoughts come and go. That picture isn’t wrong, but it’s incomplete. Meditation is a large tent, and mindfulness, or what researchers call the “attentional” practices, is only one part of what lives under it. Three Families of Practice In academic settings, meditation is often sorted into three families: attentional, constructive, and deconstructive practices. That framework comes from my friend Cortland Dahl, who developed it with his colleagues Antoine Lutz and Richard Davidson in a 2015 paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences . It’s an elegant model, grounded in the cognitive mechanisms each style of practice engages. In my own teaching, though, I lean toward the more descriptive names I first heard from my teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, who divides meditation into practices of awareness , compassion , and wisdom . These categories have shaped how I practice and teach ever ...

  Most mornings I'm on the rowing machine well before the sun rises. With the first few strokes, I set the intention that the time I spend working out benefits not only me but all beings. And with that, the meditation begins. Practice is a cornerstone of my day, and over the years I've come to see that the relationship runs both ways: meditation makes healthy routines far easier to sustain, and healthy routines make meditation more stable and alive. Approaches to meditation vary widely, but most share three common threads: awareness, compassion, and wisdom. Awareness is our inherent capacity to be present, here and now. Compassion is the warmth we feel naturally toward those we love. Widening that circle of care, as I aim to do each morning on the rower, turns out to be good for both body and mind. Wisdom is seeing things as they are, rather than turning life's molehills into mountains. Most days I meditate during and after cardio. My favorite way to weave meditation into ...

Behavior change is hard. Whether you're trying to be more active, adjust your default workout intensities, or eat more kale, ingrained patterns resist our good intentions. This is among the many reasons meditation is an integral part of my fitness regimen. Without working directly with the mind, behavior change tends to be an arduous and often futile task. Thankfully, the mind is malleable, and meditation is one of the most reliable ways to put that malleability to work. Neuroplasticity is the term for how your brain constantly restructures itself in response to experience. Neuroscientists often summarize Donald Hebb's famous principle this way: neurons that fire together, wire together. Most of the time, this rewiring happens without our noticing. Live under chronic stress, and the brain's stress circuitry grows stronger. Spend years navigating the maze of London's streets, as the city's cab drivers do, and the brain regions associated with spatial memory actually ...

For most of my adult life, I could drink coffee after lunch and sleep just fine. These days a 1pm cup means I'm staring at the ceiling at 1:30am. As we age, our bodies take progressively longer to clear caffeine out of our system . The tolerance you built in your twenties doesn't carry forward. It quietly erodes, and most of us fail to connect the dots between our afternoon espresso and the sleep we can't figure out how to fix. I'm fond of espresso. I cut my caffeine consumption by about 60% a couple months ago. The 1:30am wakeups stopped almost immediately, and I'm sleeping the way I did in my 30s. My wife Collette went further and eliminated caffeine entirely, coffee, tea, chocolate, all of it, and the change in her sleep has been remarkable enough that I suspect I'll eventually follow her there. Sleep isn't a wellness accessory. It's foundational to both mental and physical health, which is part of why sleep is one of the first things I check in on ea...

The best movement to practice is the movement that you practice. The human body is built to move, though modernity has made it increasingly easy to be sedentary. As a result, all manner of mental and physical dis-ease have become the new normal. While I advocate titrating the dose of cardio in order to maximize well-being, I remain an enthusiastic exponent of moving your body at every opportunity. Whether taking the stairs in lieu of the escalator, or grinding your coffee with a hand-grinder in lieu of using a machine, the opportunities to move your body are baked into your daily life. Some days I commute by eBike, and other days I ride my "analog" bike. It depends on the weather, how much I have to carry and the trail conditions. For example, we generally need to get from Point A to Point B. For most of us, the default conveyance is the car. While I like cars as much (or more!) than the next person, every chance we drive the car is opportunity-cost for movement. Particularly...

It probably goes without saying: as you age, your body changes. Some of those changes show up in the mirror. Many more are happening under the hood. Staying physically active matters more as the body changes, but it also has to match your current physiology. It is tempting to train the way you “used to.” In my experience, that often leads to a familiar loop: injury, inactivity, recovery, and re-injury. Others swing too far the other direction and train so gently that they barely get a return on all the time they put in. The goal is a workable middle: enough stress to drive adaptation, not so much that you pay for it for days. That is one of many reasons that I monitor my heart rate when I train. Heart rate zone training gives you a window into what is going on under the hood , which can help you choose the right duration and intensity for the day. As I have gotten older, my training focus has shifted from performance to keeping the autonomic nervous system working well. With aging, man...