Meditation project: Ethan Aughenbaugh

This is a conversation between a college student and his mom about meditation techniques. The mom has a background in mental health and uses meditation on the psychiatric unit she works in. They discuss different types of meditation, such as progressive relaxation, guided imagery, mindfulness, music, and binaural beats. They also talk about how meditation can be used in massage therapy and yoga. The mom emphasizes the importance of adapting meditation techniques to individual patients and being mindful of potential triggers. They also mention a program called Timeless, which uses binaural beats for a meditative state. Overall, they see meditation as a beneficial tool for calming the mind and promoting relaxation. Hi, everyone. My name is Ethan Achenbach. I am a supply chain major at York College of Pennsylvania. Today I am here with not only one of my best friends but also my mom. So I'll be referring to her as mom throughout the podcast. But her name is Jill Achenbach. And today we will be talking a little bit about meditation and techniques and all of that. So I'll let my mom introduce herself a little bit and her education, her job, all that good stuff. Hi, I'm Jill. I'm Ethan's mom. I actually graduated from York College many years ago. And after I graduated, I worked as a substance abuse therapist in a local rehab for about two years. And then I decided to work outpatient in mental health and substance abuse with mainly a focus on adults. I did that for several years. And then there was a contract that opened up at the York City School District. So I provided counseling for mainly middle school and high school students. But I did work with some little kids as well. And at that point, I decided to go back to school for nursing. So I got my RN. And I worked as a floor nurse for about 10 years. Got my BSN, got my MSN. After I got my MSN, I actually worked as a York College professor for clinicals for the psych rotation. That was a wonderful experience. I was doing that as well as doing my three 12-hour shifts. And then in January, a position opened up on my unit, the behavioral health inpatient unit, to be a clinical nurse educator. So that's basically what I've been doing since I started my career. So I have 20-plus years experience in mental health. So obviously, my mom outweighs me with the education stuff. But today, I felt like one of the reasons I wanted to talk about meditation is I think it is a really good alternative. And it's something that my mom actually uses on the psych unit every day at York Hospital right across the street, essentially from where I'm getting my education currently. And today, we're just going to get into a little bit of the different types of meditation, how it's used on the unit, and kind of the things that you wouldn't necessarily expect. And I'm sure a lot of people wouldn't necessarily even expect, hey, when you think of the psych unit, you would probably not expect meditation to be one of the things that you frequently use. But that is actually the case in this situation. So I'm going to let my mom kind of introduce the different types that she uses on the unit. And obviously, I'll interject myself with any commentary as well. All right. So I'm sure most of you have heard of meditation. Meditation has been around probably since the beginning of time. It's become a lot more popular recently. And there's many types. We're obviously not going to have enough time to discuss every single type of meditation. But there are things like progressive relaxation, guided imagery, mindfulness, music, binaural beats. Yoga and tai chi can also be considered a form of meditation, as well as for my patients, they love to color. And they will color for hours and almost become in a meditative state just doing these projects. Massage, some people can get to a level of deep relaxation in a meditational state while receiving a massage. We also, on the psychiatric unit, we do drum therapy. So we have a therapist that comes in and specializes in these drum circles. I have to admit sometimes it's not the best day if I'm having a headache for the drum circle to occur. But with that being said, it's been extremely therapeutic for the patients. And they can really become in a relaxed state with the beat of the drums. It's really amazing. Although, like I said, it does work on our nerves sometimes, but we just have to be prepared for those days when that's happening. So the point of meditation is obviously we want to slow down our thinking. We want to, a lot of us have racing thoughts, whether it's about stuff going on in our life, mental health issues, our mind seems to constantly be going. So what meditation helps with is calming some of those thoughts, help regulating our emotions, and basically getting us to a level of relaxation. So one of my first questions for my mom is she did mention that things like music and things like massages could be considered forms of meditation. One of my questions is, obviously, sometimes if you've never had a massage before, like a professional massage, they typically do have white noise in the background. Do you think that helps with the meditation, like getting into that meditative state where they feel like they're in a form of meditation during like massage therapy? I think it's used for a reason. I do think that it adds to the relaxation part of that massage is to get you to kind of let go of those thoughts. You know, I consider a good massage one that they don't speak to me during it. I've had somewhere the person talk the entire time. And I would say that that did not get me to any level of meditation. So yeah, I think the music is used for that. I think it helps guide the massage therapist. I am Reiki certified as well. And I know that also kind of goes along with using music and for the practitioner, the Reiki practitioner to get into a state of, you know, close to meditation to be able to focus on the client. So they have a positive experience. So like if I would not be in good space, like, you know, if I'm up in my head, if I'm angry about something, it would make it very difficult to provide a therapeutic session for somebody using Reiki. So would you also say that the, we're going to get into this a little bit later, but there also is a physical touch aspect of releasing and relaxing your muscles, I meant to say, you know, do you think that also has a part of it as well? Yeah, we can tie that into the progressive relaxation because it's, you know, like massage obviously is touch, like Reiki is, it's touch, but it's not the same, you know, like massage type touch that you would get during that. So like with progressive relaxation, like if I was doing a session with my patients and we have varying degrees of acuity on our unit, we do have patients that suffer from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and we have higher functioning patients that have depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, addiction, those kinds of things. So it's a wide range of patients. So to start the session for progressive relaxation, I would use more of like, you know, introduce, you know, some deep breathing, you know, the breath like in through your nose, out through your mouth. And then what progressive relaxation does is you are tensing your muscle groups and then relaxing them. So the focus is the tensing and relaxation. So it's supposed to make you more aware of your physical sensations, supposed to last about 15 seconds of holding that. So like if I would be like, you know, I need you to tense your hands and you tighten them. So I think we should all tense our hands together right now. We're going to tense our hands for about 15 seconds, closing our eyes and then just release it. So that's basically what it is. Now it's not like the patient has to come up with how to go about doing this. I would be reading kind of like a script saying, you know, okay, we're going to start with this, you know, our, our, our, our neck and we're going to, you know, tighten our neck and then we're going to relax and then we're going to tighten our shoulders. So we work the whole way through our body and then we end again with deep breathing. So I'm not a super big fan of it. I do feel like it's okay for a certain group of patients, people that have a lot of tension, a lot of anger, maybe control issues seem to benefit from it the most. Like I said, it's not a favorite of mine and I'm just speaking from my experience. I know that there's a lot of research on these and there's a lot of studies on them and you know, they speak so highly of evidence-based practice on some of these things. I'm speaking just from my experience working with real life patients and myself on the unit. So, you know, my experience is maybe different than, you know, a controlled environment that a study would take place in. So would this go, would yoga, physical therapy, that type of thing, would that go under that category of progressive relaxation or would you consider it kind of a little bit different? I think it's a little bit different, like yoga is more a flow. So you're going through like stretching exercise and like a flow. And again, you know, some people that do yoga sessions use music in the background. Typically if you've ever taken yoga at the end, they do almost like, you know, sort of like a guided imagery, which we'll get into where, you know, they're like, this has been a wonderful session. It's, you know, deep relaxation, go forth into your day. Namaste. Had to throw that into it. But I mean, yoga works wonderful for a lot of people. It gets a lot of that stretch, which to me is a little different than tensing muscles. So I would much prefer doing yoga over progressive relaxation. But we can move into guided imagery and this is probably something that most of you guys have been familiar with. Or sometimes when you think of meditation, you might think of this type. Or you might have even seen ads, like for example, if you go into Instagram and honestly, if you probably say the word meditation, you know, your phone will give you personalized ads and you might see the ad for Calm, where I have seen so many of them where it's, you know, blocks getting cut up and it's saying, you know, download this app. And honestly, this is I feel like the most common used one among students, among your normal everyday person, I would say. Yeah, and I think it's definitely good. I think with all the apps that are out there, like when I first started working in this field, we didn't have apps. So basically, I had to buy a bunch of books that had scripts of different guided imagery scenarios, or I had to come up with them myself. It is so much easier working in this field now than it was years ago, because not only can I like, you know, teach my patients these skills, I can say, hey, you know, you can get this free app on your phone. I mean, most people do have an iPhone or, you know, they can download apps and make it so much easier for this to not just be something that they learn on the unit, but we encourage them to use coping skills, not just on the unit, but outside, you know, when they leave. And I think one of the positives about having this type of meditation is, like my mom said, it's very easily accessible. So like most college students, you know, would be able to get any of these apps, regardless of what type of phone you have. They're usually Android, Apple. I mean, even if you weren't a part of either of those brands, you could still pull them up on your laptop. There's YouTube videos. There's so many different ways to access this type of meditation. Or if you're from the older generation, these used to come on CDs. I don't know if there's CD players still out there. Or the thicker ones with the... Like a tape? Like a, yeah. They used to come on those. Cassette tapes and stuff. Cassette tapes. So we don't use those anymore, you know, not on the unit or really anywhere. But if people, you know, they're older, that's how they... they don't have a phone like that, they could still use us. So with guided imagery, basically you're looking at, you know, relaxation. I mean, that's always the goal of the meditation. But it's more mental imagery. So you know, if you have a scenario like this, you know, typically I like to have like music in the background. You know, create that vibe for the patients. And again, we always start the sessions by doing deep breathing to kind of get them into a relaxed state. You know, when you have a lot going on, doctors are talking to you, you're worried, you don't know how you're... who's going to watch your kids. You know, the situations that my patients deal with on the unit, it's hard to kind of calm that down. So usually with the deep breathing, that kind of gets them to relax a little bit to be able to focus on what I'm saying. So then you have like your ocean music going or something. And this is where I would say something to the extent, you know, give or take, you know, like relax your body, do some deep breathing, and we take the breath. Imagine you're at the ocean, you feel the cool breeze coming from the ocean. There's nothing around except the warmth of the sand. You can feel the warmth of the sun hitting your face. You're watching the waves as they crash and hear the seagulls through the distance. Each time you have a worry or your mind wanders, return to the safe place, this comfortable place. So it's kind of like a dialogue, so to speak. It's kind of walking you through what some would consider a more safe and relaxing scenario. So one of my other questions I have for you is you did mention, for example, the beach. Has there ever been an instance where you would say, okay, you know, we're on a beach and you have a patient or you have someone you know kind of be like, oh, well, I hate the beach or, you know, I have a negative experience with wherever you're trying to place their mind in or? Yeah. So, I mean, obviously it's like anything. I have made so many mistakes along the way and it's definitely a process. You know, I don't want to do harm to the patient. That's the number one thing. And you know, when I first started doing this, you know, it's trial and error. It's like, you know, are they going to find my voice even halfway relaxing? I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I'm all over the place. You need a Morgan Freeman voice or something. Yes. It's like, you know, and I don't have that. So, you know, I have run into situations where we start the meditation all as well and we're, you know, walking on the sand, everybody seems good. And then all of a sudden I see somebody's eyes pop open. They're completely distressed, crying. And I'm like, this has gone horribly wrong. This is bad. So I've learned because, you know, everybody comes with baggage. We all come with different types of trauma. There's no way for me to know every type of trauma somebody's experienced. So I start out the session different than I used to. I used to kind of be like, hey, we're going to do this relaxation thing. It's got imagery. I used to let them pick, you know, do you want to go to the mountains? Do you want to go to the beach? And then I take consensus and that's where we go. So now I kind of present it a little bit different. I will say like, you know, okay, we're going to do the beach dialogue. If anybody has had a bad experience at the beach or you feel like this would be a trigger in some way for you, you can either, you know, attempt to stay for the session and excuse yourself at, you know, if it becomes uncomfortable or you don't need to attend this particular group. I kind of let it up to them. They know their comfort level. I have had people decide not to stay for the group because of that. You know, like you would think the mountains would be safe, you know, the deer, you know, all that stuff. But, you know, somebody had been sexually abused in a cabin. So therefore that could be extremely traumatizing. So it's definitely something that I've learned and been much more aware of doing this. I need to, you know, adapt to the patients I'm working with. So you would say it's more of a case by case basis rather than something that happens every single time? Yeah. I mean, I would say 90% of the time I could do, read any of them and everybody's cool. You know, but there are times where, you know, it brings up something for somebody or I got like an emotional response after the session is over. And I was like, you know, did it bring up something? And they're like, no, it just released some of my emotions. So some of them might be in tears or just, you know, just seem like they're so emotional, but that's not a bad thing. That's something that we can, you know, that's good. They're getting their emotions out. So I look at that as a positive. Awesome. So do you want to get into the last form of meditation? Well, there's two more. Oh, two more. Okay. Two more. A few more. So I'm going to talk a little bit about mindfulness just because this has been like the new, like the new word, you know, like, oh, practice mindfulness. Mindfulness has actually been around at least since I've been a therapist, so 20 plus years. We used to use it with DBT patients, dialectical behavioral therapy patients. So that would be a lot of patients that suffer from borderline personality disorder. We're trying to teach them coping strategies. This is very similar in a sense to the other types of meditation, but it's being more fully present. So like just trying to bring your thoughts, your racing thoughts to the here and now. That's probably the easiest way to describe it. There's like a lot of evidence-based practice on it because it is used in a specific type of therapy. It's supposed to improve your health, your happiness, your work, you know, your relationships, decrease stress, and it's supposed to just help you become more aware, not overreact to the situation or feel overwhelmed by situations. So if you had a distressing situation, you'd be able to take these deep breaths and kind of bring yourself back to the here and now. So that just sums that up. And I don't mean to interject right here, but this is also the one that I'm going to discuss a study that I found later on, and this directs right with that, you know, being mindful of your thoughts and being mindful less of the surrounding things such as your environment and rather just where your thoughts are going. And I think that's what you're trying to get out there with, you know, being mindful of, hey, this is what I'm thinking about, and this is why I'm thinking about this. And sometimes, you know, it could be for a variety of different reasons, but yeah. All right. So we're going to move on to something that I would say in the past year or two, I've become much more interested in for myself because I think life is stressful. And you know, even working in the mental health field, and I have obviously access to psychiatrists and medical doctors and supportive staff, it's still hard. And you still have your life situations that you have to deal with. I have a hard time with meditation in general because I'm like everybody else. My mind is always going. It's hard to kind of slow down and stop. A few years ago, there was a book that was out. It's called Proof of Heaven. It's by Evan Alexander. He's a neurosurgeon and kind of grew up in a religious home but was never really bought into religion or spirituality. And you know, obviously, he's a scientist. So if it wasn't scientifically proven, he didn't believe it. This guy ended up getting meningitis to the point where they did not expect him to live. He was in a coma for quite some time. And during that time, he had what they consider a near-death experience. And I'm not here to try to get you to buy into a near-death experience or not. This is his experience. So what he was saying is after he went through this, he started to really look at more of this spiritual side and just the state that he felt in the near-death experience, which is very similar to what people report in a meditative state. So it's a sense of calm, less pain, clarity, awareness, just having clear cognition. And what he had said he had found is a program that's called Timeless. It is HemiSync. So it's binaural beats, if you guys have ever heard of binaural beats. It's based on like your left ear registers, let's say, at 200 hertz and your right ear might register at 210. The binaural beat is 10 hertz, if that makes any sense. I know it's a little confusing. It's just a difference in frequency. So like alpha beats are like 18, 13 hertz. That's more of relaxation, increased positivity, decreased anxiety. Beta would be like 14 to 30, increased concentration, alertness, problem solving, increased memory. And then gamma is another one that there's a little bit more research on as far as increasing cognition, flexibility, and focus, which kind of ties into what I believe Ethan's study that he did looked at like kind of like the neurological benefits of meditation. So I'm just going to play you just like a small clip of this Timeless HemiSync, which is actually Delta. And the video does say Timeless HemiSync. So that's a con. And so you would have to realize also that, you know, typically when you would be listening to this, you know, you would be wearing headphones and you would be hearing these different waves of frequencies, like my mom was saying, through each of your left and right ear and all of that. So that's his recommendation. Evan Alexander, the neurosurgeon. So this is my recommendation as Jill, who found this on Instagram. I guess through whatever. You must've been talking about it. Like I was saying, the ad base, you know. So anyway, it popped up. And so the app that I've been using is called Sync Tuition. Okay. And normally I don't purchase or subscribe or subscribe to these apps. Okay. Against my better judgment, I subscribe to this expensive app Sync Tuition. Okay. So what the deal is with this, it's 3D sound. So like I wear like the big headphones, not like the earbuds, like it's just not quite as effective like that. But when you got the big headphones on, like, you know, beats can totally, it just makes sense. So like an example of this for listeners that wouldn't, isn't understanding what 3D sound is, essentially, if you remember in school, when the nurse would call you down and she would check your hearing, you would have those headphones on and you would hear like frequencies of noise coming from the left ear and the right ear. Or if you ever go on YouTube and you look up a song, you should look up 3D after it and the audio will go from the left to right ear and it almost sounds as if the musician or the music is being played directly above you or below you or left to right of you. It's pretty interesting. So I think that's a good explanation of it that I probably would not have come up with. So this, this SyncTuition app, it's like, it's nice. It's only 24 minutes. So it's not like it's hours of your day that you have to devote to this. I don't think meditation needs to be something that is like very time consuming or people don't do it. It's not helpful if you never have time to do it. So with this program, like I said, it uses the 3D sound and it also uses the binaural beats. And in this case, it uses gamma waves. And it's supposed to help clear your mind, decrease stress, decrease anxiety, again, you know, like increase your cognition. And what they're saying on this app is that 24 minutes of this, listening to this, is equal to four hours of deep meditation. So who has time to do four hours of deep meditation? I can do 24 minutes. So I thought that this was interesting. I'm just going to play you a little bit. Hopefully I can skip the opening because that's like, meh. It's like, welcoming, welcoming. We got some jungle noises going on there. It's actually really cool. And it's one of the only types of meditation I've ever actually stuck to or found extremely helpful for myself. And like I said, that's even working in this field. I've, you know, received sessions from other people. This is what works for me. And I guess that's, you know, really the point. It's got to be something that works for you or you're not going to use it. Ethan and I are going to talk just real briefly about drugs, but not in the way that you think. So as you guys may or may not know, there is a lot of studies on the use of psychedelics in the, I guess, you know, to help with depression, anxiety, addiction, PTSD. And in a lot of ways, the use of these drugs is getting people to a meditative state where they're able to talk to a psychologist about some of the reasons that they are struggling, you know, especially with PTSD, like, you know, like helping them relive some of those things and work through them in a safe kind of situation. So John Hopkins has done a lot of studies and their peer reviews, their evidence-based, all those wonderful things that the psychological and medical community likes to throw out there. However, there is a lot of resistance, obviously, because, you know, forever people just assumed drugs were bad. So we're not talking, like, large doses of these medication-based drugs. Yeah, so these are more of microdosing. It's very similar to what is it called, medicinal use of, like, marijuana, you know, like medical marijuana obviously would not be, you're not going to get, you know, eighth of a gram of marijuana at the hospital, but, you know, you will get it in very small doses that are enough to help, you know, just deal with little things and not just to get somebody necessarily high or anything like that. So the study that's most popular by John Hopkins is the one for you guys to understand with using shrooms, okay? I'm not going to use the technical terms because it's not going to make a lot of sense that way. But basically, like Ethan says, they use, like, these micro doses of shrooms and you would take these, you would take this under the, with a doctor there, you would have the psychologist there, so you would be monitored. So if something isn't going right. If your body rejects it, anything like that. You have help, you're in a hospital. So they found that about two sessions actually was pretty sufficient for people with PTSD, depression, anxiety, and addiction, which is truly amazing because again, working as a therapist and a site nurse for years, like, you know, people stay often in the mental health system for their life or for months, years. So for somebody to have that good of response in that short of time, I think is definitely worth looking into whether people want to believe that or not. Well, I also feel like that covers a good vast majority, whether people want to admit that or not, of people, all walks of life. You know, you think of PTSD, you think of, you know, military soldiers or people who have been in, you know, traumatizing experiences like car accidents. You think of anxiety and depression that could be your neighbor, that could be your own family that could literally be you, you know, that could be anybody from any point in any walk of life. Addiction is something that is becoming more popularized as something that is more acceptable because a lot of people, whether you like to admit it or not, are addicted to many different things and even people are addicted to caffeine and coffee and they don't even realize that is an addiction, you know, and they need the coffee in the morning. There's so many different types and I feel like, you know, it is pretty amazing that that covers so many different types of people and their experiences and, you know, anybody from any point of their walk of life. Now, there's less research on MDMA, which back in my day we called ecstasy. You guys call it Molly. So this is like basically Molly and what we all know that Molly does, it increases the levels of serotonin. It's like that happy love drug. It makes you feel good. If somebody touches your arm, you feel amazing. So there are some, I would say, not as well documented studies of this, but they did find in three sessions people were getting relief, again, from these same disorders. I guess it has a lot more to do with DMT in ecstasy. With that being said, with any of these, it can increase your blood pressure. It can increase your heart rate and your body temperature. If you ever hear people saying on Molly that they want to keep drinking, they want to keep drinking water, they're so hot. People die on Molly sometimes because they drink too much water, can die from water intoxication. That's a whole different podcast. So I mean, it's something like there's pros and cons to it. I think there needs to be a little bit more research on that piece of it. And then I just wanted to bring up the indigenous communities. This has been years. If you look at Native American practices, it's very ceremonial and meditative. I mean, coming from a Native American, right? Shout out to the Cherokees. So like ayahuasca, you guys have probably heard of that. And that is basically has DMT in it. It's a plant, though. And how they get the DMT to come out of the plant is they soak it. They almost make like a soup with it. And then you drink the soup. And again, I would not want to just use this without people that know what they're doing, preferably somebody from that community, because they've been doing this for years. And it creates a very meditational, deep state. And again, it can be a profound experience, or it can be a somewhat scary experience. So although this has been used in their community forever, I don't know if we're quite there yet here in the US, just because we're not as open to those things. But definitely something to consider. And if you didn't know, DMT is the chemical that your brain releases when you die. If you've ever heard of people going through timelines of their life, and their life, you know, right at the end of their death, people who go through near-death experiences typically talk about this, how they have these profound, you know, experiences and these crazy visions. This is because your brain releases pretty much all the DMT in your brain gets released when you pass. So this is a very, very strong drug. And that's why, like my mom was saying, you wouldn't necessarily want to take it probably by yourself or something like that. But in microdoses like this, it can be very beneficial. And it clearly is a strong, strong drug. So, you know, I know Ethan's going to go over the study. But, you know, like I said, you know, meditation, I think, is something easy for any of us to use. We all need to develop coping strategies for the stress of school, work, family responsibilities, you know, whatever it is that you're going through. I don't think that I could sit here and tell you a perfect way of going about it. I think it very much is trial and error. And what works for me certainly doesn't work for everybody. And some people really struggle to get to any level of relaxation. By all means, I'm not saying that medications don't play a piece in treatment. They absolutely do. However, we still need our patients to have coping strategies when they leave the unit. So most of our patients do leave with medications. But they still need to have ways of releasing that stress. So like I said, I'm not certainly advocating for drug use. This is done under a very, very controlled environment. And done by professionals. Done by professionals, not the students on Jackson Street. So, you know, you have to, if you were ever interested in something like that, it would have to be done in a medical environment where, you know, your safety is, you know, intact. Yep. So now, am I good to go into? Yeah, now you can talk. So now it's going to be me pretty much for the rest of this a little bit and until the end here. So I'm going to introduce a study that I found on ScienceDaily.com. This is one of the websites that a professor gave us to use to try and find more information. So this is a study out of Michigan State University. And this is, like we discussed before, it's a neurological study. So this is more of a medical psychiatric look at things rather than, you know, any other study. And they wanted to see the link between meditation and making fewer mistakes, which obviously we'd all like to make fewer mistakes. And they studied 200 participants in an open monitoring meditation exercise. These students were from the University of Michigan State. So these are people like you and I. They used an electrophilography. I'm not going to say that. EEG. Yeah, EEG is the short, which basically measures brain activity. But this is a rather advanced machine. This is, you know, tracking it by the millisecond. And essentially, you know, the study found that there is a direct link between conscious error recognition and meditation. So essentially, if you were to meditate and, you know, what these people were doing, they were doing this meditation exercise, the monitoring meditation exercise for 20 minutes, which my mom was saying, you know, she was doing her meditation exercises for about 24 minutes. So it's around the same general time stance. And they found that people were able to pick up on errors much more quickly after just those 20 minutes of the open monitoring meditation. They were obviously hooked. They had the little suction cups on the brain, you know, measuring all these brave wings. And this type of meditation is the type where, like I said previously, this is where you're paying attention to where your thoughts are going, where your mind wanders to, and being conscious of what you're thinking about without looking, you know, without getting distracted by the scenery around you. So you're not necessarily looking around the room, you know, thinking about, oh, what is this person thinking about me? You're just only really thinking about your own thoughts. So I thought this was very fascinating. And honestly, it intertwines with so many different types of meditation techniques that we were talking about before, you know, from the neurological standpoint, you know, the brain chemistry, you just can't really make that up. And also, you know, just being more mindful was one of the things we were talking about. And I honestly look at something like conscious air recognition as mindfulness. That's being more mindful of the situation and what you are presenting out there to the world. So I think this is a great study, and it honestly is very fascinating. And one of the things they said at the end of the study is this was just one study done. And you know, meditation isn't something that necessarily gets studied as frequently. It's not necessarily easy to find that many great studies on meditation. But when performed by bigger universities that have a lot more funding, like Michigan State University, you can get, you know, some pretty fascinating results. And they obviously are using very high tech machines. I mean, you're using an EEG, which is going by your brain activity by the millisecond. So I believe that's pretty awesome, and it directly connects with everything we were just speaking about. And one of the last things we wanted to talk about was what should a listener change their lives based on this information? And my basic information is if you want an alternative to, let's say, something like medication for anxiety or a way to calm yourself down that's not just your typical, oh, well, just don't think about it. Because typically people are going to give you pretty terrible advice on how to deal and cope with different things. And my mom was just talking about coping strategies. I feel like meditation is a great example of different coping strategies. If you want to change your thoughts, you know, be on a different mindset and wavelength, meditation can help you get there. And it's not something that you might not feel, you know, the effects of it immediately, but through multiple sessions you could very well feel it. You could feel it in one session, for granted, you know. I definitely know that my mom falls asleep to the meditation sometimes. So it can definitely help you, you know, in a variety of different ways, or like I was even saying before, previously, help you pick up on mistakes quicker. This can be very useful in a college environment because we're constantly being evaluated and tested and we have homework every day. And even during class, speaking could be something that you don't even realize you're making errors on. And just 20 minutes of meditation can help you be more mindful of what's going on around you. Do you have anything else to add before we end this one? I think that, you know, he kind of summed it up with all of that. And like I said before, it's just finding what works for you and using it on a regular basis. I think that's, you know, the hardest part for me is like, you know, when you think of everything you have to get done in a day, like kind of making that time for it, like making time for like self-care. That's hard, you know. Like I do the same thing with exercise. Like I'll be like, oh, every intention of going to the gym, and then I'm like, oh, I'm tired. I just want to go home. This does have to be something that, you know, that you try to do on a regular basis. And by regular, I don't mean that you have to do it every night. You can do it several times a week, I feel like, and get some, you know, decent benefit from it. And even just like deep breathing, you know, that's beneficial. But I feel like there's so many different forms of meditation that, you know, whether you're more of a physical person, you like yoga, or if you want that deeper relaxation of like getting massage therapy or Reiki treatment, or if you're, you know, more auditory and you, you know, love just listening to the rain, if that's like soothing for you and gets you in a relaxed state, then that's great. You know, none of these things are things that cost a ton of money. Or any at all. Or any. I think, you know, you can get a lot of free apps. You can get a lot of free information on the internet in general. You know, if you just Google meditation, like they, you can get, like I said, a ton of like the scripts for guided imagery now. It's just, you know, completely different. So I do think that it's, you know, an easy access to use. So I hope that this presentation was helpful for you guys and that you learned something or at least it made you think a little bit. And yeah, and thank you all for listening. Bye bye.