Contributor Aidan Teeger sits down with Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, a pioneering UCLA psychiatrist, to discuss his groundbreaking work combining mindfulness practices with neuroscience to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and develop the “four-step method.” Through decades of research, he demonstrated how mental health practices can physically rewire the brain.

Aidan Teeger: Welcome to Bruin to Bruin. Today, we’re joined by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz. He’s known for his work at UCLA on neuroplasticity and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We’re going to have a discussion with him about the implications of his work on mental health. Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz, thank you for joining Bruin to Bruin.

Jeffrey Schwartz: Hey, great to be here.

AT: You’ve been at UCLA for a little while. You’re a very prominent research psychologist, psychiatrist. You’ve made significant contributions to the area of neuroplasticity, specifically in OCD. We’re going to talk about that in more detail. Can you just provide me with a little sort of background of your history at UCLA? Why here out of anywhere?

JS: It goes back to the early ’80s. I was always into neuroscience, and then in medical school, I did serious training in old-school Theravada Buddhist meditation. When going to medical school, I was already interested in integrating or seeing the world from the perspective of the interface between classical Buddhist meditation and neuroscience. I was always interested in that. Because of that, I was doing work at Columbia University in New York and through referrals, et cetera, I came out here in connection with that, first for medical school work at Stanford and then for a while at University of California, San Diego.

Then I moved over to Cedars-Sinai hospital and finished my psychiatry residency there. In those days – they don’t even have psychiatry there anymore – but in those days, it was a UCLA-affiliated psychiatry program that, interestingly for those times, especially with the UCLA affiliation in a very mainstream academic affiliation, was very psychotherapy-oriented.

That gave me the opportunity to sort of pursue the mindfulness, cognitive therapy orientation. This is before the term “mindfulness-based cognitive therapy” was coined, but that was coined by a good friend of mine in England just a couple of years later by the name of John Teasdale.

But there I was at Cedars, and because of their affiliation with UCLA and my interest in neuroscience – at that time, UCLA was right at the forefront of brain imaging. It was the very, very beginning, especially for mental health-related brain imaging, and I knew I wanted to get involved in that.

I had already in prior years done some work when I was in San Diego – a fair amount of work. I did a postdoctoral fellowship at the Salk Institute with Jonas Salk. And at that time, Francis Crick was there. I mean, it was a beautiful place. It still is. But really made connections there with all of those famous neuroscience people that I knew from there and the work that I did there. I mean, I did work with rodents there. So there I was just doing animal work.

So there aren’t so many people who are interested in psychotherapy, who are interested in mindfulness, who have a good track record of putting electrodes in rats’ brains and putting neurochemicals in and seeing what happens.

So with that combination of background, it wasn’t too hard for me to make the connection with the people here at UCLA who were at the groundwork of doing the brain imaging. In fact, the vice chancellor of UCLA for medicine, John Mazziotta, who’s only a couple of years older than me – I was finishing my residency, he was a couple of years into his assistant professorship. So there we were working together a long time ago. I hope he remembers that. In fact, I know he remembers it. But that is how I’ve been at UCLA ever since. And so is he.

AT: How many years to this day? Can you remember?

JS: If it’s ’83, ’84, it’s just 40 years now. Its ’83. Yeah, ’83, ’84.

AT: It’s 40-odd years.

JS: Yes, it is.

AT: We’ll go into the specifics of your research. I want to touch very quickly – you actually mentioned this in that introduction – the broader theory of your research stemmed from traditional Buddhism. What is that and how did you come to it?

JS: I could go on and on about that, so I better be careful. The shortest answer to that is that I had good friends in college and when I was in medical school – they were more poet-type people, and I was always into poetry. In fact, very influenced by especially William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot – two extremely strong influences on me in my twenties. Even to this day I’m very fond of both of them. I hung around with the poet crowd even though I was a pre-med.

They went to India when I went to medical school, and they studied meditation there in India. It turned out to be with a man who was very deeply embedded in Burmese Buddhism. In fact, he became the Secretary General of the Department of Accounting of the country of Burma, a man named U Ba Khin. And he had Western students who also became teachers.

So they told me about this, and one of their people – he was actually an engineer but who got really into mindfulness – his name was Robert Hoover, and he was teaching Americans, and he had a summer meditation training course in the summer of 1975, which I’m almost sure it was the summer between my first and second year of medical school. And I said, “OK, I’m going to that course.”

I did and was formally trained in Burmese old-school classical Buddhism mindfulness practice. Satipatthana is the proper word, which means the foundations of mindfulness. Mindfulness meaning in the Buddhist tradition – having, … the easiest way I think to describe it is having a third person, outer observational perspective, close observational perspective and an observational perspective that makes assessments and discernment.

The purpose of mindfulness, which is the core of all Buddhist philosophy, certainly all classical Buddhist philosophy, is the path to enlightenment. But the path to enlightenment follows the road of mindfulness because mindfulness is acutely sensitive to the contents of your consciousness.

The really important thing that mindfulness is doing in classical Buddhist practice is making assessments, discernment of the wholesome or unwholesome nature of the state of your mind in a moment by moment, extremely high resolution observation and adjustment of the moral state. We could really put it that way, the wholesome or unwholesome.

The words in the ancient Pali – P-A-L-I, the Sanskrit dialect, which is the language, the scriptural language of classical Buddhism – kusala or akusala, which is translated as wholesome or unwholesome mental states. So mindfulness in a classical understanding, that’s what it does and that’s the function of it. Like Visuddhimagga – one of the great Buddhist classical expository texts – means the purification, the path of purification. And that’s what mindfulness is about – mental purification.

So there I was practicing that every day from literally the summer, fall in ’75. And I literally practiced it every day for many decades without missing a day. I mean, I know it’s probably about two or three years ago now I missed my first day, and I –way over 30 years, I never missed a day. So I had a very serious mindfulness practice and still do to this day.

AT: The kind of distinction between the mind and the brain, as mentioned in your book “You Are Not Your Brain” – you come across it quite frequently today, maybe not as much in academia. Was it common back then before you kind of got entrenched in this type of research and these ideas? Why was your path, do you think, so atypical?

JS: The simple answer to your question is no. Not in academic neuroscience. And to this day, this way of looking at the interface between quote-unquote mind and brain is viewed as, I don’t know, heretical, whatever word you want. I mean, it’s just not the way classical – to this day – neuroscience people are supposed to think.

This culture to a very significant degree has made it almost like the ideology of the culture that everything about how we feel, what we think, the choices we make is generated by the brain. I’ve always thought that was false, and mindfulness perspective very much says that’s false.

I grew up seriously Jewish, and I’ve also – largely influenced by T.S. Eliot among others – in the last 15 years, I’ve become very serious about Christianity as well. So all three of those great religious traditions – Judaism, classical Buddhism, Christianity – in no way would they believe that an organ in your head is generating all aspects of moral reality. But neuroscientists are somehow supposed to believe that.

So I always had it as my sort of life assignment, as it were – my intellectual … really did become my life assignment – of saying well, “OK, so how are we going to talk about the brain in the most strictest neuroscience rigorous ways while creating a space for there being choice, decision-making about ethical decision-making?”

Another person who’s been very influential on me in the last 15 years is Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, and he also put a very strong emphasis on the fact that freedom is real. Yes, science is real too. And we have to have the freedom of choice be real while somehow finding a way to integrate it.

That’s what I was always trying to do – find an interface between mental choice, decision-making and especially decision-making on morally important – to use again the classical Buddhist language – wholesome, unwholesome mental states and focusing on letting go, resisting the craving that is at the root of the unwholesome ones and going for the generosity, the purity of the wholesome ones. And in that way, the choices you make – and this was my big point that I’ve always been –rewires your brain. It changes the way your brain works and moves the predominant circuitry away from more animal parts of the brain towards more uniquely human parts of the brain.

AT: You were one of the pioneers showing in a scientific fashion what they call neuroplasticity now, which is physical changes in the brain can result from these mental practices. So, is that how you managed to court the stubborn side of the neuroscience community – which seems to be kind of very slow to move towards these things – by implementing scientific methods to prove that what you are saying has some sort of factual basis?

JS: It’s funny. There’s an element of courtship in it. So that’s an interesting word choice. I mean, I’m not denying that. Yes, I was trying to make it palatable. But make no mistake about it – within the frame of neuroscience, I’m as purist as they are. When we’re talking about neuroscience, I mean, that’s the thing – there’s no controversy between me and – establishing myself as a neuroscientist was never controversial. We’re talking about neuroscience, neurocircuitry, neurochemicals, psychopharmacology – how the brain works. We were all on the same page. No controversy there.

It’s this issue of what’s the relationship between that and the ethical world, the moral world, the world where words like wholesome and unwholesome, which are cardinal words – mindfulness is the function of mindfulness in classical Buddhism – Gautama taught, very intensively, that the purpose of being mindful is to move your mind, the choices you make, away from unwholesome choices towards wholesome choices.

And then I said, yeah, and that decision-making is going to change how the circuitry of your brain works. And then we use quantum physics-oriented way that I’ve learned in conjunction with a very important physicist who should be more remembered than he maybe is up in Berkeley. We worked together for many years –his name is Henry Stapp, and he liked my perspective because he worked with Heisenberg and worked with Pauli and was at the foundations of quantum physics.

He also became interested in neuroscience as a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley lab in Berkeley and liked my perspective because it was very aligned with his perspective on the fact that choices influence how the physical world works.

To mention the name of who introduced me to him – it’s a very famous philosopher of science named David Chalmers, who was at that time with University of California, Santa Cruz. I looked him up because he came out with a book on consciousness, which is still to this day a famous book. We met, I went up to Santa Cruz a couple of times and he said, “You should meet Henry Stapp. He’s a quantum physicist up in Berkeley. He thinks a lot like you – he’d been looking for somebody like you,” and I said great.

That’s when it really all came together in terms of getting a theoretical foundation for it because in a quantum physical perspective – a classic perspective, because I want to stress to you that even though quantum physicists in general don’t like to think about it like this either, no more than neuroscientists don’t – but Werner Heisenberg did. Wolfgang Pauli definitely did, and Stapp worked with both of them, not just knew them, worked with them.

So he knew that he was following in the tradition of the founders of quantum physics. And so we had the confidence of that and yeah, so we put together a model that was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Great Britain, a theoretical paper on how quantum physics principles can show how choices you make can influence how the brain works.

AT: And at the center of this, you developed something called the four-step method – for those who aren’t familiar, what is it?

JS: No need to apologize for not knowing about the four-step method. When I came here to UCLA and started with the brain imaging, initially we were working on depression, and we did some good papers on depression and good work on depression. But then the person who I was working with back in those days, his name is Lewis Baxter – he left here quite a long time ago, but he was here for probably about the first 15 years that I was here and we worked together for about that time. That’s about a quarter of a century ago now, so time flies.

He had a very good idea, which just turned out to work terrific – people haven’t really been studying people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. He just had this sense that I bet there are things that are interesting going on in the brains of people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. We started doing brain imaging on them, and lo and behold, we got a finding. Once you get a finding like that, you’re off to the races.

AT: What was it you found? In a nutshell. Because I know it’s probably hugely complex.

JS: What we found – it wouldn’t have made the front page of the New York Times, which it did, if it wasn’t graspable on some level because it did make the front page of the New York Times.

AT: There you go.

JS: Literally, what we found was that the bottom of the front of the brain, called the – above the eye orbits, so it’s the so-called orbital frontal cortex because it sits right over the eye sockets, the eye orbits.

That part of the brain – there’s two findings. This is the first one. The first one was that we were finding that the metabolic activity, literally the use of glucose, the fuel usage, the metabolic energy of the orbital frontal cortex was increased over normal people in people with obsessive compulsive disorder.

But then we also found – and this was kind of where my contribution came in – that probably there was good grounds to think that one of the reasons, if not the reason why that might have been happening – and this part of the finding actually turned out to be more consistent than that anatomical location as the sole source of OCD.

But the big principle that we discovered that still is very alive and very in play is that deep in the core of the brain – in the heart of what can legitimately be called the reptile brain, a part of the brain we absolutely share with reptiles called the basal ganglia, which function like an automatic transmission. They literally function like a gear shifter of the circuits in the outer part of the brain.

And we found that the relationship – and this part has really held up for all the subsequent decades – that in obsessive-compulsive disorder, there is something that’s not quite working right in the shifting mechanism of the automatic transmission in the caudate nucleus, which is the automatic transmission for the front of the brain. It’s literally in some real sense getting stuck in gear in people with OCD.

So people with obsessive-compulsive disorder get this constantly intrusive, bothersome thoughts and urges that they – and this is critically important – that they know don’t make sense. If they don’t know it doesn’t make sense, it’s a different diagnosis. It’s not obsessive-compulsive disorder.

So we discovered that, and then we used some mindfulness over the course of several years – but not too many – we did a set of studies and showed that using a mindfulness based method – this four steps – we changed the relationship and saw a correlation. Scientists always like correlations between the change in the relationship between the frontal cortex, specifically the orbital frontal cortex and the caudate and the amount of improvement that people showed when using drug-free cognitive behavioral mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral treatment.

That was the same kind of findings that happened when you used only the – still to this day – the standard pharmacologic treatment, serotonin uptake blockers. So both serotonin uptake blockers and mindfulness based cognitive therapy changed in the same kinds of ways in the same directions, correlating with the amount of improvement that people had in the connectivity between the frontal cortex and the automatic transmission of the brain.

AT: So to an outsider, these changes manifested in these people being able to sort of govern their urges more like a regular person?

JS: That’s a good way of putting it. Govern their urges is exactly right and to some degree – and this becomes a critical clinical point – to some degree, the urges go down. But this is a very important clinical point for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder: If you make the goal making, the urges, go away, it’s not a good idea because it’s so deeply embedded that they don’t really go away.

But governing them requires more frontal cortex input and more choice, more decision-making, be more mindful and that’s where the whole term, “You are not your brain,” came from. Because one of the themes that we did to teach them this –the four steps are relabel, reframe, refocus, revalue.

So if you relabel, this intrusive thought is not me, it’s OCD. So that became a big line right away – “It’s not me, it’s OCD.” Label it as OCD. Call it what it is. It’s not you, it’s OCD. And then reframe how you feel about it.

So don’t say to yourself, “My hands are dirty, I feel like my hands are dirty, I feel like my hands are dirty.” You basically know people are washing obviously with bad OCD, and so the skin literally starts coming off. I mean, all these kinds of things that people know are bad symptoms of OCD – say, “It’s not really dirty, it’s my brain sending me a false message.”

Relabel, reframe is – and you’re using a lot of mindfulness when you’re doing that because you’re not identifying – a big part of classical Buddhism is that you are not your thoughts, you are not your feelings. You need to see a difference between identity and thoughts and feelings and this whole method is based on saying, “That’s not me, that’s just OCD, that’s my brain sending me a false message.”

And then the work step that changes the brain – the work step that really changes the brain is refocus. So now focus on not giving in, focus on doing another behavior for at least five minutes, 10 minutes, just try to change, refocus and that’s the action step. That’s the effort step. That’s what changes the brain because now you’re making different circuits, you’re activating wholesome circuits and then you change and then you revalue, you start to go, “Oh, that’s just OCD, I’m going to not listen to that.”

And then in that process, you start really governing it, and that really changes how the brain works.

AT: And this was one of your breakthroughs, wasn’t it? You were able to present – you saw visually these physical changes occurring over a long course on some of these people.

JS: Not that long. I mean.

AT: How many years?

JS: It was in eight weeks we showed enough that it was – we were getting statistically significant findings on brain imaging before and after.

AT: Is that the extreme? Do you expect the average person if they persist with the practices to see tangible benefits within eight weeks or was that like the extreme?

JS: That’s why I said right away – the goal is not to make it go away.

AT: Right.

JS: If you’re trying to make it go away, you’re going to get dejected, disappointed, you’re going to give up. But if what you’re trying to see is that you don’t have to listen to it, that you can respond differently to it – just seeing that and starting to act on that, that’s what causes the brain to change, and that definitely can happen to anyone. No extreme whatsoever. That’s right down the middle. Anyone can really do that in eight weeks. Do enough of it that you can actually see changes in the brain on brain imaging.

AT: Got it. And, super briefly, you’ve used the term mindfulness a lot. It’s a term that’s permeated the mainstream quite a lot. Can you identify a point – just so we’re clear on terminology—where the definition of mindfulness you’re talking about might have deviated from common understanding? Has it deviated? And how if so?

JS: My emotional response is due to the fact that the way it’s deviated – and it’s not hard to point out the error – I’ll use that word from a classical Buddhist scriptural perspective. If you believe as I believe, as all old school Buddhists believe, that Gautama said what it says in those scriptures, which is I think quite easy to believe – then because I mean, you read it, you go, “Yeah, sure, why not believe he said this?” I mean, it’s highly believable that he said this.

And he stressed – which the modern pop version not only doesn’t stress but ignores – that sure, you have to be quote-unquote “in the present moment.” Yeah, I mean, well, everyone agrees you gotta be in the present moment, but the whole point of being in the present moment – being in the present moment is not an end in itself. Pop mindfulness makes it sound like if you’re in the present moment, “Hey, you’ve done it, you’re mindful!”

No, you’re almost – you’re on the road to be mindful. That’s where those words of Kusala, wholesome, unwholesome assessment and discernment – the purpose of the mindfulness is in the present moment to see when your consciousness is clinging, craving, grabbing onto the unwholesome and then making the effort to move to not cling to, to move away from that onto something that’s more genuinely wholesome, which in meditation is the feeling of the movement of the air in and out of the nostril.

That’s one of the great functions of classical – not just classical, which is the foundation. So many meditation traditions have picked up on that one. One of the classic objects in the Satipatthana, the discourse on the foundations of mindfulness is placing the attention, being aware of the feeling of the movement of the air, knowing you’re breathing in, knowing you’re breathing out.

Go to that – that’s the cardinal wholesome thing to do and hard to do in any sustained way. Takes a lot of practice. Of course so much evidence that that strengthens the frontal cortex – completely noncontroversial now that doing that practice on a regular basis enhances the function of the frontal cortex. That’s established scientific fact.

AT: Even in the realm of the stubbornness of academia that’s pretty –

JT: Absolutely. That’s why mindfulness is sort of so caught on as – because the evidence is just overwhelming. I mean, no one denies that anymore.

But to do it as a way of not being distracted in the present moment by the clinging and the craving by the greed and the ill will and doing it in response to that – that’s what real mindfulness is about and, they make it sound like once you’re in the present moment, hey, you did it. Not exactly – once you’re in the present moment, you’re ready to do it. If you’re not in the present moment, it’s hard. You won’t be using mindfulness to change. You’ll just be listening to rules or doing whatever.

But to do it in the present moment and say, “Oh, I’m clinging there. Oh, I’m craving there, let me focus on the breath, let me let go of that and go back to the breath.” And one of the beautiful discoveries that – it’s from the Hindu. He was working in the Hindu tradition. So in the Hindu yoga tradition, they already knew this too. So he never claimed to discover this.

But he developed a philosophy out of it that would I think go somewhat beyond – let’s just say, no need to get into arguments between Buddhists and Hindus about this or that. But he took the Hindu yoga breathing practices and created the whole structure of philosophy out of this, of this choice that you’re capable of making – the wholesome quality of being aware of in and out breathing. That doing that makes the brain more wholesome. You’ll get more wholesome experience. You’ll get – more wholesome thoughts will arise as a result of doing that.

AT: Can you define wholesome as you see it in like two sentences?

JS: He did – he used three key words which in the original language – it’s funny there’s three unwholesome, three wholesome and the wholesome are just the negation of the unwholesome.

So lobha means lust, greed. dosa means hate, ill will and moha really means ignorance or false view, usually generally false view about your own power. That is, you’re kidding yourself – self delusion that you’re kidding yourself about how great you are, how pure you are. You’re kidding yourself.

The three wholesome are alobha – loving kindness, but it’s the negation of greed, lust. And adosa means metta, which is a word everybody has come to know which means loving kindness. And amoha is getting your mind around the fact that this mindfulness is – without the mindfulness and the insights you get into your mind, without the mindfulness, you won’t have wisdom. And amoha basically means panna, which means wisdom.

AT: So the cohort of people who would probably listen to this and don’t have the same spiritual context might think to themselves – or at least I can see I would probably think it to myself – how can I tell the difference? How can I tell the difference between these deceptions and greed and these unwholesome feelings? Where does – does the wise advocate fit into that puzzle?

JS: Thank you. I appreciate that because the wise advocate was just a term that –

AT: It’s a good term!

JT: We kind of coined it. I mean, I kind of coined it. I mean, it’s in the book, “You Are Not Your Brain.” The wise advocate concept was just something that we said, “How can we get people to pay attention?” Because the difference between sort of greed and charity – only a person who is not being honest, and a lot of people are not being honest. One of the great discoveries of Gautama, I must say, is that the practice of awareness of in-and-out breathing does strengthen your ability to strengthen these assessments and discernments. That’s not stressed in the same way in the Hindu yoga tradition quite in the same way as the way Gautama stressed it, ’cause he really made – well, most people call him the Buddha, but I actually prefer to just call him by his name, and Gautama is what people call the Buddha. He really stresses that paying attention to the breath in that way will strongly enhance your ability to pay attention to all aspects of your mental life in a way that allows you to make assessments and discernments of the difference between love and hate in your own mind, lust and not, you know, etc. Greed, ill will, hatred – to just rein it in and focus on something positive, which can always be the feeling of the in-and-out movement of the air.

So that’s the hard part, to use the term of a famous book by a German monk who became very famous named Nyanaponika. But he was a German man, and that is “The Heart of Buddhist Meditation,” which is a very famous book back in the day written by Nyanaponika.

AT: Right, I’m going to want to segue pretty shortly, but before I do, can you just run me through the concepts of assessment and discernment? That sort of fits into what you were just touching on.

JS: It is, and that’s in our book “You Are Not Your Brain,” but it’s even more developed in a business book that we wrote, which is an extension of “You Are Not Your Brain” because it’s a self-help book. We wrote a book called “The Wise Advocate,” which is a leadership book written with Columbia University Business School – no pathology in there, it’s all about leadership. “How to get better at leadership” – no pathology. And it’s in that book that we stress assessment and discernment more.

Assess means literally asking yourself the question, “What’s the nature of how I’m feeling right now?” I mean making these moral – and there’s the word – discernment. Assessment and discernment, asking, “Is this going to lead to a good place?” Another way you can easily say it to people, which brings in the mindfulness, is: If you have kids and you care about what they think of you, what would your kids think if they really saw what you’re seeing now? Would you like that? Would you like everyone to know that you think like that?

And by and large, people who rouse others up by not doing that on purpose – well, we’ll leave their names unmentioned in these sensitive times. But most people don’t want to be perceived as thinking things like that. You can tell the difference; people can tell the difference that way. And that’s the whole aspect of the idea of a clear-minded, outside, third-person perspective on your first-person experience. A person you respect, someone whose opinion you value, reading your mind, seeing what you’re thinking – what do you want them to see?

AT: Interesting, it’s a really good frame – I like that. I want to talk to you about overcoming skepticism in the context of what you’re talking about. Students here are pretty busy; a lot are doing double majors, some are athletes. They get into college, they’ve got five-odd classes, extracurriculars, they want to have a social life and free time. When undertaking a new practice, people often weigh up the pros and cons.

A lot of people won’t really be willing to get into the spiritual side of what you’re talking about here, which is why I think – and this isn’t a plug – but I think your book is great for that because it offers those practical insights we’re talking about. But how do people overcome, or students specifically, the skepticism? There is bound to be sort of – a level of caution going into these things. It almost sounds too good to be true.

JS: First of all, the spiritual stuff we’ve talked about here isn’t in any of the books that I’ve written, and I mean actually, it’s really not. What I’ve been saying in this interview I’ve never really written down – not in the way we’re describing it now. It’s certainly not in “You Are Not Your Brain,” and it’s certainly not in “You Are Not Your Brain,” and certainly, certainly not in the book that Columbia University Business School Press published.

So it’s practical in that way. But with all the quotes of Gautama – no, let’s quote Jesus. I mean, and because Jesus has the line that answers your question – “By their fruits you shall know them.” And this is also highly consistent again with the word in Buddhism – karma.

Let’s spend a second here on the word karma because there’s another word that’s been completely debased. The word karma is just a Sanskrit word – karma in Sanskrit, kamma in Pali. That word has one meaning – it means volition. Your karma is the state of your will. And then it has fruits – vipaka. It ripens. Kamma-vipaka means the ripening of your will. That’s literally what it means.

And so by – I’m open to say Jesus sort of got it, said, “Hey, let’s use that.” I have no problem saying stuff like that. It was several centuries before he was speaking. I have no problem saying he knew that and used it that way.

So “by their fruits you shall know them” – the way your will ripens, “What’s going to grow out of this state of mind?” Be aware of what – how is this state? Where does this state of mind lead? Yeah, you know, and yeah, a lot of it you’re gonna find out by hard experience, but use your hard experience.

A lot of people aren’t mindful about the results of their hard experience. Start being mindful about the decisions you make and what aspects of your consciousness you’re following when you make it and what the outcome, what the ripening, what the fruits of those choices are. I promise you you’ll see that Gautama and Jesus knew what they were talking about.

AT: So I do some of this stuff myself. I have a daily practice and it’s like anything – it’s kind of a muscle, you’ve got to work at it. You’ve got to get more proficient, but I think there’s real – I’ve noticed it very quickly, the utility, and really just kind of taking time in your day to kind of just look and see what you’re feeling.

JS: Well, I like to say five minutes a day. Look, I really say watch your breath – in and out breathing five minutes a day. Don’t do more. I mean, set a timer so that way you don’t go on like – because what’s the first thought that’s gonna occur within the first two minutes in the beginner is, “How much longer do I have to do that?” The answer is till the timer goes off and you can set it for five and then set it for seven, set it for 10. But find five minutes a day. You will see the difference, that’s what you’re saying.

AT: Right.

JS: You will see the fruits of your action by doing this for five minutes a day for 28 days.

AT: I think it’s important to point out that you don’t have to go from doing this never in your life to a completely transcended spiritual guru type.

JS: Absolutely not.

AT: You can have a short morning practice

JS: And then you’re doing it in your daily life.

AT: Right. That’s what the four steps are about, and it becomes – then you’re being mindful in your daily life.

JS: Exactly. And this applies – I think that these practices apply universally. It’s not just to people with OCD, it’s not just to people who might struggle with what they would call ADHD – it’s just for anyone who’s kind of looking to be a better leader.

AT: There you go. That’s in the Colombian business book as well –

JS: That’s right on the cover.

AT: Right. So, as someone who’s been involved in neuroplasticity research for decades, one of the top guys in the field, do you think the field is moving in the right direction?

JS: I hope so. But I mean, I coined the term self-directed neuroplasticity way back in the day. But still, they like neuroplasticity that’s caused by external contingencies. They really prefer that. But that’s real. I mean, that’s how you do it in snails and rodents, and it works in snails and rodents, but we’re humans, and we can do it to ourselves. And I coined a term for it – self-directed neuroplasticity. I’m sorry to say it’s not in any neuroscience textbooks yet.

AT: Right. If rodents could read books, we’d be in a much better position. And any notes for people who hear what you’re saying, agree, see the value in it and wanna get into the neuroscience field and they kind of come up against the frustration of comprehending, I guess the stubbornness of academia –

JS: No, I think the way to do it now though – again, one road that is not so controversial anymore is that approaches to psychological therapy, various approaches to psychological therapy, change how the brain works.

So if you frame it as cognitive mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, cognitive – cognitive therapy changes the brain. That is not a controversial statement anymore. And there’s lots of different ways to follow that. All the different diagnoses – panic disorder, depression, obviously OCD we’ve been talking about – various kinds of cognitive therapy will change, will change the brain and psychotherapy in general, properly done. If you link it to refocusing your attention, refocusing your attention changes how the circuitry in your brain works. That’s the big take-home message.

AT: Fantastic. And we’re going to wrap up here. But I ask this question to anyone who comes on Bruin to Bruin. For students listening today and you can take some time to think, but it can also be a very brief answer. What is one central primary piece of advice you would give to help them begin their journey to mental resilience and self-awareness, as it is called, at the center of what you do?

JS: It’s obvious from what we said – spend five minutes a day. I mean, I even have a video – it’s on YouTube, and I made it years ago, but it still works. I mean, there’s lots of other ones too, but sit quietly in a chair. Set the timer for five minutes. When you’re breathing in, feel the air going in and I even have a count, 1-2-3-1 on the in-breath, 1-2-3-2 on the out-breath, 1-2-3-3 on the in-breath, 1-2-3-4 on the out-breath. Start over.

You don’t want to do more than two breaths in a row. You’re not counting your breath, you’re feeling the feeling of the movement of it going in, knowing you’re – it’s going in, feeling the movement when it’s going out and do that. Five minutes a day for 28 days, you’ll see the difference. Five minutes a day, not 10, not 29.5 hours, set the timer for five minutes, but do the five minutes.

AT: I think it’s good advice. Well, Dr. Schwartz, I can’t thank you enough for joining us and sharing your expertise. I think it’s going to be immensely valuable to people listening – where if someone wants to follow what you’re doing, where do they go?

JS: Good look, I’m 73. I mean, I do have a website – jeffreymschwartz.com. I mean, well, “The Heart of Buddhist Meditation” is a really good book. I mean, I have a lot of YouTubes. But honestly getting in touch with me personally is probably not the greatest idea because I mean, I’m not – I’m pretty retired, to tell you the truth. It’s not for nothing that I’m emeritus.

AT: You’re still got the tag on though, nice to see you representing us.

JS: Yeah, I do. Well, I go to classes and – but I don’t – honestly I was always a research person here and I never did much clinical practice under the aegis of UCLA.

AT: Right.

JS: Research, including clinical research. But even that’s been decades gone. I mean, and I never became the executive vice chancellor, Dr. Mazziotta–

AT: I think you would have done a good job. Well, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks again.

JS: Thank you.