Contemplative aerobics: train your mind while you exercise

Rhonda Patrick opened her conversation with neuroscientist Dr. Richard Davidson with a question she had never resolved: if time is limited, why meditate for 30 minutes when you could exercise instead? Davidson's answer is that you do not have to choose. Vigorous aerobic exercise is the best validated way to raise neuroplasticity, but plasticity is neutral. It encodes whatever is in your mind. Exercising while scrolling angry news or watching hostile television raises plasticity and burns that negativity in deeper. The fix is to combine the two, something Davidson calls contemplative aerobics.

Contemplative aerobics

As you put on your shoes, or in the first few minutes of the workout, reflect on how the training helps not only you but everyone in your life, directly and indirectly. Improving your own health becomes a radical act of generosity. That mindset of generosity and altruism fills the mind with wholesome motivation exactly when plasticity is elevated. It takes no extra time, and Davidson does it on every bike ride. Connection is one of the core pillars of well-being, and the 2023 US Surgeon General advisory on loneliness rated social isolation a larger premature mortality risk than smoking 15 cigarettes a day and more than double the risk of obesity. Connection is anti inflammatory.

The four pillars of well-being

Davidson's book with Cortland Dahl, Born to Flourish, describes four trainable qualities. Awareness is being present, and it includes meta awareness, noticing what your mind is doing, the moment you realize you read a page and absorbed nothing. Connection is appreciation, gratitude, kindness and compassion, and quality matters more than the number of people around you. Insight is your relationship to the story you tell about yourself. The goal is not to rewrite the narrative but to see it as a constellation of thoughts. For a pessimist, asking is all of me pessimistic, is there any part that is not, makes the story more porous. Purpose is direction and values, and it can live in the most mundane task. Davidson turns scooping the cat litter into a small ritual of benefit to the cat, his wife and anyone who enters the room. In adults 70 and older, a strong sense of purpose is the single best psychological predictor of longevity.

Emotional styles

Davidson's 2012 book The Emotional Life of Your Brain lays out six styles: resilience, how fast you recover from adversity; outlook, how long positive emotion lasts; self awareness, how accurately you read signals from your own body; social intuition, how well you pick up nonverbal cues; sensitivity to context, which misfires in PTSD when a safe siren triggers a combat response; and attention, the ability to focus, which the internet is steadily eroding. Well being comes from balance among these, not from being extreme on any one.

Five minutes a day

A large randomized trial using the free Healthy Minds Program app found that 5 minutes a day for 28 days significantly lowered interleukin 6, a marker of inflammation, measured 3 months after the trial ended. The same dose produced a stronger antibody response to the flu vaccine and shifted the gut microbiome toward the butyrate pathway, which helps seal the gut lining, in roughly 1,200 moderately depressed people recruited from all 50 states. A mindset only version with zero meditation still beat an untreated control, though the full version was best, and the effects held at 6 months. Active practice during a commute, the dishes or exercise worked as well as formal seated meditation, with no statistical difference. The first week often raises anxiety, which Davidson says means it is working, because you are noticing how chaotic your mind is. It usually drops below baseline within a week.

Mind and body

The link runs both ways. About 200 million neurons in the gut feed information to the brain continuously. The insula carries a map that links regions of the brain to specific autonomic organs. Davidson's asthma research showed that psychosocial stress worsens lung inflammation through the insula, and that asthmatics have higher rates of premature dementia and neurodegeneration, likely from shared neuroinflammation. Resilience promoting mental training moves lung inflammation in the healthy direction.

For children

The most powerful thing an adult can do is practice this themselves and be a calm, loving, fully present example. Children absorb stress and distraction at a cellular level. Davidson's team also built a kindness curriculum for preschoolers, free in English and Spanish, now used in about 35,000 schools, with a randomized trial behind it.

Bottom line

The core practice is regular physical and mental exercise, done together. Exercise supplies the neuroplasticity, and contemplative practice makes sure it is building something wholesome. It takes about 5 minutes a day, done consistently, and it does not require a cushion, a posture or a quiet room.