How To Escape Your Brain's Default Mode Network | Zindel Segal and Norman Farb
4/20/20261 hr 5 min
Using your senses to reduce overthinking, turn down the voice in your head, and get out of what these scientists call "the house of habit."
Dr. Zindel Segal is Distinguished Professor of Psychology in Mood Disorders at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a cofounder of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy.
Professor Norman Farb, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where he directs the Regulatory and Affective Dynamics laboratory.
Together, they are the co-authors of Better In Every Sense: How the New Science of Sensation Can Help You Reclaim Your Life.
In this episode we talk about:
- How the brain's default mode network is essential to our survival but also can keep us stuck in rumination and overthinking
- Segal and Farb's simple practice of "sense foraging" and why they say it can help break patterns and thoughts that aren't serving us
- The differences and the similarities between sense foraging and mindfulness
Related Episodes:
- Depression and Anxiety: Your Old Enemies, Your Best Friends | Zindel Segal — Ten Percent Happier
- Gretchen Rubin on: How To Use Your Five Senses To Reduce Anxiety, Increase Creativity, and Improve Your Relationships
- Why You Can't Pay Attention - And How to Think Deeply Again | Johann Hari — Ten Percent Happier
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Harris· Host0:00
[upbeat music] This is the Ten Percent Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. [upbeat music] Hello, my fellow suffering beings. How we doing today? So much human suffering is caused by the fact that we are stuck in our heads, captured by our thoughts, suckered by our habitual rumination and ancient storylines. So today we're gonna talk about the science of getting out of your head, of escaping the brain's default mode network, which my guests today refer to as the house of habit. We, of course, need our default mode network, our capacity to behave habitually. Uh, we need it in order to survive and in order to brush our teeth and tie our shoes without undue cognitive demands. But if you are stuck in the default mode, you're missing out on quite a bit, and you're also susceptible to many, many flavors of unhappiness. My guests today are Dr. Zindel Segal and Professor Norman Farb. Together, they wrote a book called Better in Every Sense. In it, they describe something they call sense foraging, which is a simple but powerful practice where you use your senses to turn down the more noxious aspects of the aforementioned default mode network. In this conversation, we talk about what sense foraging is