While I’ve long known about the neurological benefits of meditation, it wasn’t until I watched Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk that I started thinking about how many of the benefits of meditation come from quieting the verbal part of our brains.

To be honest, silence is not a state I naturally seek. I’m extroverted. I’m loud. I love parties and big families and people. And as an avid reader and professional writer, I tend to fear — not cultivate — a loss of words.

But reading nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman’s new book Thinking, Fast and Slow got me (you guessed it) thinking a little more about this. That noisy verbal part of our brains is slow, processing only about 40 bits of information per second. The creative, intuitive, non-verbal brain processes about 11 million bits per second. Knowing this, I’ve been motivated to try and better harness the power of my non-verbal brain.

According to Martha Beck — Harvard sociologist turned life coach, and one of my personal heros — practicing what she calls “deep wordlessness” is just the ticket. Here’s what she writes about wordlessness in her most recent book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World:

To master Wordlessness…you must unlearn almost everything you were taught in school about what it means to be intelligent. The sharp focus you were told to sustain is actually a limiting, stressful, narrow attention field — something animals only using the the moment of ‘fight or flight.’ Dropping into Wordlessness moves the brain into its ‘rest and relax’ state.”

I’ve been practicing Beck’s techniques for cultivating worldlessness, and though it doesn’t come easily to me, I’m finding it well worth the effort.

Take Action: Beck’s book is loaded with literally dozens of techniques for activating our non-verbal brains. One is to simply to follow your own bloodstream. You can try it by focusing your attention on your heart in the space between breaths: after you exhale deeply, pause your breathing and find the feeling of your heart beating. Take another breath while following the sensation of your heart beat. Once you’re following your heart beat, see if you can feel your circulatory system elsewhere, in your ears or toes or hands, your head and organs, or your entire body. Hang out for a while in this meditative state.

Join the discussion: What do you think?!

Learn more! I write a lot about wordlessness in my new book, The Sweet Spot.  I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it…pre-orders matter a lot for authors; they determine whether or not a book launches as a bestseller. Lots of people are already recommending it — check out the testimonials here!

Photo by Michael Coghlin

This last weekend was my nephew’s first birthday party, and because he is absolutely the most adorable baby EVER and I love him so much, I’d planned on widely documenting the occasion, in HD video and still photography.

You know, just so we’ll never ever forget the adorableness of it all. 

I forgot my big camera, but that didn’t really matter because every adult and teenager there was snapping away with their phone cameras like crazy paparazzi (myself included).

In the middle of all this, I remembered a study which showed that photographing objects in a museum impaired a person’s ability to recall much about the object they photographed — and also impaired their ability to remember that they’d seen the object at all. So I stopped madly photographing the big event and started trying to just be present.

Then I remembered a follow-up study. The “photo-taking impairment effect,” as researchers call it, didn’t occur when people were asked to zoom in on a detail of the object they were photographing. And so I went back to photographing, this time zooming in on my nephew’s messy face (did I mention that he is adorable?).

Here is what researchers think is happening: When we take a picture, we delegate memory-making to our camera, and our brain stops trying to make the memory itself. But when people photograph a specific part of an object, their memory is not impaired, presumably because their brains still need to make sense of the whole picture in order to photograph the detail.

Take Action: We tend to feel happiest when we give the people we love our full attention. It is hard to be fully present at the same time that we are photographing something. So whether we are after a happy moment or a happy memory, often the best thing we can do is just put our camera down.

Join the Discussion: Have you noticed that you remember less about an event or special moment when you photograph it?

I am not a journaler; after sitting in front of my computer all day, it doesn’t usually occur to me to end the day by whipping out pen and paper to document life’s events.

But I’ve long preached the benefits of ending the day by noting “3 good things” that happened. And I’ve practiced this research-tested happiness-boosting technique by asking my kids about “3 good things” that occurred during their day at bedtime for nearly a decade. It has come to be my favorite part of the day — when it happens. Which increasingly, it doesn’t. My kids are are now tweeners and teenagers. They share rooms, and they no longer always want to end the day by cuddling with me.

Clearly our family’s “3 good things” practice is ripe for reinvention. And I was recently reminded by the Greater Good Science Center’s wonderful (free!) Science of Happiness online class that the power of this exercise often comes from writing down three good things that happened to you during the day. Here is the suggested practice:

• At about the same time each day (I recommend the evening, just before bed), take about 10 minutes to write down three things that went well for you.
• In addition to just jotting down what happened (e.g., “I finally finished a project I’d been procrastinating”) add some details, like what you did or said, or what others did or said.
• Focus on your feelings. How did you feel when the good thing happened? How did you feel afterwards? How do you feel now?

I’ve decided to start doing this expanded “3 good things” with my kids… via text. Even if they are under the same roof. I like this because sometimes I am not with them at bedtime, but am in a place where I can still text with them. I also like it because the practice includes me more: I prompt them with something good that happened to me during my day, sometimes sending them a picture. (Again, even if they are just in the next room.)

Text doesn’t really lend itself to detail, so for each good thing I typically send two texts, one for what happened, and one for how it made me feel. I use the voice recognition on my phone and speak the texts, which saves me time.

My kids and I exchange just one good thing now, typically, since we are trying to go into detail. I also have been jotting down one private good thing for myself, and talking to my husband about a third.

Even though this isn’t the exact exercise that was tested by researchers, I think it is better to modify an exercise to make it something that you find inherently enjoyable than to try to stick to something that doesn’t feel like as good a fit.

Take Action: How can you integrate detailed reflection about three good things that happened during your day? Block off time on your calendar, or set a reminder on your phone, and try to do this practice for 10 days in a row.

Join the Discussion: Are you planning to try out the “3 Good Things” exercise? If so, what format do you think will work best for you? If you’ve done something similar before, what worked for you? Share in the comments!