Seriously, try it, it's free!

Immediate benefits:

* Clear, focused mind. I stop hopping from topic to topic in my mind "oh should I tidy the apartment, work on my website, etc etc" to a far more focused state. What you should do next is there with extreme clarity. You stop reading random junk on the internet too, and get down to it

* Much better sleep (this alone is worth it for me)

* Much calmer, steadier mood (less ups and downs in a normal day, I'm normally quite content but this effect was noticable)

All you need:

* 20 mins in a quiet room

* Perhaps white noise on headphones if you need it, timer on your laptop or phone

* Sit comfortably, back straight against a cushion, and focus on your breathing, try not to have any thoughts

* You'll fail, over and over, and follow thoughts down the rabbit hole

* Let the thought drift away without getting annoyed, start fresh

* Repeat for 20 mins

* Do it once per day, everyday

It sounds ridiculous, but this is really powerful. You owe it to yourself to try, there's no spiritual voodoo or 50/month courses needed.

I prefer to just become an observer of my thoughts; to acknowledge and let them flow; I focus on accepting that they are only thoughts - little impulses. The imagery I often have is that I'm sitting in a clear bubble, and my thoughts are swirling around me: I can see them, and I know they're there, but I do not let them in.

Mindfulness one of the key skills(if not THE key skill) exercised by meditation is the ability to be aware of one's own thoughts and feelings, and this is practiced primarily by listening to what thought's were having, and letting them go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness

I never fall into a deep sleep. Sometimes I trance out into heady thoughts where the outside world gets blocked off.

I don't really know where meditation ends, naps begin, and where legit sleep falls in the spectrum. My goal isn't meditation though, my real goal is to black out cold, but haven't gotten there yet. So ymmv for anyone else attempting but it seems I'm in the same field as you describe.

Then I tend to naturally snap out of it before my alarm rings me awake.

Tools: travelers sleep eye mask, comfortable silent area (my car in parking garage), phone timer.

The same way we are aware of moving our arm when we are doing so, becoming aware of your thoughts while we are thinking. We tend to take are thoughts for granted, giving them automatic truth status

Here's a great intro you could try: https://youtu.be/D5Fa50oj45s

> Mal: …Could have been meditating on the wonders of your rock garden right now.

> Jayne: Beats just sitting.

> Wash: It is just sitting.

There's a pretty big spectrum of mindfulness and meditation including "just sitting", yoga, Qigong -- or even certain forms of martial arts (perhaps most famously certain forms of Tachi, but also Pa Kua Chang and others).

Or even just taking a walk in the forest.

"Just sitting" is probably the easiest way to get started, but perhaps the hardest to master -- or stick with. But I think everyone should be able to find something that works for them.

It's more along the lines of "trying not to react to thoughts"

If you have sox[0] installed, just run

     play -n synth 20:00 pinknoise 

[0]: http://sox.sf.net/

What helped me was concentrating on my breathing and heartbeat, and the fact that I'm concentrating on my breathing and heart. I had a really hard time completely clearing my mind on demand, but those two things are very easy to start concentrating on and other thoughts slowly slip away.

Not OP but this is a good summary: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3946160/

> Then I see the claim that it cures cancer and forgive me if all my alarm bells go off.

I think OP was implying that it may decrease your chances of getting cancer not cure it. Everyone will get cancer if they live long enough (based on the current state of medicine, that may change in the future).

edit: I should say that personally I don't really practice intermittent fasting (at least not consciously). But I don't eat after 8pm either, so I tend to do at least a 12 hour fast every day because of that. Sometimes I also skip breakfast which makes it a 16-18 hour fast. My biggest meal of the day is usually lunch not dinner.

I'm fuzzy on the details but I believe they were trying to explain why outcomes were statistically better for early morning treatments (people coming in with an empty stomach to deal with nausea)

Oxidative Stress, Caloric Restriction, and Aging[0]

Calorie Restriction Promotes Mammalian Cell Survival by Inducing the SIRT1 Deacetylase [1]

Gene Expression Profile of Aging and Its Retardation by Caloric Restriction [2]

Caloric restriction and aging: an update [3]

Calorie Restriction Promotes Mitochondrial Biogenesis by Inducing the Expression of eNOS [4]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2987625/ [1] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/305/5682/390.short [2] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/285/5432/1390.short [3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0531556500... [4] http://science.sciencemag.org/content/305/5682/390.short

I'm surprised many believe this. It seems self-evident that our bodies are well adapted to periods of starvation. Any biology that wasn't so adapted would have been out-competed by those did.

The link to cancer is typically due to free radical theories causing genetic damage, and caloric restriction is being employed to help cancer patients last longer.

Their shortsightedness poisoned the Earth with the waste products of their energy production, changing the world's climate, and driving many of them to extinction. It also skewed the efficiency numbers towards organisms that didn't need to sit around synthesizing carbohydrates when there was so many free carbohydrates just sitting around for anything able to digest them.

I actually never thought about it from that angle. It seems like it should obviously be true now. Now the question is how true and if nuances exist where our bodies can take it but not optimal in health.

I think our current understanding of medicine and human biology is quite limited, so there may be tons of these little quirks - non obvious things that are actually amazing for us. But, i'm sure there will also be tons of things that are not directly related to what we did to survive thousands of years ago.

I haven't kept myself up to date on it, but I think I remember that it was more about changing an organism's biology early in life. If you're an organism that is going to burn less energy per day, then you are an organism that just has less entropy per day, and less side-effect damage to your cells because of it. I think that the gist of it?

"From predator-prey models (the so-called Lotka-Volterra type of population dynamics), I knew that populations experience [potentially high] variability, hence predators will necessarily go through periods of feast and famine. That's us, humans--we had to have been designed to experience extreme hunger and extreme abundance.

... So where on earth does this idea of "steady" exercise come from? Nobody in the Pleistocene jogged for forty-two minutes three days a week, lifted weights every Teusday and Friday, etc... Not hunters. We swung between extremes: we sprinted when chased or when chasing (once in a while in an extremely exerting way), and walked about aimlessly the rest of the time."

That's what he thinks anyway. We are complex, yo.

Are you sure? My understanding is that hunting requires a lot of tracking, where you are following perishable clues, which means a moderate sustained pace. And sometimes you are invisible to prey, but sometimes you just need to keep up. Notably when you have injured your prey but not yet killed it. On top of that there's persistence hunting, which is more like an ultramarathon than a sprint.

Also, when gathering you often need to move quickly. My chickens don't just move lazily all day, they often move around quite frenetically. When you find some good stuff, it behooves you to move quickly to gather as much as you can before others catch on. And when you're moving through barren areas it also makes sense to not waste time.

The idea that early humans rarely spent 40 minutes jogging seems like quite a bold assertion to me.

And anyway, even if we never jogged, we certainly migrated. An hourlong walk several times a week is a reasonable exercise regimen too.

Based on my own experiences, I agree with the main point, I find steady exercises like jogging much less exhausting than dynamic exercises like playing football (soccer) where you're frequently switching between exertion and rest. This also seems to tie in with High Intensity Training (though I've never formally tried it):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_intensity_training

However, isn't weightlifting a couple of times a week an example of exercising to extremes? At least if you prioritise weight over repetitions. This is purely anecdotal, but I've heard from various sources that free weight exercises like squats and deadlifts are some of the best exercises you can do, as they work out your whole body and the proper form relies on getting different muscle groups to work well together.

Just some random research below, there is lots of more if you use google.

http://www.davidwolfe.com/meditation-rebuilds-brains-gray-ma...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2015/05...

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/11/meditations-po...

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to...

Also

https://scholar.google.fi/scholar?q=meditation

Two things not even remotely ONLY associated with hippies -- that have been practiced for millennia before the hippy movement ever existed...

>Do you have any scientific backing to support those claims?

http://liveanddare.com/benefits-of-meditation/

>Not eating for 3 days a month does not seem especially healthy.

You'd be surprised.

http://www.translationalres.com/article/S1931-5244(14)00200-... http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/06/short-term-fasting-ma... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17316625 http://www.jnutbio.com/article/S0955-2863(04)00261-X/abstrac... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17291990/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17374948 http://ibima.net/articles/ENDO/2014/459119/ http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/06/short-term-fasting-ma... ...

>Then I see the claim that it cures cancer and forgive me if all my alarm bells go off.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2815756/ http://www.collective-evolution.com/2014/06/22/scientists-di...

There's (growing) research to suggest it partially mitigates risk: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3608686/.

This was the first pubmed search result for "fasting cancer risk". I think your alarm bells are miscalibrated.

I did this on and off (stopped eating Sunday after dinner and didn't eat until Wednesday or later in the week).

I was only 19 and 20 at the time and did it because I was bored but I remember feeling significantly more productive. Pretty sure I was but not sure if it had to do with a clearer head or because I suddenly had 1-2 extra undisturbed hours when everyone else was busy eating.

Stopped after an incident where I tried lifting weights after 2 days on a very restrictive diet and half a day with no calories at all. 15 minutes in I started seriously shivering and I never picked it up later although I am seriously tempted from time to time.

Basically, the idea is to divide into undereating and overeating cycles, eating a single big meal a day (or in more extreme instances, one large meal per 2 days).

Unfortunately, the book linked above does not have a lot of scientific backing. This may simply be due to how it deviates from a lot of conventional diets at the moment.

Nevertheless, personally I rarely trust "scientists" who work in the field of nutrition:

1. They tend to change their views drastically over time. See e.g the whole sugar vs fat issue.

2. They are often heavily influenced by corporate funding, and as such incentive structures do not align well with the goal of rigorous science. One personal anecdote: my extended family uses a lot of coconuts and coconut oil in cooking. Coconut oil was presented in many "scientific" publications as being one of the worst oils, and olive oil as the best (often by olive oil company funded research). Things are much more even now.

Basically, I believe in the following:

1. Following a particular ancestral diet is a pretty safe bet - it has been tested and refined over hundreds, if not thousands, of years. There is often accumulated wisdom in certain practices. See e.g. https://www.amazon.com/100-Million-Years-Food-Ancestors/dp/1... for a detailed discussion of this.

2. Intermittent fasting has been practiced in various cultures to different extents, often due to religious beliefs. Again, something that has persisted that long is likely fine.

In short, true science is usually lacking in nutritional work. As for anecdotal evidence, there is some, detailed in the book above. I also am skeptical about the extent of its benefits, but see no serious downside to the "one meal a day" idea.

also, have you ever tried meditation?

Sounds ridiculous to even ask.

One might as well be religious if they don't read scientific literature (which offers tons of studies on meditation) and don't at least keep an open mind and try to verify experimentally their claims.

Not only it doesn't sound "ridiculous to even ask", but there are LOTS of scientific studies on the matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation

https://nccih.nih.gov/health/providers/digest/meditation-sci...

https://nccih.nih.gov/health/meditation/overview.htm#hed3

it can't be because all the variables involved cannot be tightly controlled. Same reason why all the Psychology studies have been lately relegated to snake oil status.

All those studies are stupid.

People have been meditating for benefits (including more money and better performing at their job etc) for millennia. It's not just for spiritual/religious purposes (and if fact in some cultures those can be mixed as well without any contradiction).

>All those studies are stupid.

Yeah, all those scientists are useless and their universities are full of idiots, nothing like an internet comment to put them in their place.

If you want to prejudicially exclude research, don't claim to speak in favor of science.

And, Yes universities are filled with idiots, egotists and scamsters with their own nefarious motives. How do you explain the absurd 90% hypothesis validation? [3]

you have your own brain to observe and meditate on, why do you need some authority to tell you what to do.

>If you want to prejudicially exclude research, don't claim to speak in favor of science.

People like you who blindly believe anything a supposed authority puts out there in the name of science are real curse to the gift of science.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12185845

3. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Just because there has been a replication crisis doesn't mean you can dismiss all scientific studies willy nilly.

Those are not some Deepak Chopra style BS, they are actual clinical studies (and I've just sent a sample, there are tons). And the "replication crisis" argument doesn't really hold up if independent studies reach similar conclusions (as is the case with a lot of these).

>People like you who blindly believe anything a supposed authority puts out there in the name of science are real curse to the gift of science.

I don't "blindly believe anything a supposed authority puts out there". I respect multiple teams working on a field and coming up with relevant results, and having their papers peer reviewed etc.

I don't use issues like the "replication crisis" to dismiss any study I don't like based on predetermined convictions.

Notice also how your links are irrelevant. We are not talking about Psychology studies but medical clinical studies. So whether "Positive” Results Increase Down the Hierarchy of the Sciences" (as another paper says) is irrelevant, as we're not talking about soft sciences and humanities here.

I went to the first reference from your wikipedia link

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19123875

Conclusion: Most clinical trials on meditation practices are generally characterized by poor methodological quality with significant threats to validity in every major quality domain assessed. Despite a statistically significant improvement in the methodological quality over time, it is imperative that future trials on meditation be rigorous in design, execution, analysis, and the reporting of results.

Second reference from wikipedia

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/chapter.jsf?bid=CBO9780511816789...

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness,

Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology