Hey everyone, welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Emily Fletcher. She's a former Broadway

actress turned author and meditation expert who's written the book, Stress Less, Accomplish

More. She was named one of the top 100 women in wellness to watch, and she's spoken on

meditation for performance at Google, Harvard Business School, Viacom, Wonderlust, A-Fest, and more.

She's taught well over 15,000 people how to meditate, and she's been endorsed by health

and wellness luminaries such as Dr. Mark Hyman, as well as leaders in the scientific community,

like Dr. Andrew Hubberman, Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford, which, by the way, is one of the

things that I found most interesting is there something about your approach to meditation that

makes people like me who otherwise get a little like hebi-g-be over some of the language and stuff,

you speak about it in a way that draws people in. And when I saw that you had this neurobiologist from Stanford who

was like, I was beyond skeptical when I first heard about Emily. And then almost by accident, he ended up

listening to you. What do you think it is about your approach to meditation, maybe some of your

definitions around it that make it so accessible to people who are otherwise quite

skeptical. Well, I think the technique itself is designed for people like us. It's designed for people

with busy minds and busy lives. It's not a monastic practice. What do you mean by that? Well, it's not

made for monks. And so a lot of the mindfulness that's out there, a lot of the quote unquote meditation

apps are actually teaching mindfulness, which is originally designed for monks. And it's been sort of watered down for a more mainstream audience. Whereas what I teach at Ziva, even though it's 6,000 years old, it was originally designed to make you better at life. So I think one, it works. And two, I think the delivery, I think partly my

Broadway background, I like to make things entertaining. I'm not super into meditation as an identity.

I think that we, you know, we meditate to get good at life, not to get good at meditation. And so for me,

it's just a tool. And so it's like, here's the science behind why stress is making us stupid. And here's the science behind why meditation can make you better at life. And when you say better at life, what do you mean? Well, I think that's different for everybody. Do you want to be a better mom? Do you want to be a better husband? Do you want to be better at your job? Better philanthropist. But when you're stressed, you're wasting your mental and physical energy, so you're not able to show up as the most amazing version of you.

So if you're committing to a daily discipline of meditating, then you basically have more cylinders.

You have more mental and physical energy to really do the things that you want to do in your life.

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