112. Meditation for Busy Brains: 10-Second Hacks

Think your brain is too busy to meditate? Think again. In this episode, Dr. Stacy shows you how meditation is really just training your brain to come back — not emptying your mind or sitting perfectly still.

You’ll learn quick, doable “mini-meditations” that take 10–60 seconds and actually fit into real life, including:

• The 10-second breath
• Grounding through your feet
• “What do I see/hear?” resets
• One-breath-before-you-eat
• Sensory focus tricks
• Music, shower, cooking, and walking meditations
• Forest bathing (yes, with real science!)

Perfect for the easily distracted, overcommitted, holiday-season human who wants more calm, more focus, and fewer impulse decisions around food.

📥 Download the Habit Tracker: www.sugarfreemd.com/habits

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome back to Weight Loss Made Simple. I'm your host, Dr. Stacy Heimburger. And I want to talk to you about something that is so fun, meditation for the easily distracted, right? If your brain kind of squirrels like mine and you thought, I can't meditate, like my brain is too busy, I can't sit still, I can't quiet my brain, this episode is for you because I have learned all new fun ways to meditate and I can't wait to share it.

So here we go. I want to talk about why we need to meditate. And then I want to give you kind of a new take on it so that maybe it will reframe meditation for you a little bit. And then I want to give you a ton of easy, quick ways that you may never have thought of that will make it easy just to get that meditation in really fast, okay?

We are really trained to be multitaskers and this is really not good for our brain. So that's like, we're emailing while we're cooking, we're checking Instagram, we're sending texts while we're talking to someone because someone with business is doing something and we're snacking while we're scrolling and we're trying to order groceries in car line and all the things. But our brain really does not like that kind of juggling. So hopefully you've also had the reverse of that where you have been in flow.

Like you've been trying to work on a project and you're like in and you're focused and things are rolling and it feels really, really good. And then someone asks you a question, right? And it kind of pulls you out. It's like, you can almost physically feel yourself pulling back from the task and you're like a little dizzy and maybe they even have to repeat themselves because you were in your task and now you've been pulled out. When we do this a lot of times,

there's this thing that happens when we're switching back and forth that even if we try and get back in flow, so let's say we were in flow, we got distracted, it takes more than just a couple of seconds to get back in. And so we start to lose awareness and our focus starts to thin and then it's easier to get distracted and start squirreling all over the place, right? So if you were trying to be creative or trying to get a project done, someone interrupts you, all of a sudden instead of getting back into that project,

you could try, but it's going to take a minute to get back in the flow. But our brain is just like, wait, we have all these other fun things we could do, right? And so we can get really distracted. So that is really what meditation is, okay? Meditation is teaching our brain to come back, okay? So I feel like everyone thinks that meditation is

like emptying your mind and having this perfect brain stillness and just being able to sit there with an empty brain for 15 minutes. I will argue — and someone who teaches meditation told me this, so it's not just me — meditation is noticing when your mind drifts and bringing it back. It is the skill. We are training the muscle of refocus.

Okay, so I like to think the more my brain kind of squirrels out and I bring it back, the better I'm doing in my meditation. So I want you to think about that reframe and see how that feels for you. Because the truth of the matter is that's what we want to learn. That's what we need to teach our brain — that refocus so that when we are in flow and getting something done and someone distracts us, it doesn't take us five minutes to get back.

Maybe it only takes us 30 seconds to get back, or maybe it's easier to turn off all the “check your email, do these things” while you're not busy, or while you've taken a break, right? And then your brain's asking you to do all these other things. So it's not about emptying your mind and finding this perfect stillness. If you can do that, amazing, okay? But day to day, it's really hard to be that

unencumbered by life that you can do that. I just took — we did a trial retreat for Sugar Free MD and we went to Miraval and they do all kinds of deep meditation there. And it was guided. There were people talking, walking you through it. There was nothing else going on, right? I didn't have the kids there. I didn't have my husband. Everything was taken care of.

I didn't have anything that I needed to do other than just be there in that moment and listen to the person's voice. Yes, my mind got much stiller than it does on the day to day, but that is not something I can do every day. And we know that there's benefits to meditation. I'm going to teach you a bunch — or I'm going to tell you about a bunch — of ways to just get these mini meditations in, but I want you to first reframe the thought

that it has to be this stillness where it's really quiet and your brain doesn't drift. That's not it, okay? Your brain drifts, we bring it back, we are strengthening the muscle of refocus. That is how I want you to think about meditation. If you've never done meditation before and you're like, I hear it might be good for me, let me try it, okay? That's how I want you to think of it because that's...

you're going to be successful at that, right? All of our brains are scrolling around everywhere. It's easy for it to go off track. Bringing it back, bringing it back, bring it back. Okay. Every time you're distracted, that's a rep, right? So that's the workout and that's the win. So let's talk about some mini meditation.

These mini meditations are short and doable and we can just add them up, right? You know I like to do our little minutes, our opportunities to move and add them up. Let's just try the same thing with meditation, right? Let's make up our own rules. Let's do it. So here is one that you could try and that's just taking a really long breath, all right? Lots of meditation starts with just noticing your breath

and just thinking about your breath and nothing else. So this 10 second breath, where you inhale for four, hold for one, exhale for four, hold for one, right? Box breathing might be called that. Just doing that and really only thinking about the breath in and the breath out. That's a mini meditation. That's it. Congratulations. If you just followed along and did it, you've done one rep. Good job.

So we can just do that, right? And then maybe we can do five breaths, all right? Now you're really meditating. Now you're really in the zone, okay? If you do six breaths like that, you have done a full minute meditation. That's it, it's as easy as that. Okay, so that's one. Noticing your feet. We can just sit in a chair, put our heels on the floor

and really notice our feet. Bring a full awareness to them. Put your heel — feel your feet on the floor, wiggle your toes, notice the temperature of your feet, okay? That kind of anchors you in your body and you're not thinking about anything else, okay? You're focusing on your feet. That counts, all right? It's focusing on something other than all these thoughts traveling through in your brain. So we can do that.

That can be another minute. So we could do those things together and we're up to two minutes, right? Maybe we notice our feet first and then once we're kind of grounded in our feet, we do six deep box breaths. Now we have meditated for two minutes. All right, here's two more. They're kind of the same. So this would be: what can I see? What can I hear? Okay, so sit down.

Maybe we ground — bonus, right? We've put our feet down, we've noticed our feet. Now we're going to look around and try and really name lots of things that we can see. So we're going to really focus on what we can see. Or we're going to close our eyes and we're going to really focus on what we can hear.

And so we're going to focus on those things instead of all the thoughts running through our head. That will count.

So it's just about being in your body, not in our mind. Okay, be in our body, not in our mind. That's what we're trying to do. We can do the one box breathing before every meal. That one breath, the 10 seconds, the box breathing.

So that would be — if we eat three or four times a day — that's four minutes, right? All right, and the other thing we can do is we can maybe do this when we first wake up or maybe do this before we go to sleep, but when we're laying down, we can put one hand on our chest, one hand on our belly, and just really pay attention to our breathing. How does my body move? Am I feeling it in my chest? Am I feeling it in my belly? And just focus on that breathing.

Five or six big breaths, and we're at a minute. So those are like 30 second, 10 second, anywhere from 10 second to one minute mini meditations that you can do almost anywhere.

So even these little sessions can improve this attention and refocus. So I learned about some really fun ones while I was at Miraval. So I want to talk about a couple of them, because I just want to give you some ideas. It doesn't need to be sitting down yogi style. It doesn't even need to be laying down. These were some other really fun ones that I found very meaningful. I felt great. And so I think you might like them.

So one is: I really liked the one sensory focus. So that's either really focusing on what I feel. So putting our feet on the ground, like what am I feeling? Do I feel the clothes on my skin? Do I feel the chair under me? Whatever it is. So feeling, right? Or the hearing — I like that one too. Close your eyes.

What am I hearing? That's all we're focusing on. Well, you can do it as smell. You can do it just like, however you're holding your hands, you can concentrate on what that feels like. So anything sensory — just pick one and focus on it. Five to 20 seconds, okay? Maybe you want to run through a couple of them. There we are, back up to a minute.

Music meditation. I thought this was really fun. So if you can find some music — preferably not with words, right? Because then we'll start to sing along — but something with a melody, maybe no words, and pick one instrument or one line and try and pull that apart and focus on it. We can do that for a whole song. That's two to three minutes.

Again, it's just bringing that focus outward and if we start to drift, bring it right back. So we can use that sound to anchor us. So if you think of all the things that are anchoring us in our body to stay out of our mind, any of those can become meditations. Chad GPT will say you can do this in your car. I really don't recommend doing this in your car. Now I do drive in silence when I go up to the hospital and I do find that kind of mind-stilling,

but you do still have to pay attention to your driving. So I don't know that you can totally be out of your head and just focus on your body, but I like to think of that time, that quiet, as giving my brain time to sort out its to-do list so that those thoughts don't keep interrupting other places in the day. So it's not so much that I'm not in my head,

but I'm giving my brain time to organize so that it doesn't feel like it needs to keep telling me that I need to order a birthday gift or whatever it is. So I would not meditate in my car, but you could meditate in the shower, right? We could do: what does the water feel like? I love — I have a window in my shower so I can really look outside and see if I can find a bird or see what I can see.

Can I see the hummingbird? Can I see something jumping on the — is there a lizard outside? Sometimes there's all different birds outside. Can I see any of those things? So we could use that time as meditation too. Or you could do: what does the water feel like rolling down my skin? All that good stuff. I'll tell you one more story. And this, if you have some dedicated time and you really would like to get more mindful and do this trick of

meditating and refocusing. Again, because remembering, even if we're doing this for a short time, our brain is probably going to try and give you that to-do list again — that's okay, just be like, I'll get to you in a minute. We just refocus, refocus, refocus. So when I was at Miraval, they do this thing, it's called shinrin yoku or forest bathing. You don't actually get wet in the forest, that's not what it is. But it's kind of like bathing in the forest, taking in the forest.

And so this started in the 80s as a public health initiative in Japan because people were literally dying at their desks. They were overworking, like working themselves to death. And so they started this as a wellness practice and they found that the health benefits were even more profound than they thought they were going to be. So with this two hours of forest bathing — and I'm going to go through exactly what that means — you could see the health benefits for up to a week,

even longer — the maximal benefit lasted a full week. And that was decreased cortisol and increased heart rate variability, decreased blood pressure. So really profound things that are really good for your heart health with two hours of this. And so all it is, is really slowing down. So if we're taking a walk and there's trees, we're halfway there. But this is not about

beating your time, right? We're not trying to race. It's about really slowing down and using all of your senses. So kind of some of the things we talked about before. So when we did this — I was part of a group that did this at Miraval — we had to go and touch the tree and do the tactile sense. What does it feel like? We had to stop and look: what's the furthest thing away that you can see and try and only focus on that?

Then refocus on what's something really up close that you can see and only focus on that. Then you can sit down and listen. And it was a windy day, so you could hear lots of wind through the trees. And I could hear one little bird in the distance, right? So we can do that. Then it was: change your height. Get low and look on the ground and see things that you wouldn't have seen before.

And when I did that, I saw all kinds of little critter houses, right? Because there were no critters out there when we were out there — they probably heard us and went running — but I could see all their little houses. I could tell little critters lived in these little cubbies that I was finding. And so all of these things — using your senses, sitting down and just taking it in — really can get you out of your head and your to-do list.

And this forest bathing — if you can do that — you probably don't have two hours to do it, but even five to 10 minutes would help, right? So if you are taking a walk and that's part of your morning routine, maybe we just slow down for a little bit of it and do this refocus. So we can take our headphones out for a second. We can look up into the trees. We can try and spot some birds. We can try and look for critters, right? And that will give us these health benefits.

Just get out of our heads for a minute, slow down. All right, so let me see if there were any other ones that I forgot, but I think this is very important during the holidays because we're trying to get a lot done. I know you are, you are over committed. I'm sure you have too many things to get done. And so if you're actually in flow and someone interrupts you, it can really throw you behind.

So just strengthening that muscle of refocusing and getting back into flow and staying on task can be super, super helpful during the holidays. So we've got all these mini meditation ideas that we can try, because even one minute a day of just getting out of your head and back into your body can be super helpful. So we can do that listening to music.

We can do that in the shower. We can do that while we're cooking, right? What does it smell like? All the things, right? We can do that just taking some deep breaths before we start eating. We actually did a walking meditation that was really interesting, where it's one breath in and one breath out per footstep. And it's really hard to stop your back foot from coming up. So just — you have to concentrate so hard on only moving one foot at a time.

So that was a great one, right? It's really hard to be in your head when you're trying to do that. So walking meditation, listening to music, you can dance, right? Just move to the music, do what feels good. Of course, yoga — if you do sort of a vinyasa type where it's one breath per movement — amazing, okay? So pause, notice, come back.

Meditation is not about your head being totally still. It is about trying to get out of your brain and into your body. But if your brain keeps showing up, it's okay. We just refocus and that's the muscle we're trying to strengthen anyway. So anyone can be a good meditator. There is no special thing that you need to do. And I hope you try some of these techniques and let me know how it goes. All right, if you need a habit tracker to get through the holiday season and you want meditation to be on there,

you know I've got one for you. So go to www.sugarfreemd.com/habits and it'll be there for you. All right guys, I will talk to you next week. Bye.