Mindfulness, mediation, and mental health: Integrating mindfulness and meditation into psychotherapy with Dr. Simon Goldberg Part 2

In the 2nd episode of season two, Dan continues his conversation with Dr. Simon Goldberg, Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling Psychology and Core Faculty at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin.

Dan and Dr. Goldberg explore the topics of rejection and setbacks in academia, positive experiences in collaboration, and the differentiation between mindfulness and meditation. Dr. Goldberg shares his personal experiences with rejection and the impact it had on his early career. He also discusses a positive experience of collaboration and the joy and inspiration he felt working with respected scholars. Dan then delves into the area of mindfulness and meditation, with Dr. Goldberg explaining the difference between the two and his own daily meditation practice. 

Special Guest: Dr. Simon Goldberg

Episode Links:

Healthy Minds

Smiling Mind

Headspace

Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening

The Great Psychotherapy Debate

Mindfulness and progressive muscle relaxation as standardized session‐introduction in individual therapy: A randomized controlled trial

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Transcript

Broadcasting from the most beautiful city in the world, I am your host, Dr. Dan Cox, Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to episode number 18 of Psychotherapy and Applied Psychology, where we dive deep with the world's leading researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully, we have a little bit of fun along the way. So this is what I'm gonna ask you to do.
What I'd like to do, what I'd love to do, is for you to send me questions and for me to answer them in the podcast, probably at the beginning, I'm guessing, although we haven't worked that part out. These could be questions to me about show-related things or about something that has absolutely nothing to do with the show. These could be from practitioners, these could be from students, these could be from whomever.
I would love to hear your questions and be able to make this a little bit more interactive. There are a myriad of ways that you can contact me. In the show notes, you will see links to the following.
A way that you can text me, a way that you can email me, and through the SpeakPipe link, you can actually leave me a voicemail, which is pretty cool. You can also contact me on any of the social media platforms that I am on. So today, I couldn't be more excited to welcome back one of the world's foremost experts in meditation, mindfulness and psychotherapy.
My guest is an associate professor in counseling psychology and core faculty at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He's also a fellow at the Mind and Life Institute and has won several notable awards, including early career awards from American Psychological Association and from the Society for Psychotherapy Research. In this conversation, we discuss quality versus quantity of mindfulness practice, integrating meditation into psychotherapy, mindfulness apps, and the therapeutic alliance with digital technologies.
The episode starts with my guest helping us understand what quality mindfulness practice is. So without further ado, it's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Simon Goldberg.
So this was, yeah, this is some work that AC. Del Rey, who was a mentor and friend during grad school, he was graduating right when I came to grad school in Madison. And this was a project that he did for his dissertation.
He developed this measure of mindfulness practice quality, and he was thinking of it as, my understanding is it's the extent to which someone is applying the practice during a period of formal meditation. So, to what extent are you kind of coming back to the present moment with non-judgmental awareness? And there are some items on there that get at some of the experiences that I was talking about before, you know, when I'm falling asleep, when I'm meditating and zoning out, that's an item on there.
So that would kind of score you low on practice quality. And it's been, for me, a really interesting construct to be studying. One, because we consistently find that it's related to changes in other psychological measures, so it seems to tap something.
And on the other hand, you know, you're not supposed to judge your practice. It's sort of antithetical, in a way, to the spirit of mindfulness itself, to say, oh, today I was, you know, five stars or whatever. You're supposed to be accepting whatever the experience is, in a way, or connecting with it in this kind of non-judgmental way.
So, it's been an interesting thing. In our own group, we've had some discussions around the extent that we want people to be thinking of their practice that way, because we have measured some things in the app that we've been studying. After someone does a practice, we ask them some questions, and we've had some discussions about how to do that and the impact of having people kind of evaluate themselves in that way.
But that's the, I guess, long answer for what that is. But we've studied it. I mean, we've studied practice quality now in four or five studies, and there's other groups that have looked at it, too.
So it's been an interesting measure. I think the one potential or one potential maybe among a few limitations of it is to what extent is it just taking a little sample of how somebody is feeling or doing over the course of an intervention. So it's maybe less about that particular practice and more just a little sample of how are you feeling now and looking at longitudinal changes and how you're feeling now.
It's not surprising that that's correlated with say pre-post changes and how you're feeling. So I worry a little bit about that sort of like mono method bias in a way with the self-report there.
And then you've also done some work or looked at some in terms of quantity of practice, right? Like some of the duration and where are you at with that?
Yeah, we've been doing a lot on that topic. And it's fun talking to you about this, Dan. I'm like, these are just things I've been thinking about for 20 years.
So it's fun to, you know, I guess research is research. This is stuff I'm really fascinated by. So we've, you know, in some of the early work we were getting practice time from self-report and comparing it with practice quality.
And we found in some studies that the quality, the changes in the quality in particular really seem like the stronger predictor more so than the amount of time that people were practicing. And more recently, we have, and there's other groups that are starting to do this too, that have been doing this, we've been randomly assigning people to practice for a certain amount of time. And we've also looked at objective measures of how much people are practicing through the app that we've been studying and relating that to different outcomes.
And the kind of big-picture answer for this sort of dose response question is that it seems a little bit complicated, actually. And it doesn't seem, in the data that we've seen, that there's a super strong, clear, there's definitely a dose relationship between how much someone's practicing and how much they're benefiting. And that's, you know, including data from these randomized designs, as well as the sort of naturalistic use designs.
So that's been really fascinating to me. And my guess is that that's because these quality characteristics actually might make a difference, I think, is one factor. That it's maybe less about just how many hours you're putting in and more about what you're doing when you're putting in those hours.
And then another potential confound, I think, is in the digital context, I think people are using these tools in really different ways than we're necessarily used to thinking about. So I might use my meditation app because I'm feeling bad, right, as a way of feeling better, kind of responding to how I'm doing, which is a little bit different potentially than how we might use a medication or how we might use psychotherapy, where you just keep coming and then you're hoping to progress over time. These tools might be used in ways that make that dose-response association less robust or maybe more variable kind of person to person.
Because people are using it more kind of like a Tylenol, where they're taking the Tylenol and they have a headache. They're not taking Tylenol every morning at 8 o'clock and then again at 2.
The people who take more Tylenol probably have more headaches. Maybe if you look free to post, they might have more headaches than somebody who didn't take any Tylenol.
So you don't necessarily have a sort of a directionally kind of like a prescription for, well, it's good for a person to mediate once a day for at least 20 minutes, or they're better off doing it once a day for 20 minutes than every other day for 40 minutes, or anything like that. It doesn't seem clear.
Yeah, and we've run some of those. You know, we ran a trial where we compared once a day versus twice a day and didn't see any difference in changes in depression and anxiety over time. This was a sample of undergrads who had depression or anxiety symptoms.
In our randomized trials where we were testing app versus various control conditions, we consistently see benefits for those assigned to the app group. But on average, they're practicing about 10 minutes a day or sorry, they're practicing about five minutes in an hour, five minutes a day over the course of the, say, four week period, and they're using the app for about 10 or 11 days. So it's really modest amounts of practice.
And we're seeing these pretty consistent benefits.
Right. So one of your hypotheses is it's because people are doing it reactively. It's because they're doing it when they need it.
They're taking it out of their pocket and doing it, perhaps.
I think that's one reason why we're not seeing that association. And another thing that I think is happening is that, you know, if you have you've had no exposure, say, to mindfulness as a construct in any kind of a detailed way, people could or you haven't really had much exposure to the notion that well-being is malleable. And then you're getting exposed to this app, excuse me, that includes that content.
I think there's actually change that can happen from relatively mild interventions or modest amounts of exposure to content or to practices.
Because they're gaining new, because they're gaining insight about how they can experience the world?
Yeah, or they're shifting a mindset. You know, in the education literature, they have this whole kind of growth mindset notion, and they have studies where they give people, they give students really super brief growth mindset interventions. Basically this notion that intelligence, for example, is malleable, and that can have these effects even years later on things like graduation rates.
I think we're seeing something similar potentially in some of the work that we're doing. And I'm sure you've seen some of the single session interventions that Jessica Schleider and others are starting to study. I mean, there is evidence that even one session of an intervention can have an impact for people even months later.
So sort of the idea of, it's not sort of... Like earlier when we were talking about how this might work, we were talking about... We were thinking about diffusing from your thoughts and feelings and sort of changing the...
Or which could reduce those repetitive negative beliefs, the worry, that sort of thing. But this is a very different potential mechanism for action, which is the realization of I am not trapped in this. Like I can...
This... I have some agency over this feeling. Things can get better.
Things can be different.
And quite frankly, we've looked at growth mindset and this kind of well-being growth mindset construct in some of our work and we have found that it also mediates effects. So it seems to be potentially another kind of candidate mechanism. And they might relate to each other.
I mean, maybe...
And that's something... Sorry, keep going.
No, just acknowledging that there might be some sort of interplay between adopting a growth mindset or maybe the other way. Maybe you have this experience of having some distance from your, say, rumination or worry or different emotional experiences and then, wow, it really feels like that well-being, maybe it really is malleable, that it could be changeable or trainable.
Right. Yeah. And that's interesting because it does...
I mean, it just sort of does get into this idea. And maybe this... Just because we only have so much time, I didn't want to go...
Because you've been doing some research on psychedelics, but it does potentially... There is potentially a link there in terms of mindfulness or meditation for insight, which again, it isn't completely separated, but I feel like it is a little bit... I don't know.
I don't know if it's different or not.
Yeah. I wish that we had... I wish we had other ways to measure this stuff because I think the measurement challenges are really substantial.
I'm just putting that out there as an aspiration that we continue to develop other measures that we can use that aren't so reliant on self-report.
So it sounds like prescriptively something to think about. So for clinicians listening or people who are practicing for themselves to listen, that maybe there is more of a value in thinking about how can I practice mindfulness in a way that is sort of more quality for me. So rather than thinking about, I need to sit every morning for 20 minutes, it's how can I do it in a way that is a higher quality experience for me?
That makes total sense. And I might think of it, I mean, the thing I always tell people is to experiment for themselves and see, watch their minds, see what works for them, and that that's going to be the most reliable source of evidence rather than something from a study or something that somebody else tried to actually go and test it for themselves, if they're curious and see what seems to be beneficial. I think in terms of the quality finding, I think emphasizing that even five minutes of really practice where we're really showing up and putting in the efforts can be beneficial, that it doesn't have to, you don't have to go run off to some mountaintop or you don't have to be spending hours a day necessarily.
Maybe you do want to run off to the mountain to often spend hours a day, and there might be really extraordinary benefits that you couldn't get another way from that kind of engagement, but even relatively small amounts of practice actually can have an impact. It's something that I think we're seeing fairly consistently, at least in our app trials.
So even if it's small, but with the focus on quality.
Yeah. And I think, I mean, the part of why I'm hedging around this is I do think it's a little dangerous to be thinking too much about quality. Like I think that's worth studying scientifically, but I think, you know, overemphasizing that.
I would think of it more like the deliberate practice literature. Like if you want to learn how to play the violin, you have to show up and you have to pay attention as best you can when you're practicing violin. Like don't show up in daydream and doodle on your score or whatever.
Like show up and do your best. And I think that that same kind of spirit to the extent that we can bring it to our practice. You know, and for me, some of it has been trying to find things like what's the time of day that's really best for me or what's, you know, where can it fit into the schedule?
Is there a way I can, so I have a meditation cushion in my office on campus, and if I have a little half an hour, if I can manage to get to work half an hour early, I'll often sit there if I can. So those sorts of, you know, figuring out how to make it work in your day. Yeah, so I wouldn't want people to kind of over fixate on the quality, and I think a lot of us can be quite harsh and judgmental towards ourselves and our experience already, and so I think for a lot of us, actually toning that down in our practice and having more of like, any practice is good practice, just show up to your best and not really worrying about the quality necessarily, I think is probably the attitude to bring.
And I guess, you know, when I was saying quality, what I was thinking was how you were explaining it. So in my personal experience, doing walking mindfulness practice is, it just came so much more naturally to me, it just is so much easier. And then it's, you know, when I'm walking to point A to point B, unless I'm talking on the phone or something like that, it's not, there's no, oh, I could be doing this other thing right now, right?
So there's not that other thing, you know, my mind is sort of like can accept, all right, you're walking for the next five minutes from your office to your car, the next 10 minutes, whatever it happens to be, let's just use this time to do some.
I love that.
Yeah, yeah. So I guess, so I think how I was thinking about goes along well with your, just try stuff out, right? And see what works for you and then lean into that, lean into what works for you.
I mean, for me, that's that sort of playful orientation. Maybe like we were talking about before with Bruce and Bill and Helena, that when we can like feel like we're exploring something, we're curious about it, and I just think that's where a lot of really, like that's where the richest learning has happened for me, at least when it has that quality. I think it can be that way with our own minds.
I actually think that's a really kind of healthy way if we can to relate to our own experience, not taking it so seriously all the time.
Yeah, I did one where it was like, you're supposed to, it's something like, you're supposed to count to 10, slowly count to 10, and then when you feel, when your mind wanders, you start back at one or start back at zero or something like this. And so the first time I did it, I was like, I got to like seven and I was like, ah, yeah. And then like the next time I did it, I was like, oh, I can't get past a two.
Like, you know, it's like, I can barely get to a one. And so this, that was like-
It's amazing.
Yeah, and it was just, it was so frustrating. And I was just like, all right, I just, I need to let this go right now because I just can't do this. Okay.
So how have you, I want to talk about this acceptance change dialectic a bit. Yeah. Because it obviously fits in so well here.
And, you know, when we talk about sort of the third wave therapies and ACT and, you know, acceptance and commitment therapy, sort of they talk about that and very much lean towards the acceptance end of it. I guess, but there's always this sort of, in some ways it's logically problematic because when we're doing mindfulness or meditation, typically we are hoping for some sort of a change because if not, we wouldn't be doing it. But where this sort of underlying foundation is the goal isn't to change, it's to be aware and accept and that sort of thing.
I guess I was just curious about your thoughts as it relates to mindfulness and meditation.
Yeah, I love that question. I think it's sort of like a core paradox in the contemplative traditions, as well as in the sort of secular acceptance-based intervention traditions. So I don't think there's like a pat answer to it, but I think it's one of these really kind of beautiful tensions or sort of paradoxes at the center of a lot of these interventions, which I sort of love.
And I think that's really that in a way, the change would come through acceptance, I think is really like a sort of beautiful possibility. One of the stories I've heard about this or quotes I've heard about this, that I won't get exactly right, and I forget who does, I think it was a Zen teacher who said something like, you're whole and complete from the very beginning, and you could use a little work. Then both of these things are true, like the universe is perfect exactly as it is, the moment is perfect exactly as it is on some level, and of course we want to try to make our world better, and we want to try to make our minds healthier, and make our relationships healthier, and that both of those things can be true in a way at the same time, and maybe through our ability to come close to experience or come close to others even, that we have more potential to move in the change direction, that that's the kind of paradoxical element.
My guess is that for most of us, we could use a little more acceptance, especially of what's happening in the moment, that kind of moment to moment acceptance, that I think our culture kind of emphasizes the change element much more strongly, and we have this notion that we should be able to get what we want and make things the way that we want them to be. And the reality, even outside of psychology, is that we have these bodies that are going to get sick and are going to die, and there's going to be a lot of discomfort in things that happen. Aging happens without our permission.
Right. So there are things that we will have to accept because that's the nature of reality. Right.
I think that's part of why the acceptance stuff... No, I was just going to say, I think that's part of why the acceptance stuff has been so popular, is because I think that's a refreshing kind of antidote to some of the other therapeutic traditions that have kind of sold us on this vision of change, that you can change your thoughts, for example, you can change your emotional experience, you can change your relationships. So I think that's part of why the third wave has been so popular, is because this is this kind of, there's a sort of yearning for another way to be with what's happening, that's more useful potentially.
Yeah, you know, I haven't thought about it too much recently, but I mean, in a way, acceptance is change, right? I mean, what you're saying is that we would do well to change a bit by being a little more accepting.
And maybe even, I mean, I've heard Joseph Goldstein is a meditation teacher, well-known Western meditation teacher, and he has this experience that he talks about of working with fear a lot in his early practice. And that for him, the thing that really transformed it, it was really overwhelming. It sounds like it would really come up on retreat.
It was really a big force in his life. And when it really shifted was in a retreat context where he basically said, you can be here as long as you want. That there was this really kind of profound acceptance and willingness to allow that fear to be there, that there wasn't this resistance to it in the same way.
And that's really what allowed it to open up for him and ultimately kind of move for him.
Interesting. Yeah, I think about that when it comes to sleep in some ways that sort of the, you know, when one is, I certainly have had this, when you're having trouble sleeping and you start worrying about getting enough, you know, being not being able to get to sleep or tomorrow, not having enough, having had enough sleep, that once you're willing to sort of accept that as a possibility, you know. Yeah.
So you've done a lot of work with smartphone apps. So where, where are you, where are we with that? You know, I'm thinking about the clinician or a clinician in training who's listening, who's thinking about, you know, I feel like this could be really useful for me to give something like this to one of my clients or several of my clients, but there's just so much out there.
And a lot of me have to, you know, where, where, where are we with, where are you in terms of your thinking when it comes to these different apps?
Yeah. I mean, the, I think the meditation apps have a growing body of reasonably good data, suggesting that they produce small to moderate magnitude benefits on common mental health symptoms. So the same kinds of things that we were talking about for mindfulness in general, we're seeing similar effects smaller, but similar effects for these meditation apps.
And when you look at the mental health apps that people are using, they're all meditation apps. I mean, that's really the lion's share of what people are actually out there using, which to me speaks to the fact that people are benefiting from this stuff. So those kind of data points, I mean, there's growing body of randomized trials, but then also, you know, there's millions and millions of people who are using these apps, I think, to some extent, because they're benefiting from it.
So, you know, the app that we've been studying, the Healthy Minds program, I'm really happy that it's free. So that's one app that has kind of no barriers to use that's out there. And the New York Times has named us as their budget pick for several years in a row.
So we're really excited and proud of that. And then, you know, there's many, many meditation apps out there. Headspace and Calm are also top apps that the New York Times has listed.
Smiling Mind is another free app, I think, from Australia that New York Times has listed. And with, just like we were saying about dosage, I mean, my encouragement is always for people to explore this stuff and see if it works for them. And if you don't like this one, try a different one.
And if, you know, a meditation app isn't for you, maybe there's some other digital tool. But I think that, and not that everyone needs a digital tool, but I think, you know, there's a lot of really interesting stuff out there and a lot of potential. The meditation apps are the ones that I know the best.
Well, I mean, I think that's really helpful, what I can do. So because, you know, for the practitioner, it's like, what, yeah, I have a client who's interested in this, or I think they might be interested in this, but I don't even know what to give them. And there's a lot of, there's a lot out there.
Some of them are much more expensive than others. And some of them, it's like, you know, if I don't use it, it's like, you know, I'm not going to try all the apps. So is this, you know, is this snake oil or is this actually legitimate?
So the two that you said, Healthy Minds and Smiling Minds? Smiling Minds? Yeah.
I should be able to look those up and just sort of link those in the show notes. So that way, for practitioners or, you know, those are free resources that they can offer their clients, which is super helpful. So who is most likely to benefit from mindfulness meditation?
One of the things that we've found is that, actually, people who are high ruminators seem to benefit more. So that seems to, it's a little bit, I don't know if that's surprising or not, but I guess it's the people who kind of have, can stand to have some habits in their mind that they can work with a little better. And I include myself in that category as a high ruminator, that these techniques provide something useful that someone might not be as natural, doing as naturally.
Okay, so high ruminators.
So that's one, yeah, high ruminators. You know, we've looked at different demographic moderators in some of our trials and other groups have looked at that. And from what I could tell, and even in some individual patient data meta-analyses where they combine data from lots of trials, there don't tend to be a lot of demographic factors that are associated with benefiting.
That said, a lot of the literature is based on, you know, weird samples and white samples as well. So there is, you know, some selection bias that's happening in the trials that are out there. But when we look at, you know, even race, ethnicity or education as a moderator, we don't consistently find that the effects differ by that.
So if I'm a therapist and not a therapist whose approach is primarily, or is very much so, integrating mindfulness or meditation, right? So not somebody who's doing mindfulness-based CBT or whatever, how do you suggest, so, you know, how do you suggest they might consider integrating mindfulness or apps, or mindfulness in their therapy?
Yeah, I mean, I think one way is to think of it as another kind of health behavior that we know is beneficial for a lot of people. The same way a therapist might recommend that someone consider exercising or might help somebody with, you know, behavioral, I mean, behavioral activation is its own treatment, but kind of including more pleasant events or more social interaction or supporting a change in diet or sleep hygiene or things like that. I would think of it in the category of things that we can pretty confidently say is beneficial for at least a subset of people, and that if somebody is interested in it, you know, to support their exploration of it.
I think if a therapist is going to be including it more deeply than that, it's probably worth them having had some of their own exposure and having done some practice themselves. And I think going back to the Myriad trial, the trial in the UK where they had the teachers who were implementing the intervention didn't necessarily have that much practice experience themselves. I think there are dangers with that, and you really want to have people who have had some of their own experience that they can speak to.
So yeah, and I know a lot of therapists have that background and interest, so there could be really natural ways to integrate it too.
One of the things that I do is, and it's always sort of hit or miss if I remember to do it in a class that I'm teaching, but whether it's me or one of my teaching assistants starting each class with a really brief mindfulness exercise, and it's, so I haven't, I've never done it systematically to collect data, but anecdotally, it really makes a difference, and I think it might just be this like a switch for people, because they've just, they've come, they've run across campus, they've done from wherever. And so there's this, you know, but it's like, but this like taking two, three minutes to re-center into the present moment and be like, all right, now I'm in this classroom doing this thing, I can let go of whatever they happen to be coming from, that I have really, you know, whenever I remember to do it, it anecdotally feels like it really makes a difference in terms of how class goes.
And that's an easy way, I mean, that's an easy way to bring it into therapy. You know, there's a trial that looked at that experimentally and didn't see any effect. Yeah, Johannes Mander, I think, is the first author on the paper from a couple years ago.
And they didn't see an effect from, you know, having that at the beginning of a therapy session or not. But if it seems, if someone thinks it works for them or that, you know, for a particular client, it may be super helpful. I have a couple of students who I do that with at the beginning of our meetings together.
We'll do just a little minute practice if that's something that they're into. And I really enjoy it.
Yeah, no, I find it's, yeah, I find it's very, I find it's helpful for me. I would say it's like, as the instructor, like as the person doing it, sometimes you're less, you're able to be less mindful yourself in that moment because you're going through the thing, you know. Yeah, doing the, reading the script or whatever it happens to be.
But yeah, I think it's, yeah, no, I think that it is, it is pretty helpful. Does it, do you know if anybody's is totally an unfair question, but I'm curious if, if anybody's looked at that in classrooms outside of, and I mean, you know, in, in, in university level, kind of.
I think they have. I'll have to try to check down that paper for you. I feel like I've seen a paper or a protocol for a study that they were planning on running with kind of exactly that design, this little short practice at the beginning of class.
Yeah.
Well, if anybody's, if anybody's listening, who wants to run, who's planning on running a study and they need to recruit someone, I'm happy to, I'm happy to jump on board.
Love it.
One thing, so in looking at your work and reading at your work, one of the things that sort of jumped out was you did some work on the therapeutic alliance with a smartphone app.
Yeah.
And you did some measurement stuff to basically, off existing tools to modify to create a new tool for the, so can you tell us how we could have, like how does that even work in terms of having a therapeutic alliance with a digital technology like that?
Yeah, it's a great question and I think we're really just at the beginning stages of understanding that. That said, some of the aspect of the alliance, like agreement on the tasks and the goals of a treatment, you could have with an app just like you could have with a book or in a bibliotherapy context. So I think there are elements of it that actually makes sense and we could think of it as sort of alignment with the rationale and ritual of therapy and that that is a relational quality in a way that can happen with a digital tool.
The bond element is a little bit fuzzier, but I think there probably are trust, like do you trust, maybe it's not the app but the app developers or I think that there can be aspects of bond still that show up. But we're really just starting to understand that.
Yeah, so that was the one thing I was going to sort of come back at you on a little bit was, in like reading through, I was like, all right, goals, task, this makes sense to me. And then I was like, when it got to the bond one, I was like, all right, I mean, it kind of feels like this might not be quite the essence of the therapeutic bond as we, as originally conceptualized.
I agree. I agree. Yeah.
Yeah.
Interestingly, we've seen in a couple of studies now that that also seems to be a mediator where changes in that are at least related to pre-post changes in outcomes or pre to follow up changes in outcomes.
The bond specifically or the alliance in general?
No, no, the alliance in general. Yeah.
Oh, yeah. I mean, that doesn't surprise me at all because I even have some of the items. I believe the app tasks will help me to address my problem.
I believe the app is easy to use and operate. I trust the app to guide me towards my personal goals. I mean, it seems to me almost expected.
Like, of course, if I feel like, yeah, this is really helpful. This is great. Like, this is, you know, helping, like, of course, I would expect that to facilitate, you know, therapy, you know, psychological gains.
So, yeah, that's not surprising at all. But it's, yeah, I just sort of jumped out. When I saw that paper that you wrote, I was like, all right, I'm going to double click on this.
I got to check this out.
Yeah, well, good. I'm glad it elicited some, wondering if that's reasonable at all.
So, is there any pushback that you've gotten for your work?
We really, we haven't gotten much pushback. I think there is sort of a movement, well, I don't think, I know there is a movement to some extent in the meditation literature to study unintended consequences or adverse effects from meditation. So I think that's something that's happening more broadly.
And we've actually done some work in that area ourselves. So I think there's, to some extent, kind of a cultural or even scientific backlash in a way against the popularity of meditation and mindfulness that we've been a part of. But I haven't felt like, honestly, I think the psychotherapy stuff that we were doing, we would get more pushback from people who felt like one particular form of therapy was better than all the others.
But I haven't felt a lot of pushback.
Okay. So the last thing, are there any, and we've already hit on a couple, but are there any other resources that you think would be particularly helpful for the listener?
I think the two apps that we talked about are good places to start for someone interested in practice. There's some really beautiful books that have come out. If someone's interested in understanding meditation or mindfulness more deeply, there are some really beautiful books that have come out in the last few decades.
Joseph Goldstein, who I mentioned before, wrote a book called Mindfulness that is really a thick book, but really insightful and has lots of beautiful stories from his experience of practicing for many decades. So that's a Buddhist book. And then we didn't talk about the psychotherapy side of things, but for me, Bruce and Zach's great psychotherapy debate, I think, is one of the most readable and really fascinating, illuminating books on how change happens in treatment.
So that I know has been a huge influence on me and really inspired how I've thought about the various interventions that we're studying, the human and digital ones.
Great. All right. Well, thank you.
Yes. Thanks for having me, Dan.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you to Dr. Simon Goldberg.
That's a wrap on part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Simon Goldberg. And please send me your questions via text, leaving me a voice message or any of the other numerous ways of contacting me using the links in the show notes. Until next time.