You can make this happen. You can do this!

13 minutes a day.

728 minutes over 56 days.

According to a study at NYU, that is the minimum time it takes to rewire your brain using meditation… and you can do this!

Wait! Don’t let that “M” word scare you off. The word meditation has been over-mystified to the point that it turns people off. This is not to knock anyone who is able to sit in an upright position, motionless every day, clearing their mind.

I wish I could. I can’t.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, meditation is “the action, or an act, of meditating.” OK… that was of little help.

Over to you, Merriam-Webster…

“…the act or process of spending time in quiet thought.”

Hmmm. No mention of sitting upright. No mention of sitting in the lotus postition high atop a mountain in Nepal. “spending time in quiet thought.”

The progression is actually quite simple:

• The result of meditating is mindfulness.

• The result of mindfulness is being present.

• The result of being present is calm.

The NYU study found that just 13 minutes a day of being in a mindful state, over 8 weeks, decreased negative mood, enhanced attention, and reduced anxiety.

Many of you who have tried to reduce your own anxiety have tried meditation, no doubt. What I hear from you often is:

• “I can’t meditate.”

• “My mind wanders too much.”

• “I can’t make the time.”

• “I forget to do it every day.”

Before we move on, take what you feel to be about 30 seconds and look at the dot in the picture below. Don’t look away or try and figure this out… just look at it.

If you spent the last 30 seconds just looking at the dot and not thinking about anything else—you just meditated! To be exact, you just participated in a Focused Attention Meditation.

Stress and anxiety have coated our thinking in a goo that is hard to break through without an extreme struggle. How about we take away the struggle a bit and dissolve that goo at the same time?

This Week’s Exhale Assignment:

Our goal is to have you carve out 13 minutes a day of mindfulness. Many studies have found that these 13 minutes can be broken up over the day to the exact same effect. (One British study even found just 10 minutes is all that’s needed.)

The easy method is to set a number of alarms on your phone and be mindful for a few minutes at set times. But I have thought of a more practical way.

Use a door closing behind you as a trigger.

Every time a door closes behind you, pause. Take a minute or two and notice everything around you: Sight. Sound. Touch. Smell. Don’t try and judge any of these senses—just observe. Pay attention to your breath. Deep breathe if you like, but you don’t have to. Carry on.

(I hope I don’t have to tell you to move aside so you don’t get hit by something or someone, right?)

• You leave home in the morning. The front door closes behind you. Pause. Notice. Carry on.

• You get off the bus or get out of your car. The door closes behind you. Pause. Notice. Carry on.

• You go into a building, an office, or a classroom. The door closes behind you. Pause. Notice. Carry on.

• You come home. The door closes behind you…

• You go to your bedroom to sleep. The door closes behind you…

You are going to cross many a threshold in your day. It doesn’t mean you have to pause every single time.

The entire idea is simply to trigger you. Every time you go through a doorway, just be in the present, even for a few seconds. Don’t even worry if you have hit 13 minutes or not.

That would be a judgment—and we are leaving judgments at the door.

“What do you think you are? The centre of the universe?”

Yes. Yes, you are!

You are so much more important than you give yourself credit for. After all, there are other people who may be richer, better looking, more powerful. The King, The Pope, The Mayor. They are all more consequential to this world than you are, right? Wrong!

Every single living soul on this planet is a part of the puzzle that, pieced together, reveals the fabric of this world and the entire universe. I ask you, what is the most important piece of a puzzle? The corner piece? A side piece? To answer this question for yourself, imagine you have just opened a new box of a 1000-piece puzzle. Before you start to build it, reach into the box and pick a piece at random. Throw it in the garbage, then get to work on the puzzle. Once all the remaining pieces have been assembled, look at your work. You can’t help but notice that missing piece. It took you hours to put all of the pieces together, but you can’t help but feel that the result of all your work is very unsatisfying. The puzzle is not complete. And it’s noticeable. So, which piece of a puzzle is the most important? Answer: None. Each is essential and vital to the big picture.

My entire outlook on life was changed many years ago thanks to Max Ehrmann, an early 20^th century poet, philosopher (and lawyer btw). He wrote The Desiderata (Latin for “things desired”). Here is the particular line that tells you how important you are. “You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and stars; you have a right to be here.”

How can you say which drop of water in the ocean is more or less important than any other drop? What pixel of the Mona Lisa is more significant than any other?

But wait. Didn’t renowned astronomer Carl Sagan describe humanity as a “lonely speck” or “mote of dust” in the immense vastness of the universe? Yes, but he also said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” He argued that without “The Observer” (you), the stars have no one to witness their light, the wind has no one to feel its breeze.

You are vital. You are important. You are significant. A piece of a puzzle that would be missed if it were absent.

This Week’s Exhale Assignment:

Go buy a puzzle. Big or small. Get it at the dollar store. Before you begin, destroy one piece. Rip it. Burn it. Shred it. Build the puzzle. Then leave it somewhere you can see it every day. Explain the missing piece to anyone who asks. Let it bother you. (this may not be ideal, of course, for anyone struggling with OCD) Allow that irritation to morph into a realization, a eureka moment if you will. You have a right to be here and that without you, nothing is complete.

I want to share with you something very special to me, something that changed my very way of thinking about existence and purpose.

I know. Holy crap! That deep? Really?

Yes. If you just stay with me for a bit, I think you will understand why I subscribe to the “Calm The ‘F’ Down” philosophy.

This epiphany came to me from Alan Watts, a British philosopher, writer and speaker. He is my hero for one reason: he makes the complicated simple. One of his talks is titled “Life is not a journey, it’s a dance”. If you truly understand these few lines, it could change your life.

“…with dancing. You don’t aim at a particular spot in the room—that’s where you should arrive. The whole point of the dancing is the dance…We thought of life by analogy with a journey…And the thing was to get to that end…But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played.”

We are always chasing the horizon. Let’s put money away for later…beyond the horizon. My better body and health are beyond the horizon. My nicer house is beyond the horizon.

While preparing for the future is a smart thing to do, ignoring the present is a waste.

Consider Al-Biruni, one of the greatest minds of the Islamic Golden Age at the dawn of the 2^nd Millennium CE. He revolutionized how we measure the Earth and how we study different cultures. However, chasing the horizon most likely led to his death, and the death of thousands of other sailors. Legend has it that he oversaw expeditions of 2,000 boats to find the “extremity of the ocean”. In other words, he chased the horizon but never reached it. Al-Biruni chased the horizon but never reached it. We do the same thing every day, just in smaller, quieter ways.

· British researchers found that the average adult spends approximately 6.7 years of their life just waiting.

· Between 4-6 months of your life is spent waiting for a red light to turn green.

· We spend about 17 months waiting for food to cook and nearly 4 months just waiting for the kettle to boil.

· Canadian drivers spend an average of over 8 days per year just commuting by car.

Experts suggest that reframing these moments from “wasted time” to a “chance to pause and breathe” can drastically reduce the physical and emotional strain of the daily “chase”.

This Week’s Exhale Assignment:

Start keeping track of the times you “chase the horizon”, the time that you spend wishing for the end of a task. Write them all down. After a week, add them up. Think about how much of your life you were wishing away. If you dare, do the math and figure out how much of “now” you will throw away in a year, in ten years, in your life.

Why does this work?

It goes back to the autopilot I described in my very first post card to you. Turn off that autopilot, listen to the music…and dance.

I am going to break format this Post Card and give you this week’s Exhale Assignment first.

This Week’s Exhale Assignment:

Do three acts of kindness this week (hold a door open for someone, pay for their coffee at the drive-thru, send a thank you note, compliment someone’s appearance or work…. etc). Don't just wait for it to happen; go hunting for it.

Just how does this help your mental health?

Well, isn’t it obvious that it triggers your MESOLIMBIC PATHWAY? You know, the major dopaminergic pathway in your brain connecting the ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the nucleus accumbens in the ventral striatum. Sheesh!

What?

Sorry, I have to stop Gemini from explaining things to me.

Doing nice things for others actually triggers the “reward system” of your brain. We can thank our biological survival instincts for this. The way we humans learned to survive and thrive was through “service”, helping others. Community and cooperation are why we thrived. Think “I am making this time safe for someone else so that means it is safe for me too.”

There are several other reasons for this reward.

• By helping someone else we divert worry over our own anxieties using empathy to feel good for that moment.

• Any loneliness we feel can briefly be interrupted.

• Nasty Cortisol, our stress hormone, is diminished because your brain can't feel "threatened" while it's busy being "kind." Releasing oxytocin is like sending a "System All Clear" signal to your nervous system.

Obviously, this week’s Exhale Assignment will be intentional. You, hopefully, are going to be on the alert, looking for kindness opportunities. The hope is that you, with practice, make this a habit and make it a part of your daily life.

Be selfish-Be kind to others!

Contrary to what every medical drama has taught us, a defibrillator does not RESTART a heart.

Instead, a defibrillator momentarily and purposely STOPS the heart. When the heart is twitching in a chaotic, useless rhythm—what doctors call fibrillation—the shock acts as a biological reset button. It clears the slate so the heart’s natural pacemaker can step back in and take control. It’s a manual override for a system that’s lost its way.

I realized that we have a similar “reset” built into our own hardware. It’s called a sigh.

The human body, including the mind, has an incredible ability to heal itself. Think about the way cells rush to patch up a wound or how a cold virus is defeated by a mighty army of white blood cells—at least that’s what I learned from the totally accurate medical movie, Osmosis Jones.

Think of a sigh as a momentary, biological grace note. Deep inside your lungs, you have half a billion tiny air sacs called alveoli. Throughout the day, these sacs naturally collapse like wet balloons. A sigh is a forced, high-pressure burst of air that pops them back open

.

But it does more than fix your lungs; it settles your mind. By adjusting the levels of carbon dioxide in your blood, a sigh creates the friction-free space your brain needs to finally stop racing and just be.

The Exhale (literally, lol):

1. Take a deep breath in through your nose.

2. At the very top, take a second, shorter “sip” of air to fully inflate those air sacs (The Double Inhale).

3. Exhale for a full 8 seconds through your mouth.

You aren’t just breathing; you’re performing a manual override on your nervous system. You’re hitting the Pause Button. It’s the simplest, most honest defibrillator you’ll ever own.

I do this often. While walking, driving, standing still—even stopping and enjoying a nice day. People even ask me, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I say, “Just making it right.”

Try it right now, then hit the reply and describe the feeling you get.

It was early 2006. A routine morning on Breakfast Television. I was mid-voiceover when it hit: an unexplainable, sudden onset of dread.

Then came the part I’ve rarely shared: I was convinced I was going to lose control of my bladder, right there on live television, if I didn’t get to a washroom now.

The Guardian in the Wings My floor director at the time was Andy Boehme. He was, as it turns out, my steady anchor. He recognized the “look of confusion” in my eyes—a look he knew meant I was about to faint.

• The Action: Andy acted as my silent advocate, communicating to the control room that we needed to go to a break immediately, and would continue to perform this action for the months and years to come.

• The Aftermath: I left the building, got in my car, and cried all the way home. I thought my career was over.

The next day, I went back on air and told the audience the truth. The flood of “Me too” emails that followed changed my life. I wasn’t just in a personal crisis; I was part of a community at critical stress overload.

Since then, I’ve worked to become a “rational spectator” of my own dread. My greatest defence? I started saying “Thank you.”

Over the years, through professional advice and the latest research, I have been able to reduce my panic attacks to almost nothing. I want to share the “secret sauce” that works for me.

YOUR EXHALE FOR THIS WEEK

Note: This is from my personal experience and is not a replacement for working with your doctor or mental health professionals.

To make this work, you need to become an observer in your own body. During your next episode, try to truly “feel” everything, from beginning to end. Here is the process I call EXHALE:

• E – Evaluate: Recognize the “earthquake weather”—those subtle precursors before the tremor.

• X – X-Ray: Mentally describe every sensation. “My heart is fast,” “My hands are tingling.”

• H – Help: Tell someone. Bringing the attack into the light takes away its power.

• A – Acknowledge: Understand the biology. This is a team effort between your body and your neurons. The threat may be exaggerated, but the sensations are quite real.

• L – Love: Say “Thank you.” Consider this a “kick-in-the-ass” from your brain—how else is it going to get you to listen? Accept the message.

• E – Endure: Wait. It will pass. It always does.

It works for me. It turned my “monster” into a messenger.

“I’ll start Monday!”

We’ve all said it. We know we need to break old habits and start new ones, so we commit to the big shift: The new diet starts Monday. The walking routine starts Monday. We even tell ourselves, “Kevin says I need to pause and be mindful... I’ll start that on Monday, too!”

Then, two weeks later, we’re back on the couch.

The likelihood of failure for most new habits peaks at the two-week mark. But why? Are we just weak? Do we lack the willpower to make change stick?

Actually, the problem is a structure in your brain about the size of a gumball.

The Energy Miser

Your brain is wired to resist change. It sees a new habit as a threat to your energy supply. Deep inside your brain, these structures—called the basal ganglia—have one primary job: Automation. The basal ganglia puts you on autopilot to save the finite energy available to your body. If you try to change your routine, the “Gumball” steps in to stop you. It’s trying to protect your energy reserves.

The bigger the habit change, the more pushback you get from your brain.

The Covert Operation

I’m about to tell you something that needs to be kept secret from your neurons. Shhh!

The secret to The Pause Button Project is small, sustainable shifts. To change your life, you don’t need a frontal assault on your habits; you need to smuggle changes past that gumball.

If the change is small enough, it’s invisible to your brain’s “security system.” Done often enough, this covert operation rewires your habits from the inside out.

YOUR EXHALE FOR THIS WEEK

Remember sneaking food into a movie theatre under your coat? You didn’t try to bring in a four-course meal—just enough to get past the usher.

We know that to ease anxiety, the “ideal” is to meditate for 20 minutes a day. But you aren’t going to keep that up right now, are you? So, let’s try a Micro-Habit instead:

• The Cue: While your coffee is brewing or you are waiting for an elevator...

• The Action: Do two wall-pushes.

• The Secret Sauce: Exhale sharply as you push away from the wall.

That exhale is a mechanical signal to your brain that you aren’t in danger—you’re in control. You just smuggled a win past the gumball.

Leave a comment below, and share with others, what other “little things” you can do.

Through these Postcards, I’ve encouraged you to make small investments in your mental health. Usually, we’re told “slow and steady wins the race.”

But today, I have a hot tip—an investment research shows can bring a 28% return. The best part? It only costs you four letters: H-O-P-E.

Yes... HOPE.

I know “Hope Theory” sounds like something out of a textbook, but in reality, it’s just a roadmap for the “Exhale” we all need.

In the 1990s, psychologist Dr. C.R. Snyder introduced The Hope Theory. He proved that hope isn’t just a “fuzzy feeling”—it’s a conscious strategy. When we choose hope, we don’t just “wish”; we build Pathways (the plan) and the Agency Muscle (the willpower) to reach our goals.

Snyder’s research showed that hope accounts for a 28% variance in success. What does that look like in real life? Think of it as a 28-meter head start in a 100-meter dash. If you and a competitor have the same talent and drive, but you have Hope, you are starting the race nearly a third of the way to the finish line. Hope is the edge that explains why you cross the finish line while others—with the same skills—are still stuck at the blocks.

I have often said that the opposite of depression isn’t “happiness”—it’s HOPE.

THE EXHALE: A 60-Second “Hope Anchor”

Today, I’m asking you to set a Hope Anchor.

Pick one task weighing you down. Spend one minute visualizing yourself taking just the first step. Not the finish line—just the start. See yourself opening the laptop to write that report or carrying the ladder to the window.

By doing this, you are training your brain for performance. You’re flexing the “Agency Muscle.” You’ll find that when you actually start the task, the resistance is lower. You’ve already given yourself that 28% head start.

I leave you with a bit of musical encouragement. I loved this song as a kid, but I never realized its deeper meaning until now. The Title? High Hopes! It’s about an ant who wants to move a rubber tree plant. He accomplishes that herculean task because he refused to ignore that four-letter word... H-O-P-E.

YouTube - High Hopes

Would you give yourself an electric shock just to avoid being alone with your thoughts?

Chances are, you would. A study by social psychologist Timothy Wilson found that 67% of men (and 25% of women) chose to shock themselves rather than sit in silence for 15 minutes.

We fear BOREDOM

In the gaps of our day—walking, waiting, or resting—we reach for our phones to kill the boredom. But by killing the boredom, we are killing our brain’s “Maintenance Mode.”

The Engine is Overheating

Think of your brain like a car driven non-stop. Without a “Pause,” the system begins to fail:

• Thermal Breakdown: Your mental “oil” turns to sludge under constant pressure.

• Warped Rotors: Without cooling time, your decision-making “brakes” begin to fail.

• The “Drunk” Driver: Staying “on” for 24 hours makes your brain function as if you were legally drunk (0.10%). You start experiencing “micro sleeps”—where your eyes are open, but your mind is literally offline.

The Science: When you aren’t “occupied,” your brain switches to the Default Mode Network. This isn’t wasted time; it is the source of your creativity, empathy, and self-awareness.

Reclaiming the Signal

Let’s stop calling it “boredom”—that makes us feel guilty. Let’s call it:

• Stillness

• Recharging

• The Exhale

Your Exhale: Today, find three minutes of “boredom.” Don’t check the phone. Don’t turn on the TV. Just do nothing. Your brain will take it from there.

Go ahead and be bored. I dare you. I triple-dog dare you!

Note from Kevin: We are just 106 people away from 1,500 ‘Exhalers.’ If this spoke to you, please forward it to one person who needs a pause today.

One of my favourite movies is Stranger Than Fiction. It starsWill Farrell who plays Harold Crick, a pathologically rigid and lonely IRS auditor whose life is defined by extreme “robotization” through repetitive routines.

Every weekday, for nine years, Harold would brush each of his 32 teeth 76 times. 38 times back and forth. 38 times up and down…Every weekday, for nine years, Harold would run at a rate of nearly 57 steps per block for 6 blocks nearly missing the 8:17 Faraday Bus…”

I don’t want to ruin the rest of this brilliant movie but the lesson being, Harold Crick did the same thing, every day, at the same time, the same way…for nine years. He had become a victim of an Erosion of Agency. In other words: You aren’t driving the car; the car is driving you. Gone is desire and motivation.

Let me guess what you did this morning. Let’s see…your alarm went off at the same time it always does, you hit snooze a couple of times, got up, unknowingly scratched yourself in the same place you always do when you wake up, showered washing yourself in the exact same sequence as you always do, went to work in the exact same way, following the exact same route, as you always do…and I could go on.

You have surrendered control of what you perceive as the more mundane routines in your day. At first, it seemed efficient, but what have you really given up?

Have you ever noticed that if something happens that changes that routine? Remember the scene in A Bugs Life where a single leaf throws an entire line of ants into chaos? “What do we do!!! What do we do!!!

Your Exhale

Oh, this one is easy. All you have to do is turn left instead of right. Start scrubbing the left side of your body in the shower instead of the right as usual. Zig instead of zag. Have pork chops on meat loaf Tuesday.

Just break one routine. Driving home? Take a different way home.

That’s it!

Pardon? Why?

Because the moment you change the routine, your brain ‘wakes up.’ You start noticing the world again because you can’t, and don’t want do it on autopilot.

You are not a robot. You can make your own choices. You make your own decisions. Take back that control, just one habit at a time. (The trick is not to let these things habit-breaks become habit of course, so you have to change the changes)

Don’t be a Harold. Take the left turn.

Until next week, take care of yourself, and take care of each other.

We interrupt this Post Card From The Exhale for this interruption.

Right now, close your eyes and listen to your breath for two exhales. I’ll wait…

[1…and…2]

There. Now we know that you are equipped to handle an intentional interruption.

intentional interruption

The act of stepping off the conveyor belt of your day. It is a ‘manual override‘ where you pause, take your mind off autopilot, and reclaim your presence. You aren’t stopping because you’re finished; you’re stopping to remind yourself that you are the one in control. Then, you carry on.

• You blinked your eyes more than 21 thousand times today

• You took almost the same number of breaths

• You touched your face about 23 times every hour.

You probably drove to work, not worrying about which turns to make…you just did it. In fact, most of everything you did today was done without you making a conscious choice.

Not being a participant in this much of your day is not a good thing. How often do you feel “meh” or “blah”? Your mind is already on Friday rather than actually living in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Let’s do the math…on average a person lives 29,000 days. Take away weekends and holidays and we’re left with approximately 17 thousand days, or more than half our lives! (OK…I arrived at that number using shaky logic, but you get the idea.)

By being on autopilot for more than half of our lives is, as I said, not a good thing. Your mind gets bored. It languishes. One study showed “languishing” participants were 89 to 117 percent more likely to develop anxiety or depression.

The answer? Mindfulness. Being present. Turning off the autopilot. But you already knew that didn’t you? Breathe, meditate, then, breathe again. It’s in all the self-help books that you are going to read one day. Let’s try something a little more manageable for now.

Your Exhale:

Sometime today, in fact a few times today (set an alarm if you have to), pause! Turn off the autopilot and notice something, anything. The colour of the shingles on the house next to you at a red light. How many sounds are around you right at that moment? Is there any sort of a breeze? Breathe in…hold it…Exhale slowly. Carry on.

That’s it. Just 10 seconds. You don’t have to analyze anything. You don’t have to clear your mind. You don’t have to sit in the lotus position.

Let me start you off. Look at the letter “t” in think on this page. Is it straight at the bottom or curled. How close to the top is the cross? How wide is it compared the “h” next to it. Breathe in…hold it…Exhale slowly. Carry on.

Another Post Card next week.

(please leave a comment on how this made you feel)