PODCASTThe Science of Happiness

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Studies show qigong can strengthen your body and mind, and reduce cortisol levels. We explore this Chinese meditative movement practice that dates back over 4,000 years.

Summary: After a period of intense stress, loss, and physical disconnection, one guest turns to qigong—a gentle, meditative movement practice rooted in traditional Chinese medicine—to reconnect with their body and calm their nervous system. This episode of The Science of Happiness explores the growing scientific evidence behind qigong, revealing how mindful movement can support both physical health and psychological well-being.

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One Way To Do This Practice:

1. Stand and settle: Stand with your feet hip-width apart, knees soft, arms relaxed by your sides. Take a moment to feel the ground beneath your feet and let your body arrive.
2. Ground through your feet: Gently rock or sway in small circles, slowly shifting your weight to notice different parts of your feet making contact with the floor. Let your balance find its own rhythm.
3. Breathe slowly and naturally: Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth, allowing your breath to deepen without forcing it. Imagine your breath moving through your whole body, not just your chest.
4. Begin gentle, flowing movements: Move your arms and torso in smooth, continuous motions—circling, swaying, or softly lifting and lowering your hands. Keep your movements relaxed and fluid rather than stiff or controlled.
5. Soften your body and attention: Release unnecessary tension in your jaw, shoulders, and hands. Place your attention on how the movements feel from head to toe, letting your mind stay with sensation rather than thoughts.
6. Close with stillness: After 10–15 minutes, return to standing quietly. Notice any changes in your energy, mood, or sense of grounding before stepping back into your day.

Today’s Guests:

ACE BORAL is an Oakland-based chef.

PETER WAYNE is an Associate Professor of Medicine, and serves as the Director for the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine, jointly based at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Learn more about Peter’s work: https://tinyurl.com/342xndna

Related The Science of Happiness episodes:  

Breathe Away Anxiety (Cyclic Sighing): https://tinyurl.com/3u7vsrr5

The Science of Synchronized Movement: https://tinyurl.com/n4bcrb5j

How Holding Yourself Can Reduce Stress: https://tinyurl.com/2hvhkwe6

Related Happiness Breaks:

Moving Through Space, with Dacher Keltner: https://tinyurl.com/3u844n4d

The Healing Power of Your Own Touch: https://tinyurl.com/y4ze59h8

A Mindful Breath Meditation, With Dacher Keltner: https://tinyurl.com/mr9d22kr

Tell us about your experience with this practice. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.

Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap

Transcription:

ACE BORAL: In 2020, specifically March, when the shutdowns happened, my restaurant started feeding the public like we just started feeding like these food insecure and immunocompromised populations in Long Beach like, because I had a fridge full of food and I had staff that had nothing to do. So we did that for a couple weeks, and then the LA Times picked up on it and did a little like thing about us. Long Beach city found out about us, and then they just started supporting us. People just donating because they saw what we were doing. And that felt great. I was like, Oh my God. You know, people want to help, and they're helping the helper. I was like, okay, I think that's what I need to do. So we were, like, rolling with that from March until August. And in August, I was like, Yo, you know what I'm done with, like, traditional capitalist chase with, like, a successful business, let's just get into the business, quote, unquote, of helping people. So I announced to people that we were starting a nonprofit. The day after I announced that the restaurant had a fire, an electrical fire, and it pretty much burnt down.

I would say that I kind of just let my health go after the restaurant in Long Beach. I ended up going from pre diabetic to diabetic. I packed on 50 pounds. Man, it was bad. Like I've never felt so just so disassociated, so not a person, just so not myself. And you know, since then, you know, I'm getting treatment, you know, check the old ticker, the heart's doing okay. Like, really pushed myself to get better, and chasing that happiness, that peace, and so the past four years has been just completely Rise of the Phoenix, yada yada. But I really do feel like ashes to where I am now. And you know, all the tools that I've developed, and especially, honestly, Qigong over the past few weeks, as I'm going through this transition, have been really helpful. 

DACHER KELTNER: Welcome to The Science of Happiness. I'm Dacher Keltner. This week, we're learning about a practice that dates back over 4000 years and has been studied for a few decades now, Qigong. Qigong is a meditative movement practice that arose from traditional Chinese medicine and has been shown to help us with everything from our sense of balance to our cortisol levels. Our guest this week, Oakland based chef Ace Boral, wanted to calm his mind and feel more connected with his body. So for our show, he practiced Qigong exercises for 15 minutes a day for a few weeks. We're going to hear how that went, and also hear from a scientist and Qigong master about the many ways Qigong has been shown to support our health. 

PETER WAYNE: This seems to be like a multi, non drug intervention that hits multiple systems and affects the systems as a whole and their interactions, mind, body, cardiovascular, breathing, muscles, nerves, etc.

DACHER KELTNER: The Science of Qigong after these messages from our sponsors.

Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. Today, we're talking about what the literature says about how Qigong can nourish our health. Our guest today, Ace Boral, joins us after trying out Qigong for a few weeks to get back into his body. Ace, thanks so much for joining us on the show. 

ACE BORAL: Hey, pleasure to be here, Dacher.

DACHER KELTNER: Give our audience a sense of what are some of your daily meditation movements that were part of your Qigong practice. 

ACE BORAL: A lot of it was grounding. A lot of it was feeling your feet on the ground and really emphasizing balance. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah.

ACE BORAL: One of the ones I really liked was, like, put your feet on the ground as flat as you can, and kind of just move around, like in a 360 motion. And that was interesting, because you feel parts of your feet that you didn't realize you had, and it's oh my gosh. And that was actually kind of eye opening to me, in a way, because I was like, so that's how disconnected I am from being grounded, right? And so that was a big one. I have problems with fine motor skills, and I just noticed, like, the flowy movements that kind of come with it, the intention of moving energy, you know, like that stuff. And being like a full body thing, it's also really relaxing, you know. And the whole thing is, you can't be stiff when you do it, you know. Otherwise, you're kind of defeating the purpose. But if you're able to just immerse yourself in it, learn how to relax into it, and you really focus on the movements, whether they're, you know, more aggressive, or they're more gentle and fine. But the whole time it's like, head to toe, your body is moving in sync with each other. 

DACHER KELTNER: And were you doing this with other people, or were you doing it by yourself? 

ACE BORAL: I had my roommate do it with me a couple times when she was like, around, this is my roommate. You know, we're chill, but I definitely would feel like, if I was out in public doing Qigong, I would definitely be a little more tense, I think. I kind of just went on the YouTube kind of rabbit hole, like seeing different kinds of Qigong and seeing different instructors. And I would say I would do it almost every morning. And then I found one that was actually like Qigong before bedtime. And I was like, oh, I could use that. I could definitely use that. And that was really helpful too. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah. You know, the Qi in Qigong means energy or life force in Gong is to cultivate. And there are studies like doing these Qigong interventions a few months can help people with chronic fatigue syndrome. That same study showed increases in telomerase activity, which is something that helps with the health of your DNA. I mean, it's pretty remarkable. And I'm curious, how would you describe the shifts in your energy if you started to practice Qigong? Tell us about some of the moments. 

ACE BORAL: In the simplest terms I could put it is, I could feel the Qi, or energy really moving throughout my body, yeah, like a full body, kind of just like awareness, right? And that's so hard to get nowadays. You know, we just have a screen in our hands, and we're just staring at it, hunched over, just so disembodied from ourselves. And, you know, finding yourself, really, I think, is finding your physical self in a lot of ways. And at least that's what it was for me, and has helped me get through the tougher periods of my life. But yeah, that energy, man, it's just, you know, I do it in the morning, and then just things just feel a little easier, you know, like just, I'm really happy to hear about those specific benefits of Qigong, because I didn't know that, especially the telomeres. That's really cool. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, it's impressive. I want to get into your mind a little like you talk about the you do it in the morning, and then it affects your day. And they're nice studies coming out of Singapore. You know, 10 weeks of Qigong nursing students, less depression and anxiety, which is impressive. Those are hard conditions to move around, reduced cortisol, stress hormone, you know, going through this big transition, having the, your restaurant, burning down, stressed out time worldwide. What was your mental state like coming out of Qigong that changed your day?

ACE BORAL: The change mentally I think, definitely like more awareness. But I think with that came like this, more honestly, peace, it was more of like a peaceful feeling. I stopped worrying so much about the world or what my errands were, or the things that were just really been stressing me out. And, you know, I didn't ignore those or not have those, but I also was able to separate myself as a person from those things, you know, frame my own energy within myself, and then separately from, like, the other things, yeah, that's what it felt like to me mentally. I mean, when I think about it, the mentally side and the physically side honestly feels so hand in hand, yeah. 

DACHER KELTNER: How does this become part of your daily life? You know, we're always moving. Qigong is a kind of a practice about meditation and movement. So how does it shape your daily life? 

ACE BORAL: I definitely notice the difference when I don't do it. And I think a lot of people feel that way about a lot of tools that they have. I've definitely moved my schedules around a little bit, really, in the sense that I know I got a tough meeting in a couple hours, and let me just try to figure out a way to squeeze some Qigong. And hey, I'm about 30 minutes late. Let them know ahead of time. You know what? I mean, I've actually did that, 

DACHER KELTNER: And how much did you squeeze in?

ACE BORAL: Oh, 15 minutes tops. Really, 10 minutes is enough. Yeah, 10 minutes of just like, it sounds like an advertisement, 10 minutes a day. But really, 10 minutes of just, you know, gentle movement it's very low impact. Yeah, it helps me out more than any sort of stretching I've ever done for the gym. You know, I do that before the gym, and I feel like stronger. And so I guess, like, the way it shaped my daily life is, and the way that I've been able to incorporate it, honestly, this podcast, and you guys kind of nudging me to do it was what actually got me to make it more consistent, and really it's like holding yourself accountable for it, like knowing it works for you and just seeing the benefits, like feeling the benefits.

DACHER KELTNER: What specifically is true for your benefits? 

ACE BORAL: You know, the mental clarity, the emotional balance. With that comes more of a confidence in self, you know, something that I struggle with a lot, and just I see myself being able to relate to people better, which is also something that's a struggle for me. You know, more productive, like all this, I feel like it's an advertisement. You know what? I mean? It's like 10 minutes a day. Well, your life can change. 

DACHER KELTNER: You found a good thing. 

ACE BORAL: Yeah. Yeah. You know. Qigong, with the way that it can forcibly, kind of make me relax and ground myself. When you have that blood flowing through you, you feel that energy, that Qi. Maybe I'm over exaggerating, but it feels like a superpower, or almost like a power up. I think it absolutely calms my nervous system. 

DACHER KELTNER: I appreciate your answer. It's something we don't talk about enough, which is important. 

ACE BORAL: Mind, body connection, man. I swear that's, taking that approach will help a lot of people. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, and going forward, how do you see it as being part of this next phase of your life? 

ACE BORAL: I think it's just one of the many tools along with, you know, like Vipassana meditation that I've done eating better. It's another tool in my box that helps me just be a better person. And I don't know if I'll continue to do it, like, I'm just being honest, like, it's hard to do something every day.

DACHER KELTNER: Man, even 10 minutes, right? 

ACE BORAL: Even 10 minutes, it's crazy. It is crazy. I think the only thing I do, for sure, is brush and floss every day and shower, you know, but that took what decades of conditioning? No, but, I mean, I have a very I have a fondness for it in the sense that I think it's gonna stick with me a lot better than like meditation did, because it took me, I would say, I've been meditating for about 20 years, and just now, like, my practice is, like, a few times a week, but I think this feels a little more special to me because, you know, I've been a lot more reflective on it because of this podcast. Like, I need to really feel like what it's doing for me. And so I think there's, like, a lot more of a personal aspect to it now than I think I thought would be. So I'm thinking this will be something that sticks with me for sure. I think any movement, meditation, or meditative movements, especially in these difficult times, it's really important to get back to that. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah. Ace Boral, thank you so much for trying Qigong, and thank you for your immersion in it and reflections upon it. I'm feeling inclined to try a little bit myself. So thank you. 

ACE BORAL: Thank you, Dacher. Pleasure.

DACHER KELTNER: Up next we hear from Harvard psychologist Peter Wayne, who spent 40 years practicing Qigong and decades studying its physical and psychological benefits in the lab.

PETER WAYNE: One of my agendas is to sort of dissolve the hyphen between mind and body. We know that how we move deeply affects how we feel emotionally, cognitively, but also how we feel emotionally and cognitively affect how we move.

DACHER KELTNER: This is Dacher Keltner. Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. We're going to dive a little deeper into both the history and science of Qigong. I spoke with Peter Wayne, a psychologist at Harvard who's devoted his career to the science and practice of Qigong and other embodied approaches to well being as well. Here's part of our conversation.

You've been teaching and studying Tai Chi and Qigong for 40 years, and done a lot of the pioneering science on this. These important ancient traditions. How'd you get to these practices? What in your life led you to be involved with Qigong and Tai Chi. 

PETER WAYNE: I was very interested in eastern philosophy and Daoism in particular, and so this was the hook. Once I started going into the practices, and especially when I started teaching, I started to really appreciate the health benefits. And somewhere along the line, I decided to merge my love and interest in science and these practices and created a career out of it. And so my job at the Harvard Medical School is to really work with that strange bridge between these very traditional, somewhat esoteric practices, but trying to understand and frame them within the language of Western science. And I think because we use that framework, we get a little bit more buy in. 

DACHER KELTNER: Yeah, wonderful. For people like myself who have just a very superficial knowledge about Tai Chi and Qigong give us a kind of a brief cultural history of where these traditions come from and just how they differ. 

PETER WAYNE: Yeah, there's a lot of overlap, and in many ways, we pool many of the practices for our research purposes in Qigong and Tai Chi together, but they have different histories. Tai Chi is a bit more contemporary. It dates back to about the 16th century, and they seem to be an extension of a lineage of martial arts that look like traditional kung fu practices. The history for Qigong is not written very well, but there are scrolls that go back a few 1000 years BC, where there's exercises that look like Qigong. So that history is much richer and much more steeped in, in health practices, lifestyle philosophy and general Asian philosophy, especially Daoism. 

DACHER KELTNER: Cool, you know, you've done a lot of just groundbreaking scientific research on this, which we're going to get to. And I'm just curious, you know what the science and then these esoteric traditions have taught you about mind and body. You know, there's this new movement in the science of well being, broadly defined, of embodiment, that how we hold our bodies affects blood pressure and cortisol levels and vagal tone and the like. And what's it taught you?

PETER WAYNE: One of my agendas is to sort of dissolve the hyphen between mind and body. We know that how we move deeply affects how we feel emotionally, cognitively, but also how we feel emotionally and cognitively affect how we move. And so we can call some of this work mindfulness. We can equally call it body fullness, but there's a focus much more on the cognitive pieces, because I think it's the new value added to exercise. In the West, you have exercise, and now you have mind-body exercise. So there's a cognitive piece that's an added. You can't have an emotion without a body. I think programmed into these practices are shapes that make you feel better. And this goes way back to my older work in evolutionary biology, which is prior to verbal language, there was facial expressions and body language, and people communicated non verbally, so deeply encoded in the shapes we make are things that affect our nervous system, our endocrine system, and just about every other system with that 

DACHER KELTNER: Incredible you know, I'm struck by how powerful Qigong is for physical health, and you've been part of this literature, helps reduce blood pressure, helps mitigate the risks of cardiovascular disease. Just really powerful. What are some of the most striking scientific discoveries from your perspective on Qigong? 

PETER WAYNE: I think at the clinical level of its utility in healthcare, there's a couple areas, and I'm going to merge Tai Chi with Qigong. It seems to be one of the best, if not the best, tool we have out there for preventing falls. There's no pill you can take to prevent falls, and we know that this is such an important issue for our aging society. So I would say that mobility and keeping people moving is really important. So that's a really big piece. Pain is another one. There's some good evidence on back pain, neck pain, knee osteoarthritis. There's some growing evidence in terms of mood and depression. Unlike many drugs in the West that are designed to be a specific ingredient targeting a specific receptor, and therefore one outcome, this seems to be like a multi, non drug intervention that hits multiple systems and affects the whole systems as a whole and their interactions, mind, body, cardiovascular, breathing, muscles, nerves, etc. 

DACHER KELTNER: I think there is a misperception, as there is with a lot of these eastern esoteric practices, where there are biases that Qigong is really for the elderly, and yet we know, you know from research in Sweden, for example, that you know when kids do Qigong classes for a couple of months, they report less stress, they have a better sense of self, and they feel calm and alert. How are you working to get Qigong to kids in today's climate? 

PETER WAYNE: The short answer is not enough. If we look at the epidemic of mental health in the world, the burden on young children and adolescents is just, it's horrifying. One out of three children in certain groups, you know, socioeconomic groups, you know, have suicidal ideations. We've done some work with Qigong in graduate students. There's so much as you would appreciate, Dacher, academics, and especially in medical centers, there's so much burnout and so much attention now on taking care of the caregivers. But what we also wanted to do is take care of all the researchers, and it's incredibly stressful being a graduate student or a postdoc, and so we did a study in combining some cognitive behavioral work with some Qigong, and we found that some of these graduate students were really on the edge in terms of borderline burnout, if not over the other side, and just 12 weeks of training gave them the tools to manage their stress a lot better and to have that resilience. 

DACHER KELTNER: You know, we study emotion and passion and the body and physiology from Western scientific perspectives and try to get a sense of it. Is it ecstasy or bliss, or awe or joy? Or how do you think about the Qi from the Western scientific perspective that you've been a pioneer in? 

PETER WAYNE: I just gave a lecture called to Qi, or not to Qi, and I began by saying how far we've come in clinical trials and mechanistic research without evoking esoteric concepts like that. So first of all, we can explain all of this without terms like that. We can explain a lot of what's going on, but at the same time, when I'm teaching in classes, I use a very different language. I use the language that I've learned from my teachers, which is about Qi and information. I think of Qi much more as information than some frequency that you can measure with a device. We know that humans generate fields. The heart's pumping, there's a magnetic field. Ions are flowing through with blood and liquids throughout the body. Tissues that get squeezed and unsqueezed all have crystalline structures, and so we generate fields. We can measure the field around the heart from far away, magnetic field. We use fields of the brain to do MRI research. I think that this, it's a little bit like the information. In a forest, you have one tree, you get some information. You put a bunch of trees together, you change the humidity, you change the airflow, you change the animals that are attracted. When you create a whole human there's an emergent field, and I think that field, just like the field of a forest, feeds back on the health of the pieces. And what I think is that it'd be really interesting to be able to come up with some measures of whole person field behavior to see how that feeds back on the individual parts of the system. But what I don't think is that we're going to have a little Qi meter that's going to give you a 2.3 or a 4.6. It's not a very simple measure of bio electricity. For example, I think that we'll be eventually able to probe these questions with good scientific rigor, but it's also fun to leave that behind and just explore it from a phenomenological perspective. 

DACHER KELTNER: Peter, I want to thank you for being on our show, for promoting Qigong and Tai Chi, for both in science and in practice. So thanks so much. 

PETER WAYNE: Thank you.

DACHER KELTNER: Next time on The Science of Happiness, we talk with doctors about what happens when care is guided by compassion, even in systems that make it hard.

DR. AKIVA LEIBOWITZ: I just think it's very impressive what people can do when they decide to embrace their humanity instead of deciding to embrace the forces that are pushing them away from that humanity.

DACHER KELTNER: Our associate producers are Emily Brower and Tarini Kakkar. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. Shuka Kalantari is our executive producer. I'm your host Dacher Keltner.