CNN news anchor Candy Crowley is one of America’s busiest—and most influential—women. She’s CNN’s chief political correspondent, the host of the Sunday morning talk show State of the Union with Candy Crowley, and this week she hosted the second Presidential Debate between US President Barack Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. How does she juggle such a hectic schedule and stay balanced? Says Crowley, a healthy vegetarian diet, exercise, and deep rest through the Transcendental Meditation program all help to keep her on top of her game.

In a pre-debate NY Times Q&A entitled “Candy Crowley’s Debate Prep,” Crowley was asked if there is one thing she does every day. She responded:

“I practice Transcendental Meditation. I’ll do it in the morning. If I have to, I do it at the office. Most times, I will do it when I get home, but not before bed, because it tends to be energizing.”

Higher energy levels mean a lot to an award-winning woman whose journalistic assignments have taken her to all 50 states and around the world. In fact, Crowley says it was the hectic pace of her 2008 presidential election coverage that led Crowley to learn the TM technique in the first place.

In Prevention magazine’s “10 Questions for Candy Crowley, Presidential Debate Moderator,” Crowley said,

“Campaigns are just so hard on everything. You’re on the bus, you’re off the bus, you’re on the plane, you’re in a hotel. And that’s really your life: You think you’re not going to eat and then you eat too much, or you think you are going to eat and you don’t eat enough. You’re just so stressed out and tired.

“When the 2008 campaign was over, I said, ‘How about if I promise myself that I will spend a year concentrating on getting healthy and doing the right things? If I hate it and it’s horrible, at the end of the year I’ll just go back and eat crazy.’ My friends called it The Year of Candy. I had a friend who said, ‘You oughta try Transcendental Meditation.’”

She learned shortly after and has been an avid practitioner ever since.

In addition to enjoying the program’s health and wellness benefits herself, Crowley has seen the TM program create positive transformations in other people’s lives as well—including US military veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Last May, she was host of the national summit on “Resilience, the Brain, and Meditation” at the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C. The meeting was held to explore the extensive scientific evidence and clinical experience documenting the use of the Transcendental Meditation technique to promote resilience and overcome post-traumatic stress disorder among active-duty military personnel, veterans, and cadets.

The TM program is associated with many health and wellness benefits—as shown by hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and NIH-funded research. But for Crowley, the main benefit is stress-relief.

In the Prevention article, Crowley said of her daily TM practice:

“It’s a relaxation technique. A TM teacher once said to me, ‘You know when you have a really wavy day on a boat, and you’re getting tossed around and there’s white caps everywhere? That’s kind of where we spend most of our time: on top of the waves.’ But if you jump into the water and can get down to the bottom, it’s so still and quiet. That’s where TM is. I just sit in a chair in my room. I meditate in the airport. I meditate in my office in the afternoon. It doesn’t require a special place or even a lack of people.”