Mindfulness is one of those zeitgeisty health terms you may have seen bandied about in the media recently. But what exactly is it? How does it work? And why should you care? In answer to the first question, mindfulness is one of those things that is, at the same time, both exquisitely simple and extremely complex. In essence, being more mindful just means paying greater attention to the sensory, moment-by-moment experience of your life. If you eat a scrumptious sandwich, really taste it. If you follow a perfect puff of cloud as it drifts across a blue sky, really see it.
This may sound obvious - patronising, even - but think about it. How often do you wolf a sandwich while texting, reading the paper, listening to the radio… do you even taste the sandwich? Do you sometimes stare at the empty wrapper in your hand and wonder whether you actually just ate it? Or gazing up at that cloud - is your head full of chatter as you think about the thousand things you have to do that day, the argument you had last night with your wife, even the sandwich you will eat (without noticing) for lunch… do you even see the cloud?
We life in a go-faster world, where we rush from one distraction to the next, never quite experiencing any of our experiences. We are bombarded with information - from rolling TV news, the internet, smartphones, iPods, blaring city streets, screaming sirens, barking dogs - which is far too much for our brains to process. We are constantly frazzled, attention fragmented, concentration impossible, short-term memory shot - and no wonder.
So the ‘informal practice’ of mindfulness just means trying, as far as possible, to fully experience every second of our lives. Simple. And the ‘formal practice’ merely involves taking a few minutes every day (10 is fine, 20 better) to sit in silence, focusing our attention on our breath. Just that. Letting the ‘monkey mind’, as Buddhists call it, chatter away, without paying it too much attention. Also simple.
How does it work? Well, there is an increasing body of research proving that mindfulness has a major impact on our mental and physical health. Especially its two clinical applications: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) which are extremely effective at tackling chronic pain, stress and anxiety; and depression, respectively. MBCT has been approved by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) to treat recurrent bouts of depression, so it’s now recognised by the mainstream medical establishment.
And why should you care? As someone who practices mindfulness meditation daily, and teaches it to his clients, I can assure you that it can have a profoundly positive influence on your life. You will feel calmer and more at peace; be less buffeted by storms of negative emotion; feel less stressed, anxious and depressed; life will have greater meaning, pleasure and joy.
Perhaps a better question to ask yourself is, if this wonderful stuff is free, easy to learn and takes just minutes a day to work, why on earth wouldn’t you try it?
Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. In a study that will appear in the Jan. 30 issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging,a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) reported the results of their study, the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain’s gray matter.
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology. “This study demonstrates that changes in brain structure may underlie some of these reported improvements and that people are not just feeling better because they are spending time relaxing.”
Previous studies from Lazar’s group and others found structural differences between the brains of experienced meditation practitioners and individuals with no history of meditation, observing thickening of the cerebral cortex in areas associated with attention and emotional integration. But those investigations could not document that those differences were actually produced by meditation.
For the current study, magnetic resonance (MR) images were taken of the brain structure of 16 study participants two weeks before and after they took part in the eight-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program at the University of Massachusetts Center for Mindfulness. In addition to weekly meetings that included practice of mindfulness meditation —which focuses on nonjudgmental awareness of sensations, feelings, and state of mind —participants received audio recordings for guided meditation practice and were asked to keep track of how much time they practiced each day. A set of MR brain images was also taken of a control group of nonmeditators over a similar time interval.
Meditation group participants reported spending an average of 27 minutes each day practicing mindfulness exercises, and their responses to a mindfulness questionnaire indicated significant improvements compared with pre-participation responses. The analysis of MR images, which focused on areas where meditation-associated differences were seen in earlier studies, found increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, known to be important for learning and memory, and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion, and introspection.
Participant-reported reductions in stress also were correlated with decreased gray-matter density in the amygdala, which is known to play an important role in anxiety and stress. Although no change was seen in a self-awareness-associated structure called the insula, which had been identified in earlier studies, the authors suggest that longer-term meditation practice might be needed to produce changes in that area. None of these changes were seen in the control group, indicating that they had not resulted merely from the passage of time.
“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life,” says Britta Hölzel,first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany. “Other studies in different patient populations have shown that meditation can make significant improvements in a variety of symptoms, and we are now investigating the underlying mechanisms in the brain that facilitate this change.”
Amishi Jha,a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training’s effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, “These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training. They demonstrate that the first-person experience of stress can not only be reduced with an eight-week mindfulness training program but that this experiential change corresponds with structural changes in the amygdala, a finding that opens doors to many possibilities for further research on MBSR’s potential to protect against stress-related disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.” Jha was not one of the study investigators.
James Carmody of the Center for Mindfulness at University of Massachusetts Medical School is one of the co-authors of the study, which was supported by the National Institutes of Health,the British Broadcasting Company,and the Mind and Life Institute. For more information on the work of Lazar’s team.
Tags: Brain,Compassion,Giessen
