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January 2 - January 17, 2022
In the realm of mind (as everywhere else), what you do determines what you get. In sum, “meditation” is not a single activity but a wide range of practices, all acting in their own particular ways in the mind and brain.
our model of change tracks how many lifetime hours of practice a meditator has done and whether it was daily or on retreat.
in Richie’s lab. Each of the meditators they study report on what kind of meditation practice they do, how often and for how long they do it in a given week, and whether they go on retreats. If so, they note how many hours a day they practice on retreat, how long the retreat is, and how many such retreats they have done.
As we will see, there sometimes is a dose-response relationship when it comes to the brain and behavioral benefits from meditation: the more you do it, the better the payoff.
Such “Hawthorne effects,” though, do not mean there was any unique value-added factor from a given intervention; the same upward bump would occur from any change people regarded as positive.
The instructor’s enthusiasm for a given method can infect those who learn it—and so the “control” method should be taught with the same level of positivity as is true for the meditation.
Richie and his colleagues developed a Health Enhancement Program (HEP) as a comparison condition for studies of mindfulness-based stress reduction. HEP consists of music therapy with relaxation; nutritional education; and movement exercises like posture improvement, balance, core strengthening,
many of the reported benefits in the early stages of practice can be chalked up to expectation, social bonding in the group, instructor enthusiasm, or other “demand characteristics.” Rather than being from meditation per se, any reported benefits may simply be signs that people have positive hopes and expectations.
And in popular usage, mindfulness can refer to meditation in general, despite the fact that mindfulness is but one of a wide variety of methods.
a larger sequence which starts with a focus on one thing, then the mind wandering off to something else, and then the mindful moment: noticing the mind has wandered. The sequence ends with returning attention to the point of focus. That sequence—familiar to any meditator—could also be called “concentration,”
In the mechanics of meditation, focusing on one thing only means also noticing when your mind wanders off so you can bring it back—and so concentration and mindfulness go hand in hand.
Another common meaning of mindfulness refers to a floating awareness that witnesses whatever happens in our experience without judging or otherwise reacting.
what’s called “mindfulness,” by scientists and practitioners alike, can refer to very different ways to deploy attention. For example, the way mindfulness gets defined in a Zen or Theravadan context looks little like the understanding of the term in some Tibetan traditions.
The four main neural pathways meditation transforms are, first, those for reacting to disturbing events—stress
the second brain system, for compassion and empathy, turns out to be remarkably ready for an upgrade. The third, circuitry for attention, Richie’s early interest, also improves in several ways—no surprise, given that meditation at its core retrains our habits of focus. The fourth neural system, for our very sense of self, gets little press in modern talk about meditation, though it has traditionally been a major target for alteration.
academic journals themselves vary in the standards by which peers review articles; we’ve favored A-level journals, those with the highest standards. For another, we’ve looked carefully at the methods used, rather than ignoring the many drawbacks and limitations to these published studies that are dutifully listed at the ends of such articles.
So, for example, of the original 231 reports on cultivating loving-kindness or compassion, only 37 met top design standards.
A mind undisturbed marks a prominent goal of meditation paths in all the great spiritual traditions.
In nature, stress episodes like encountering a predator are temporary, giving the body time to recover. In modern life stressors are mostly psychological, not biological, and can be ongoing (if only in our thoughts), like a horrific boss or trouble with family. Such stressors trigger those same ancient biological reactions. If these stress reactions last for a long time, they can make us sick.
But the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about it—as well as to think about the past—and regret.
As Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, put it centuries ago, it’s not the things that happen to us that are upsetting but the view we take of those doings.
cortisol, if raised chronically, has deleterious impacts like an increased risk of dying from heart disease.3 Can meditation help?
Like Goenka, the main methods Hover taught were, initially, to focus on your breath in order to build concentration for the first three days of the retreat, and then to systematically scan the body’s sensations very slowly, from head to toe, over and over again for the next seven days.
These immobile sessions produced a level of pain, Jon said, he had never experienced in his life. But as he sat through that unbearable pain and scanned his body to focus on his experience, the pain dissolved into pure sensations.
the program now known around the world as mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR, came into being in September of 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
In his vision he realized that pain clinics are filled with people whose symptoms are excruciating and who can’t escape the pain except through debilitating narcotics. He saw that the body scan and other mindfulness practices could help these patients uncouple the cognitive and emotional parts of their experience of pain from the pure sensation, a perceptual shift that can itself be a significant relief.
you connect with and then move through key regions of the body in a systematic sequence, starting with the toes of the left foot, and winding up at the top of the head. The key point: it is possible to register and then investigate and transform your relationship to whatever you are sensing at a given place in the body, even if it is highly unpleasant.
Borrowing from both his Zen background and vipassana, Jon added a sitting meditation where people pay careful attention to their breath, letting go of thoughts or sensations that arise—just being aware of attending itself, not of the object of attention, the breath at the beginning, and then other objects such as sounds, thoughts, emotions, and of course, bodily sensations of all kinds.
methods taken from contemplative paths and put in new forms without their spiritual context could have benefits in the modern world.
MBSR may be the most widely practiced form of mindfulness anywhere, taught around the world in hospitals and clinics, schools, even businesses. One of the many benefits claimed for MBSR: boosting how well people handle stress.
That is but one of many hundreds of studies that have been done on MBSR, revealing a multitude of payoffs, as we’ll see throughout this book. But the same can be said for MBSR’s close cousin, mindfulness itself.
Alan developed a unique program that extracts from the Tibetan context a meditation practice accessible to anyone, what he calls Mindful Attention Training. This program starts with full focus on the breath, then progressively refines attention to observe the natural flow of the mind stream and finally rest in the subtle awareness of awareness itself.
A word about the amygdala, which has a privileged role as the brain’s radar for threat: it receives immediate input from our senses, which it scans for safety or danger. If it perceives a threat, the amygdala circuitry triggers the brain’s freeze-fight-or-flight response, a stream of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline that mobilize us for action. The amygdala also responds to anything important to pay attention to, whether we like or dislike it.
The amygdala connects strongly to brain circuitry for both focusing our attention and for intense emotional reactions. This dual role explains why, when we are in the grip of anxiety, we are also very distracted, especially by whatever is making us anxious. As the brain’s radar for threat, the amygdala rivets our attention on what it finds troubling. So when something worries or upsets us, our mind wanders over and over to that thing, even to the point of fixation—like
In this second study, lessened amygdala reactivity was found only during mindful attention and not during ordinary awareness, indicating a state effect, not an altered trait. A trait change, remember, is the “before,” not the “after.”
If you give the back of your hand a hard pinch, different brain systems mobilize, some for the pure sensation of pain and others for our dislike of that pain. The brain unifies them into a visceral, instant Ouch! But that unity falls apart when we practice mindfulness of the body, spending hours noticing our bodily sensations in great detail. As we sustain this focus, our awareness morphs.
But if we persevere with mindful investigation, that pinch becomes an experience to unpack with interest, even equanimity. We can see our aversion fall away, and the “pain” break down into subtler flavors: throbbing, heat, intensity.
Among pain’s main components are our purely physiological sensations, like burning, and our psychological reactions to those sensations.11 Meditation, the theory goes, might mute our emotional response to pain and so make the heat sensations more bearable.
In Zen, for example, practitioners learn to suspend their mental reactions and categorization of whatever arises in their minds or around them, and this mental stance gradually spills over into everyday life.
The more experienced among the Zen students not only were able to bear more pain than could controls, they also displayed little activity in executive, evaluative, and emotion areas during the pain—all regions that ordinarily flare into activity when we are under such intense stress. Tellingly, their brains seemed to disconnect the usual link between executive center circuits where we evaluate (This hurts!) and circuitry for sensing physical pain (This burns).
This offers a new twist on a strategy sometimes used in cognitive therapy: reappraisal of severe stress—thinking about it in a less threatening way—which can lessen its subjective severity as well as the brain’s response.
Like people who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, victims of burnout are no longer able to put a halt to their brain’s stress response—and so, never have the healing balm of recovery time.
They found that the stronger a person’s sense of purpose in life, the more quickly they recovered from a lab stressor.16 Having a sense of purpose and meaning may let people meet life’s challenges better, reframing them in ways that allow them to recover more readily.
This simple skill, statistical analyses suggested, led to a range of improvements on self-reports, from less anxiety to an overall sense of well-being, including emotion regulation as gauged by reports of recovering more quickly from upsets and more freedom from impulses.
Whereas Dan had used the shop accident film to bring stress into the lab, here the stressor was the Trier test’s simulated job interview followed by that formidable math challenge.
The more hours those teachers had practiced meditation, the quicker their blood pressure recovered from a high point during the TSST. This was true five months after the program ended,
Richie’s lab used the Trier with seasoned (lifetime average = 9,000 hours) vipassana meditators who did an eight-hour day of meditation and the next day underwent the test.
Result: the meditators had a smaller rise in cortisol during the stress. Just as important, the meditators perceived that dreaded Trier test as less stressful than did the nonmeditators.
The meditators’ brains were scanned while they saw disturbing images of people suffering, like burn victims. The seasoned practitioners’ brains revealed a lowered level of reactivity in the amygdala; they were more immune to emotional hijacking. The reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which manages reactivity, and the amygdala, which triggers such reactions.
This connectivity modulates a person’s level of emotional reactivity: the stronger the link, the less reactive.
