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January 2 - January 17, 2022
Lessening the grip of the self, always a major goal of meditation practitioners, has been oddly ignored by meditation researchers, who perhaps understandably focus instead on more popular benefits like relaxation and better health.
These regions very likely underlie what traditional texts see as the root causes of suffering—attachment and aversion—where the mind becomes fixated on wanting something that seems rewarding or on getting rid of something unpleasant.
IN A NUTSHELL The brain’s default mode activates when we are doing nothing that demands mental effort, just letting our mind wander; we hash over thoughts and feelings (often unpleasant) that focus on ourselves, constructing the narrative we experience as our “self.” The default mode circuits quiet during mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation.
This quieting of the self-circuitry begins as a state effect, seen during or immediately after meditation, but with long-term practitioners it becomes an enduring trait, along with lessened activity in the default mode itself.
hospitals and clinics around the world offer MBSR, one of the fastest-growing kinds of meditation practice, and by now the approach with the strongest empirical evidence of its benefits.
To date there are more than six hundred published studies of the method, revealing a wide variety of benefits—and
MBSR program, can continue to help people live well with chronic conditions and with stress-related disorders that will not necessarily get better on their own or with conventional medical treatment.
no research so far has found that meditation produces clinical improvements in chronic pain by removing the biological cause of the pain—the relief comes in how people relate to their pain.
another well-designed study found that MBSR brought significant improvements in psychological symptoms, such as how much stress fibromyalgia patients felt, and lessened many of their subjective symptoms.4 The more often they used MBSR on their own, the better they did.
the key to a lifetime relatively free from the experience of pain, both physical and emotional, is continuing one’s mindfulness practice day after day in the following months, years, and decades.
Stress, though often psychological, worsens inflammation, apparently part of an ancient biological response to warnings of danger that marshals the body’s resources for recovery.
what’s called “neurogenic,” or brain-caused, inflammation. Skin specialists have long observed that life’s stress can cause neurogenic flare-ups of inflammatory disorders like psoriasis and eczema.
in order for the body to ward off bacteria in wounds, pro-inflammatory cytokines increase blood flow to the area to supply immune products that gobble up foreign substances. The resulting inflammation in turn signals the brain in ways that activate several neural circuits,
cortisol, that hormonal precursor of diseases made worse by chronic stress, like diabetes, hardening of the arteries, and asthma. But the MBSR group did better on an unfudgeable test: participants had a significantly smaller patch of inflammation after the stress test, and their skin was more resilient, healing faster.
Those who engaged in their MBSR practices for thirty-five minutes or more at home daily, compared to those doing HEP, showed a greater decrease in pro-inflammatory cytokines, the proteins that trigger the red patch.
Result: the meditators not only found the dreaded Trier test less stressful than did a matched cohort of novices (as we saw in chapter five), but they also had smaller patches of inflammation afterward. Most significant, their levels of the stress hormone cortisol were 13 percent lower than in the controls,
Mindfulness practice, it seems, lessens inflammation day to day, not just during meditation itself.
Constant stress and worry take a toll on our cells, aging them. So do continual distractions and a wandering mind, due to the toxic effects of rumination, where our mind gravitates to troubles in our relationships but never resolves them.
Blood samples before and after revealed that the meditators, but not those taking relaxation, had reductions in a key pro-inflammatory cytokine.
“The consuming task of my day was to build a precise attention to my breath, noticing every nuance of each inhalation and exhalation: its speed, lightness, coarseness, warmth.”11 The point for Dan: clear the mind, and so, calm the body.
After genetic scientists mapped the entire human genome, they realized it wasn’t enough to just know if we had a given gene or not. The real questions: Is that gene expressed? Is it manufacturing the protein for which it is designed? And how much? Where is the “volume control” on the gene set? This meant there was another important step: finding what turns our genes on or off.
Sugar turns on the genes for diabetes; exercise turns them off. Sugar and exercise are “epigenetic” influencers, among the many, many factors that control whether or not a gene expresses itself.
After the day of practice the meditators had a marked “down-regulation” of inflammatory genes—something that had never been seen before in response to a purely mental practice. Such a drop, if sustained over a lifetime, might help combat diseases with onsets marked by chronic low-grade inflammation. As we’ve said, these include many of the world’s major health problems, ranging from cardiovascular disorders, arthritis, and diabetes to cancer.
Telomeres are the caps at the end of DNA strands that reflect how long a cell will live. The longer the telomere, the longer the life span of that cell will be. Telomerase is the enzyme that slows the age-related shortening of telomeres; the more telomerase, the better for health and longevity. A meta-analysis of four randomized controlled studies involving a total of 190 meditators found practicing mindfulness was associated with increased telomerase activity.
the less mind-wandering during concentration sessions, the greater the telomerase benefit.
As practice continues and breathing becomes progressively slower, the body adjusts its physiological set point for its respiratory rate accordingly.
Compared with nonmeditators, her group reported, meditators had greater cortical thickness in areas important for sensing inside one’s own body and for attention, specifically the anterior insula and zones of the prefrontal cortex.
study at UCLA that finds meditation slows the usual shrinkage of our brain as we age: at age fifty, longtime meditators’ brains are “younger” by 7.5 years compared to brains of nonmeditators of the same age.
The differences could be due to factors like education or exercise, each of which has its own buffering effect on brains. Then there’s self-selection: perhaps people with the brain changes reported in these studies choose to stick with meditation, while others do not—maybe having a bigger insula in the first place makes you like meditation more.
we highlight them here to underline the ways in which a complicated, poorly understood, and tentative scientific finding can radiate out to the general public as an oversimplified message
For now, there’s no way to know in these studies if the findings of brain growth are actual or an artifact of the methods used. Another problem: researchers tend to publish their positive findings but not report nonfindings—times they did not find any effect.
the temporoparietal junction, or TPJ. In previous research by Tania’s team, the TPJ has been found particularly active when we take another person’s perspective.
With high levels of meditation practice, emotions seem to lose their power to pull us into their melodrama.
MBSR teachers vary greatly in expertise, in how much meditation retreat time they have put in, and in their own qualities of being.
Our questions are simple when it comes to whether meditation leads to better health: What’s true, what’s not, and what’s not known?
The sounder studies, we found, focus on lessening our psychological distress rather than on curing medical syndromes or looking for underlying biological mechanisms. So, when it comes to a better quality of life for those with chronic diseases, yes to meditation.
And, as we’ve tried to do here, Richie walked a very careful line between critical rigor and genuine conviction that there is really a “there” there: that meditation has beneficial impacts worthy of serious scientific investigation.
MBSR and similar methods can reduce the emotional component of suffering from disease, but not cure those maladies. Yet mindfulness training—even as short as three days—produces a short-term decrease in pro-inflammatory cytokines,
Among experienced meditation practitioners, a daylong period of intensive mindfulness practice down-regulates genes involved in inflammation.
All in all, the hints of neural rewiring that undergird altered traits seem scientifically credible, though we await further studies for specifics.
the lightness of thoughts when viewed through the lens of mindfulness. That insight mirrors a principle in cognitive therapy of “decentering,” observing thoughts and feelings without being overly identified with them. We can reappraise our suffering.
His research had revealed that for people with depression so severe that drugs or even electroshock treatments were no help, this mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) cut the rate of relapse by half—more than any medication.
In a prominent article in one of the JAMA journals (the official publications of the American Medical Association), the researchers concluded that mindfulness (but not mantra-based meditation like TM, for which there were too few well-designed studies to make any conclusions) could lessen anxiety and depression, as well as pain. The degree of improvement was about as much as for medications, but without troubling side effects—making
But no such benefits were found for other health indicators like eating habits, sleep, substance use, or weight problems.
From a medical perspective, these studies were the equivalent of a “low-dose, short-term” trial of a medication. The recommendation here: that more research be done, using far larger numbers of people and for a far longer period.
After careful sifting, only 3 percent (that’s the 47 in the analysis)—of the studies proved sufficiently well designed that they could be included in the review. As the Hopkins group points out, this simply underscores the need to upgrade meditation research.
Segal found the best outcomes were in those patients most able to “decenter,” that is, step outside their thoughts and feelings enough to see them as just coming and going, rather than getting carried away by “my thoughts and feelings.” In other words, these patients were more mindful. And the more time they put into mindfulness practice, the lower their odds of a relapse into depression.
A mindfulness program designed for teens reduced overt depression and such subtle signs, even six months after it ended.10 All of these studies, tantalizing as they are, need replication as well as upgrades to their design if they are to be acceptable to strict medical review standards.
the NIMH favors research that focuses on specific symptom clusters and their underlying brain circuitry—not just DSM categories.
what specific kinds of meditation work best to relieve which mental problems—and while we’re at it, what’s the underlying neural circuitry? For now, these are unanswered questions. We’re waiting to find out.
