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Mindfulness Is Powerful Medicine for Your BrainMindfulness is intersecting with the leading-edge of neuroscience. Looking at the ancient practice through a scientific lens has been labeled “contemplative neuroscience” and is turning out some extraordinarily robust data showing that the practice to be a powerful mental health tool.

In case you’ve managed to somehow miss the buzz, mindfulness is rooted in 2500-year-old Buddhist meditation practices and very basically means paying attention to the present moment with a sense of openness, curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is.

All of the research into mindfulness’ impact on mental health ultimately comes down to the concept of neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity

In every moment of your life, every single thing of which you are aware – sounds, sights, thoughts, feelings – and even things of which you aren’t aware  – unconscious mental and physical processes – are based in and can be directly mapped to neural activity in your brain. What you do, experience, think, hope and imagine physically changes your brain through what is called experience-dependent neuroplasticity.

The neurological explanation of how neuroplasticity happens gets complicated, but the basic concept is simple:

In Neuroplasticity: Are You Making A Masterpiece or Mess of Your Brain?, I explain how neuroplasticity physically takes place in your brain:

  • Busy regions get more blood flow since they need more oxygen and glucose.
  • The genes inside neurons get more or less active; for example, people who routinely relax have improved expression of genes that calm down stress reactions, making them more resilient.
  • Neural connections that are relatively inactive wither away. It’s a kind of neural Darwanism, the survival of the busiest, use it or lose it.
  • “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”  This saying from the work of Donald Hebb means that synapses – the connections between neurons – get more sensitive, plus new neurons grow, producing thicker neural layers.

Brain plasticity is a two-way street. It’s just as easy to generate negative changes as positive ones. This same characteristic, which makes your brain amazingly resilient, also makes it very vulnerable to outside and internal, usually unconscious, influences. In his book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science, Norman Doidge calls this the “plastic paradox.”

You can practice “bad” habits or “good” habits – and these activities literally become wired into your brain. In mindfulness, you are consciously practicing good things to sculpt your brain accordingly.

Mindfulness Resets Your Brain’s Default Mode Network

There is an ensemble of neural networks, called the default mode network (DFM), that is your brain’s go-to state when it’s at rest, not doing anything in particular. Science discovered the DFM using fMRI studies where people were asked to lay in the scanner with no specific thinking assignment. The scans showed that their mindless mental activity was mostly repetitive ruminative thoughts. These internal mental states persist under deep general anesthesia – even in a coma – and are probably the neural basis for the self.

In mindfulness, by intentionally directing attention inward and cultivating awareness of the breath or a mantra or some mental image, you are becoming aware of what your DFM is up to and exerting control over it. Guiding your DFM is a skill that you practice and develop just like learning to play the piano or swing a golf club. You are training your brain to break free of negative thought loops and to orient itself in an object of focus in the present moment.

Mindfulness as a Mental Health Treatment

Mindfulness has become a first-line treatment for many mental health disorders.

In general, a meta-analysis, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, determined that mindful meditation helps ease psychological stresses like anxiety, depression, and pain. A review of empirical studies, Effects of Mindfulness on Psychological Health, concluded that:

…mindfulness and its cultivation facilitates adaptive psychological functioning. Despite existing methodological limitations within each body of literature, there is a clear convergence of findings from correlational studies, clinical intervention studies, and laboratory-based, experimental studies of mindfulness—all of which suggest that mindfulness is positively associated with psychological health, and that training in mindfulness may bring about positive psychological effects. These effects ranged from increased subjective well-being, reduced psychological symptoms and emotional reactivity, to improved regulation of behavior. 

More specifically:

  • Becoming aware of your own mind and emotions activates the prefrontal cortex, which calms the amygdala, your brain’s emotional/fear center.
  • Research on some mindful awareness practices reveals that they greatly enhance the body’s functioning: healing, immune response, stress reactivity, and a general sense of physical well-being.
  • A 2003 study found that just eight weeks of mindfulness training was enough to cause significant changes in the brain associated with increased happiness.  
  • People who routinely practice mindfulness meditation develop thicker layers of neurons in the insula — a region of the brain that activates upon tuning into your body and feelings — and in parts of the prefrontal cortex controlling attention.
  • Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) has proven successful in decreasing depression, anxiety, pain, and psychological distress.
  • Research showed that Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) reduced depression relapse by 43%. It also enhanced people’s ability to feel reward and positive emotions. 
  • There is even some preliminary data that mindfulness training has a beneficial effect on seizure frequency in patients with epilepsy, which is associated with tremendous anxiety and stress, 
  • Some studies show that the frequency of relapse in multiple sclerosis decreases with mindfulness intervention. 

Mindfulness Is Powerful Medicine for Your Brain

Mindfulness is Fast Medicine

When practicing mindfulness, beneficial changes can begin to happen almost immediately and become cumulative over time. No one really knows what the minimum effective dose is or how fast to expect results. Of course, these variables are going to differ per person and depend on other individual factors. Even taking this into consideration, it isn’t inaccurate to say that mindfulness makes lasting changes to the brain pretty quickly.

One study demonstrated just how fast mindfulness can produce results. In the experiment, the researchers invited stressed out, unemployed adults to a weekend retreat. The participants were then randomly divided into two groups: a three-day mindfulness retreat (the treatment group) and a three-day relaxation retreat where they read stories, told jokes and had an overall good time (the control group).

Both groups subjectively assessed the weekend retreat as being equally helpful upon completion. The researchers looked at brain connectivity changes and stress markers in their blood. What they found was pretty amazing.

After the brief weekend of mindfulness, the treatment group showed a neuroplastic response of increased connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the cyngulate gyrus. They also had a decrease in the stress marker IL-6. Even after four months, IL-6 was still reduced in the treatment group, but in the control group, levels continued to rise – whether they had landed a job or not.

That’s just one small isolated study, but the positive evidence keeps pouring in. If a weekend of mindfulness was life-changing for their brains, just think about what powerfully good results a regular daily practice and lifestyle of mindfulness could produce in your brain.

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13 Comments

  1. Hi Debbie…I think it’s wonderful the way science is connecting with spiritual practices…and everything you write here makes perfect sense to me. I can almost feel the ‘reset’ after my daily mindful meditation practice. I end up in a totally relaxed and peaceful state of mind and body. Just think if everyone practiced a little of this on a daily basis…we could change the world!

    • Me too, Elle. I usually meditate daily and boy! do I feel it if I miss my session. It’s powerfully good stuff! 🙂

  2. Amazing information is coming out about the power of mindfullness and especially in meditation. I love that I learn something new with each of your posts xxx

  3. I’ve seen these positive changes in myself and others when they practice mindfulness meditation. I’m fascinated to see how science is verifying the positive impact of mindfulness. It’s almost crazy not to practice mindfulness given how good it can be for you!

  4. I totally agree with you Mindfulness is the power of medicines. it gives you fresh and cool ideas. thank you for the lovely blog. keep posting such more.

  5. Arthur J. Marr Reply

    How a Resting State is different from a ‘Resting Brain’

    A resting ‘state’ or somatic rest represents the inactivity of the striatal musculature that results from the application of resting protocols (continual avoidance of perseverative thought represented by rumination, worry, and distraction.). Resting states also are affective states, as they elicit opioid activity in the brain. Resting states in turn may occur in tandem with all levels of non-perseverative thought that are passive or active, from just passively ‘being in the moment’ or being mindful, to actively engaging in complex and meaningful cognitive behavior. The latter cognitive behavior is also affective in nature due to their elicitation of dopaminergic activity.

    On the other hand, a resting ‘brain’, or the so-called ‘default mode network’ is a specific type of neural processing when the mind is in a ‘passive’ state, or in other words, is presented with no cognitive demands. This results in ‘mind wandering’ that can entail non-perseverative (creative thought) or perseverative thought (rumination, worry). As such a resting brain may or may not correlate with somatic rest, and is correlated with a level of demand, not a kind of demand, as in somatic rest.

    It also follows logically that somatic rest combined with meaningful behavior will stimulate both opioid and dopamine systems, and create a pleasurable state of attentive arousal, or ‘bliss’. This has been demonstrated empirically through the so-called ‘flow state’, or an affective state that reflects a non-distracted meaningful engagement with the world.

    Reference for opioid release and relaxation
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8698954

    Reference for opioid-dopamine interactions in meaningful behavior (pp.43-45)
    https://www.scribd.com/doc/284056765/The-Book-of-Rest-The-Odd-Psychology-of-Doing-Nothing

    • Thank you for the additional information, Arthur. Very interesting and helpful. You should write a blog! 🙂

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