Introduction
Mindfulness is a state of deliberate and conscious awareness directed toward the present moment. The practice is incredibly simple on paper, but with diligent practice can reap many, many benefits.
A great entry level exercise to mindfulness is the 100 Breaths Meditation. It teaches you how to use your breathing as an object of focus, by deliberately directing your awareness toward the motions of your breath. The goal is to remain fixated on your breath, while ignoring distractions and any other outside stimuli. Often the stronger and more focused your awareness becomes, the more you enter into a state of relaxation, bliss, and insight.
(If you’re serious about practicing this stuff, I also recommend reading a post I wrote awhile back called Mindfulness of Mindlessness. This one was intended to help people overcome the common problem of getting too distracted during meditation. It emphasizes how in fact acknowledging your distractions is a key first step toward cultivating greater mindfulness. This is true for both meditation, and also practicing mindfulness throughout our daily life.)
The purpose of this article, however, is to put together a list of all the ways mindfulness has been scientifically shown to improve our physical and mental health. It is a complete list of all the benefits I know that come from mindfulness. And to be honest, if this doesn’t convince you to start developing a mindfulness practice of your own, I don’t know what will.
The Benefits of Mindfulness
Research into mindfulness has really picked up over the past few decades. Here are some of the benefits we are just beginning to discover:
Improving Attention
One of the most obvious benefits from meditation is that it improves our attention. One study has shown that just 5 days of 20 minute training can show significant improvements in our ability to focus and concentrate. The fact that mindfulness meditation can improve our attention is one of the most well-documented benefits. And the practice of staying focused on our breath can build concentration that often spills over into many other activities.
Improving Cognition
Another interesting study showed that just 4 days of 20 minute training showed significant increases in cognitive functioning, especially memory and learning. Other related research indicates that meditation can help slow down Alzheimer’s and dementia. Some of this may in part be due to our increased attention, but it seems meditation also acts on other parts of the brain more directly related to learning and memory, such as increasing gray matter in the hippocampus.
Managing Stress and Anxiety
Meditation has also been shown to reduce gray matter in the amygdala, which is a part of the brain commonly associated with stress, anxiety, and emotional processing. This demonstrates why meditation does so well in relieving stress and increasing relaxation. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of The Stress Reduction Clinic and Center for Mindfulness in Medicine at the University of Massachusetts, is one of the leading teachers and researchers in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR). Here you can find a wonderful lecture he gave to Google summarizing a lot of the research demonstrating how effective mindfulness meditation is for reducing stress and improving medical outcomes.
Improving Heart Rate and Blood Pressure
In light of meditation’s ability to reduce stress, it has also been reported to lower your blood pressure and heart rate. This particular study followed 200 participants for 5 years who were at a “high risk” for heart attacks and strokes. They found that those who practiced meditation regularly reduced their risk for heart attacks and strokes by almost 50%.
Reducing Pain
Mindful breathing has also been discovered to reduce pain, according to a recent study in the Journal of Neuroscience. After just four 20 minute mindfulness sessions, participants did better at reducing unpleasant sensations (such as 120 degrees of heat, a temperature that most people find painful) than those who did not receive mindfulness training. Researchers theorize that mindfulness trainees have an easier time keeping their focus directed toward their breathing and thereby ignoring the discomfort caused by the heat. It’s likely that mindfulness can show similar effects on other types of pain as well.
Overcoming Depression
Surprisingly, mindfulness meditation is said to be on par with antidepressants in preventing depression relapse. According to researchers, mindfulness prevents excessive rumination (a common cause of depression) by teaching individuals how to reflect on thoughts and emotional states in a non-judgmental and non-attaching way. Instead of clinging to “negative” thoughts and feelings – and feeding into them – mindfulness teaches us to sit back and watch these emotions and thoughts without needing to overreact or feel guilty about how we feel. This makes it a lot easier to fully experience these passing thoughts and emotions, and then let them go.
Overcoming Fears of Death
Another recent study published earlier this year found that mindfulness can also ease fears and anxieties related to death. Mindful people tend to be more accepting of their limited time while alive. They also tend to be less dependent on fantasy-filled beliefs and desires for self-preservation or immortality. They understand that death is not the opposite of life, but a necessary part of it. Thus, they accept the reality of their demise, instead of being defensive.
Changing Bad Habits
There is a particular technique in mindfulness training that helps individuals overcome addictions and other bad habits. It’s called urge surfing, and it’s a popular tool in some psychotherapies to help individuals quit smoking or stop obsessive eating. The main goal of the meditation is to “ride out” your desire to do certain negative habits, but not act on them. Mindfulness teaches you that many of these desires are impermanent, and if we just sit back and watch them, it is very likely that they will subside and go away (without us necessarily needing to smoke another cigarette, or eat that slice of cake).
Changing Brain Structure
In addition to many of the benefits mentioned above, it has also been shown that 8 weeks of mindfulness training can cause long-term changes to our brain structure. While this isn’t necessarily a “benefit” in-and-of-itself, it is evidence for just how powerful mindfulness training can be. For more on this you can also check out my article Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity.
Conclusion
These are just about all of the main benefits I know of that are associated with mindfulness, but I’m sure there are countless others. Mindfulness can be such a fundamental skill to living that it truthfully affects just about all areas of our life.
If you haven’t started a mindfulness practice of your own, I highly recommend it. And if you want any help getting started, feel free to e-mail me questions at contact@theemotionmachine.com. I’d be more than happy to help you out.
You can also check out the “Mindful Awareness Training System” below if you want a great training course on how to apply mindfulness to your daily life.
Mindful Awareness Training System
One of the most powerful shifts in your mindset is thinking of mistakes as learning opportunities. Recently a study published in Psychological Science tried to investigate how this attitude affects our brains.
Researchers first hooked up participants to an EEG in order to record electrical activity in the brain. They then had participants perform a simple task where they had to identify the middle letter in a 5 letter series. For example, “MMMMM” or “NNMNN,” where the correct answer is M in both cases. Sometimes the middle letter was the same as the other four, and sometimes it was different.
Although it was an easy exercise, it became tedious enough where many participants would zone out and make silly mistakes from time to time.
Whenever someone made a mistake, the brain would send out two signals. The first signal was when participants realized they messed up – researchers jokingly called this the “Oh crap” response. The second signal was when participants were trying to correct themselves so that the mistake wouldn’t happen again.
The study found that not only do people who adopt a “learn from your mistakes” attitude bounce back easier from mistakes, but their brains also send out a much stronger second signal. This second signal essentially tells us, “I see that I’ve made a mistake, so I should pay more attention.”
A “learn from your mistakes” attitude makes us more responsive to our mistakes and try harder to correct them. But those who think their intelligence is fixed tend to react less and instead repeat the same mistakes over and over. The takeaway message is that when we think we can learn from our mistakes, our brain actually changes the way it responds to failure.
I browsed my psychology feed this morning and found an interesting article about brainwaves and learning.
Scientists at MIT were studying the brains of rats as they learned how to navigate through a maze. They found that during the first few trials there was a lot of activity in high-frequency brainwaves, including beta waves (between 13-30 cycles per second) and gamma waves (between 30-100 cycles per second).
Once the rats learned the maze, activity in these brainwaves decreased. This suggests that high frequency brainwaves are associated with learning and memory. And once the task was learned, future trials showed the rats were in a much more relaxed and low frequency brain state. This is because the brain no longer needed those high frequency brainwaves to help focus on the task. In other words, it has became second-nature.
Remember when you first learned how to tie your shoes and you really had to focus? Your brain was probably pumping out gamma waves to help you concentrate on the task as best as possible – until you got it. Now, however, you can probably tie your shoes without focusing at all, because the task is already committed to memory. This is how most new habits are learned.
This fits well with other research on brain waves. Beta waves and gamma waves have frequently been found to be associated with increased focus and concentration, a faculty of our minds that also aids in learning and retaining information.
Interestingly, for the past month and a half I’ve been using an audio program named Laser Focus, which uses a technology called brainwave entrainment. The goal of entrainment is to sync your mind up to certain brainwaves using binaural beats.
A binaural beat is when you play one frequency in one ear and another frequency in another ear. The difference between the two frequencies is the frequency your mind syncs with.
For example, playing 300Hz in your right ear and 340Hz in your left ear will produce brainwaves at 40Hz (the beginning of gamma waves).
The “Laser Focus” audio is designed to produce high frequency brainwaves in the gamma and beta range. I listen to it every other day for about an hour, usually while reading or writing.
I’ve personally found it helpful for increasing my energy, focus, and concentration throughout the day. Anyone who knows me usually knows I’m pretty sluggish and lazy. But now I’m learning more and getting more done. And since listening to it, I’ve even begun to wake up earlier and stay up later.
Now I’m not sure just how much of it can be attributed to the binaural beats, but I’ve definitely noticed a peak in my attention and productivity since I started it. If you want, you can try out a free sample here and see if it works for you.
I’m also interested in any other brainwave entrainment programs you guys may use. I’m always looking forward to trying new ones.
Much of our social anxiety is caused by an area in the brain called the amygdala. In this post I describe how the amygdala works to increase our anxiety and some treatments we can pursue to restructure and rewire our amygdalas.
A lot of our social anxiety is affected by an area in the brain called the amygdala. Research shows that the amygdala plays a big role in our emotional reactivity, especially our “fight-or-flight” response when the brain senses danger. Studies have found that an overactive amygdala often correlates with higher social anxiety and social phobia. In theory, a more active amygdala triggers increased feelings of fear, worry, uneasiness, or dread.
Sometimes our amygdala can be conditioned to have such a strong emotional response to a stimulus that it overrides our logical thinking or reason. We may rationally understand that a fear has no basis in reality, but the amygdala’s reaction is so strong that we feel this fear anyway.
Neuroscientist Daniel Goleman coined this phenomenon amygdala hijack. Other researchers on emotion, like Joseph E. Ledoux, have further elaborated on this concept, describing it as when “emotional reactions and emotional responses can be formed without any conscious, cognitive participation…because the shortcut from thalamus to amygdyla completely bypasses the neocortex.”
The neocortex is usually associated with the conscious “thinking parts” of our brain, so when our fear response bypasses this region, then we often feel as though our emotions are emerging from a deeper part of our brains that lies outside of our conscious awareness.
This is why Sean Cooper, author of “The Shyness and Social Anxiety System,” says that logical thinking is not enough to overcome social anxiety.
Many people may try overcoming their social anxiety solely by reasoning inside their heads and trying to adopt healthy beliefs (and these can certainly help!), but they are rarely enough to fully rewire our brains in order to experience less anxiety.
Thankfully, there are other methods we can use to help change the structure and reactivity of our amygdala. Here are some of those options:
- Medication. There are several effective drugs currently on the market that have shown to have positive results in changing the structure of the amygdala. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRIs), like Citalopram (Celexa), Escitalopram (Lexapro, Cipralex), Fluoxetine (Prozac), Paroxetine (Paxil), and Sertraline (Zoloft), have all shown to be effective in the treatment of social phobia. See a psychiatrist and they will help you determine if medication is right for you.
- Meditation. Daniel Goleman has theorized that meditation helps rewire connections between our amygdala and pre-frontal cortex. Our pre-frontal cortex is the part of the brain that causes us to stop and think about a situation; on the other hand, the amygdala is often seen as the opposite of this: it is more impulsive and it’s activity is more subconscious. However, by rewiring the connections between these two brain structures it is possible for us to exercise more conscious control over our emotional reactions. By engaging in weekly meditation, an individual can often develop stronger feelings of relaxation and equanimity, these are great combatants toward social anxiety.
- Exposure Therapy. Exposure therapy is an important part of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that encourages individuals to gradually expose themselves more to social situations and thereby become more habituated to these kinds of environments. Often by engaging in more social situations we find that our previous fears and worries were actually unfounded. And when we give our amygdala new experiences to learn from (and rewire in response to), then our anxieties can often diminish overtime.
This is one of the core teachings in Sean Cooper’s The Shyness and Social Anxiety System. Throughout his guide he walks you through a very comprehensive step-by-step way to increase your exposure to social settings and gradually overcome your anxiety.
- Minimize substance abuse. Abusing drugs and alcohol can often damage our amygdala to the point where we depend on these substances in order to lessen our anxiety and inhibitions. While alcohol can sometimes be a valuable social lubricant, we have to be careful not to train our brains to rely on these substances in order to function properly. Moderation is key here.
- Cognitive Restructuring. Cognitive structuring (or “reframing”) is another important part of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy that can help diminish social anxieties and phobias. While it doesn’t affect the amygdala directly, it does affect other structures connected to the amygdala including the prefrontal cortex (a part of our brain responsible for conscious thinking and decision-making) and the hippocampus (which is responsible for memory formation). The goal of cognitive restructuring is to change our perspective and beliefs which can often reduce “contextual fear” – fear caused by certain attitudes and beliefs about ourselves and the world we live in.
This is another central teaching in The Shyness and Social Anxiety System. Cooper goes over a very comprehensive list of tips and techniques for improving our beliefs and self-perception using methods like positive self-talk and discovering our true values in life.
As you can probably tell by now, your social anxiety can be managed with a wide array of different treatments and techniques. I and many others have found through personal experience that sometimes the very best treatment is to mix-and-match several of the above techniques. Often one technique can help, but it isn’t enough to fully overcome our excessive anxiety all by itself. Instead, you should give multiple techniques a fair chance, and by doing that you will definitely increase your probably of improving your social anxiety in the long-term.
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Krista and Tatiana Hogan are a remarkable set of twins. From a quick glance, they look like your average 4 year olds – they like to watch cartoons, run around the house, and drink apple juice. But Krista and Tatiana share something special that few twins have: they are conjoined at the head. And not only are they conjoined at the head, but they share a neural bridge, a part of the brain called the thalamus, which allows them to do some really incredible things, almost as if they share the same mind.
For example, when the twins were first born, doctors noticed that when they did a medical procedure to one of the twins, the other one reacted to it (just as if it was happening to her). Their parents have also noticed other times when the twins seem to directly share the same experiences; they even suspect that each twin can choose to look through the others eyes. In another situation, Krista reached for her cup and announced to the group, “I am drinking really, really, really fast.” As she attempted her drinking feat, gulp after gulp, Tatiana’s eyes-widened, she grabbed her sternum, and exclaimed “Whoa!” She shared Krista’s super-fast drinking experience.
When neuroscientists hooked up the twins to an EEG, they flashed a light in one of their eyes while the other was blindfolded, and noticed that the occipital lobe (which is responsible for vision) acted in sync in both brain hemispheres. This suggests that both twins can indeed directly experience what the other is sensing.
Todd Feinberg, a clinical psychiatrist and neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, responded to this crazy phenomenon saying:
“This is beyond empathy — it’s like a metasensory experience. It’s like she has one consciousness and can witness another’s.”
What’s even more interesting to Feinberg, who is the author to the book Altered Egos: How The Brain Creates A Self, is how the twins can share the same head, and many of the same experiences, yet still retain their individuality. In the video below their mom, Felicia, describes how Tatiana is more laid-back and passive, while Krista is more proactive and aggressive.
The situation Tatiana and Krista find themselves in is certainly a remarkable one. It will be very interesting to see how their brain continues to develop throughout their life, and what new abilities they may discover. I’m sure they will remain a fascinating case study for many neuroscientists and psychologists, as there is a lot we can potentially learn from these two girls. To their family, however, they remain just ordinary kids who happen to live under extraordinary circumstances.
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