Meditation
Several studies highlight the incredible benefits of meditating, including reducing negative emotions, easing pain, reducing stress, boosting brain function, and increasing error recognition. Over recent years, meditation has become more popular. So much that spiritual posturing and enlightened one-uppers fill up in our social feeds and make it seem like meditative bliss is just around the corner.
Unfortunately, the more popular spiritual practices enter the vast marketplace, the more likely their true essence will be degraded and turned into nonsense. If you want an authentic meditation experience, it’s best to avoid the commercialization version of contemplation. It is an effortless thing to do.
Zen master Alan Watts explained:
Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And therefore, if you meditate for an ulterior motive, you’ve got your eye on the future, and you are not meditating!
What Is the Purpose of Meditation?
The goal of meditation is to be within the here and now. To rid yourself of symbolic language, hang-ups of time, and fully experience the present moment. Once this fundamental point is grasped, you can meditate in any way or anywhere you want. The possibilities are endless, sitting on the beach, under a tree, twisted in a yoga position, or out in the sea.
The problem is that our minds are constantly chattering, always forcing logic and reason when there is no need for it and continuously labeling experiences. So many people get stressed out by the thought of just sitting still and doing nothing at all. Emptying the mind becomes another thing to think about.
Watts said:
The art of meditation is a way of getting into touch with reality. And the reason for it is that most civilized people are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about it, talk about it, and describe it. For — on the one hand — there is the real world and — on the other — a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds.
Meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole universe, and what that requires is that we shut up. That is to say, that we become interiorly silent and cease from the interminable chatter that goes on inside our skulls. Because you see, most of us think compulsively all the time.
Tomorrow will never come. The future is, and always will be, just a concept that can change at any moment in time. So meditation puts us back into our present place of the now.
Reduce Negative Emotions and Ease Pain
When one meditates, they are mindful of their breathing, and nothing else exists. Studies have shown that conscious acceptance and mindfulness have multiple emotional and physical health benefits. Other research revealed mindfulness lowered blood pressure, helped cope with phobias, pain, and emotion regulation.
Scientists conducted neuroscientific experiments and found that participants felt less physical pain after practicing mindfulness. Further tests using brain scans revealed that mindfulness helps control emotion, which may be helpful for people trying to overcome addiction or at least lower their stress levels.
A team of researchers led by Hedy Kober of Yale University in New Haven set out to determine whether an individual who has never meditated before can also reap these benefits from a 30-minute introduction. The results published in Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience suggest that a brief introduction to mindful meditation can help reduce negative emotions and ease pain.
Long-Term Stress Reducer
A recent study conducted by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences found that mental training reduces the concentration of the stress hormone cortisol in hair.
The cortisol levels in hair offer information about how much a person is troubled by persistent stress. The study, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, provides the first objective evidence that mental training lessens physical signs of long-term stress. Stress is a severe condition that strains those affected and is linked to various physiological diseases, such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and psychological disorders like depression.
This is why it’s crucial to find effective methods to reduce everyday stress in the long term. One promising solution is mindfulness training, in which participants train their social and cognitive skills, including gratitude, compassion, and attention, via various meditation and behavioral exercises. Several studies have demonstrated that even healthy people feel less stressed after an eight-week training program. However, it has been unclear how much training contributes to minimizing everyday stress until now.
The cortisol concentration in hair is considered an apt measure of exposure to chronic stress. For example, cortisol is a hormone released when we are confronted with an overwhelming challenge. This particular case helps put our body on alert and mobilize energy to deal with the challenge. The longer the stress continues, the longer an increased amount of cortisol circulates our body – and the more it builds up in our hair.
Typically, hair grows roughly one centimeter per month. Therefore, the researchers analyzed the study participants’ cortisol levels every three months in the first three centimeters of hair, starting at the scalp, to measure their stress levels during the 9-month training period.
This 9-month mental training program involved three 3-month sessions designed to train a specific skill area using Far Eastern and Western mental exercises. Three groups of about 80 volunteers completed the training modules in a different order. The training lasted nine months, 30 minutes per day, six days a week.
After only six months of training, the amount of cortisol in the participants’ hair had diminished significantly, on average by 25%. Slight effects were seen in the first three months, which increased over the following three months. In the last month, cortisol concentration remained at a low level.
As a result, the researchers suspect that only sufficiently long training leads to the desired stress-reducing results. However, the effect didn’t seem to rely on the content of the practice. Therefore, several of the mental approaches studied may be correspondingly effective in improving how people deal with chronic daily stress.
The participants were placed in a very stressful job interview for the study and solved challenging math problems while under observation. The results revealed that those who had undergone socio-affective or socio-cognitive training released 51% less cortisol under stress than those who hadn’t been trained.
Overall, the scientists conclude that training can improve the handling of severely stressful social situations and chronic daily stress. “We assume that different training aspects are particularly helpful for these different forms of stress,” noted Veronika Engert, head of the research group Social Stress & Family Health at MPI CBS.
Puhlmann explained:
There are many diseases worldwide, including depression, that are directly or indirectly related to long-term stress. Therefore, we need to work on counteracting the effects of chronic stress in a preventive way. Our study uses physiological measurements to prove that meditation-based training interventions can alleviate general stress levels even in healthy individuals.
While meditation helps calm people’s minds, relieve them from negative emotions, and reduce their pain and stress, the practice is also good for the brain!
Brain Booster
A study from Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering & Applied Science shows how practicing meditation for a couple of months changed ten students’ brain patterns.
The research was conducted by Assistant Professor Weiying Dai and lecturer George Weinschenk, both from the Department of Computer Science. Weinschenk is a long-time meditation practitioner, while Dai has studied brain mapping and biomedical image processing.
When Dai secured grant funding in 2017, their collaboration began. Dai took the participants to Cornell University for MRI scans of their brains while Weinschenk taught students how to meditate. He told the students to practice five times a week for 10 or 15 minutes and to keep a daily journal record of their practice.
Weinschenk said:
Binghamton University Scholars are high achievers who want to do the things they are assigned and do well on them, so they didn’t require much prompting to maintain a regular meditation routine. To guarantee objective reporting, they would relate their experiences directly to Weiying about how frequently they practiced.
The results, recently published on May 31, 2021, in the journal Scientific Reports, revealed that meditation training led to quickly switching between the brain’s two states of consciousness. One is known as the default mode network, which is active when the brain is at wakeful rest and not focused on the external world, like during mind-wandering and daydreaming. The other is called the dorsal attention network, which engages in attention-demanding tasks.
These findings demonstrate that meditation can boost the brain connection within these two brain networks, indicating the effect of meditation on fast switching between daydreaming and focusing its attention and upholding attention once in the attentive state.
Weinschenk explained:
Tibetans have a term for that ease of switching between states—they call it mental pliancy, an ability that allows you to shape and mold your mind. They also consider the goal of concentration one of the fundamental principles of self-growth.
However, Dai points out that the trials involved young students, and therefore more research is needed to confirm the results. Their next step is to conduct an elderly study. “I want to get a healthy elderly group, and then another group with early Alzheimer’s disease or mild cognitive impairment. I want to see whether the changes in the brain from meditation can enhance cognitive performance. I’m writing the proposal and trying to attract the funds in that direction,” Dai said.
Increased Error Recognition
A 2019 study from Michigan State University (MSU) found that meditation could help you to become less error-prone. The research, published in the journal Brain Sciences, tested how open-monitoring meditation (a form of meditation that focuses awareness on thoughts or feelings as they unfold in one’s mind) changed brain activity in a way that increased error recognition.
Jeff Lin, the study’s co-author, commented:
People’s interest in meditation and mindfulness is outpacing what science can prove in terms of effects and benefits. But it’s amazing to me that we were able to see how one session of guided meditation can produce changes to brain activity in non-meditators.
The findings suggest that different kinds of meditation can have other neurocognitive effects. However, according to Lin, there is little research about how open-monitoring meditation affects error recognition.
Lin added:
Some forms of meditation have you focus on a single object, commonly your breath, but open-monitoring meditation is a bit different. It has you tune inward and pay attention to everything going on in your mind and body. The goal is to sit quietly and pay close attention to where the mind travels without getting too caught up in the scenery.
Lin and his MSU colleagues recruited over 200 participants to test how open-monitoring meditation influenced how people detect and respond to errors. The volunteers who had never meditated before participated in a 20-minute open-monitoring meditation exercise while the researchers measured brain activity via EEG or electroencephalography. Afterward, they completed a computerized distraction test.
Lin explained:
The EEG can measure brain activity at the millisecond level, so we got precise measures of neural activity right after mistakes compared to correct responses. For example, a certain neural signal occurs about half a second after an error called the error positivity, linked to conscious error recognition. We found that the strength of this signal is increased in the meditators relative to controls.
While the participants didn’t have immediate improvements to task performance, the findings offer an optimistic view of the potential of continual meditation. “These findings are a strong demonstration of what just 20 minutes of meditation can do to enhance the brain’s ability to detect and pay attention to mistakes. It makes us feel more confident in what mindfulness meditation might really be capable of for performance and daily functioning right there at the moment,” Moser added.
Lin’s next steps will include a broader group of participants in the study, test different forms of meditation, and determine whether alterations in brain activity translate to behavioral changes with long-term practice.
Lin said:
It’s great to see the public’s enthusiasm for mindfulness, but there’s still plenty of work from a scientific perspective to be done to understand the benefits it can have, and equally importantly, how it actually works. It’s time we start looking at it through a more rigorous lens.
How to Meditate
There is no one way to meditate; there are countless ways. There are Eastern texts regarding the many practices – various methods and techniques. However, some specific central tenants serve as a foundation for meditation.
Alan Watts describes how he meditates:
You can sit any way you want. You can sit in a chair, or you can sit like I’m sitting — which is the Japanese way of sitting — or you can sit in the lotus posture; the easier you’ll find it to do — or you can just sit cross-legged on a raised cushion above the floor. Now, the point of this is that if you keep your back erect, you are centered and easily balanced, and you have a feeling of being thoroughly rooted to the ground.
Once this is figured out, you can make it fun and throw in some mantras or breathing techniques. So, what are you waiting for? Start meditating today for a brighter future!
