How meditation can ease your mind and raise self-awareness

According to the United Nations, for the first time in human history, of the planet’s 7 billion souls, more people live in cities than in rural towns. We live in unique and exciting times in so many ways but is the modern way of city living conducive to happiness?

Researchers from Harvard Medical School have recently published a report suggesting city life can hinder mental processes such as memory and attention, leaving you mentally exhausted. Every day on a city street, you are bombarded with information and some of that information is vital to staying alive, so you must pay attention to all of it. You need to know, for instance, if a car is coming around a corner, and you can’t risk ignoring any signs and indications around you that may tell you if that car, or some other important event, is on its way.

The drain on your brain that results from attending continuously to those stimuli that surround you in a city is called “directed attention fatigue” (DAF). This DAF has been identified at the neurological level as the wearing-away of your ability to voluntarily focus while ignoring distractions. The symptoms of DAF include heightened distraction, impatience, forgetfulness, poor judgement and increased stress. In essence, DAF is antithetical to happiness.

Treating DAF brains

Research has shown that just a few minutes spent walking in nature (or even looking at photographs of nature) can improve your directed-attention abilities. The theory behind this power of nature is called ART (attention restoration theory). ART says that nature presents you with stimuli that engage your senses from the “bottom up”, which allows the “top-down” attention activities such as watching for cars and competing for space to regenerate. Essentially, the peace and security of a natural setting allow your top-priority survival mechanisms to switch off and replenish.

So spending some time in nature is a way to reduce your mental exhaustion and enhance your happiness. Of course, there is a meditative quality to being in nature and the Harvard researchers also point to meditation as a way to overcome DAF. Their studies have shown that meditators have a thicker prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula, the parts of the brain involved in attention and sensory processing. These brain regions tend to thin as you age and meditation obviously strengthens this attention-related part of the brain.

The researchers point out that getting yourself into a quiet space either meditatively or in nature reduces cortisol levels and that improves neuroplasticity (the adaptability of your brain’s neurons).

This all adds up to the fact that meditation addresses one of the core reasons for modern unhappiness in that it helps regenerate an exhausted mind. That, however, is just the beginning of how meditation creates both functional and structural change in your mind and brain that is the underpinning of happiness.

Serenity now

The Western world is in the process of embracing meditation and that is reflected in the interest shown in it by the big universities. We have already mentioned one Harvard study and we are now moving along to some research into meditation that has emerged from Yale.

These Yale University researchers used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to measure activity in the brains of both novice meditators and experienced meditators as they engaged in three different forms of meditation.

As a preface to understanding the findings, it helps to know that there is a part of your brain that includes the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in lapses of attention. It is the part of the brain that runs the “default mode” of your mind, to use computer-speak. This area of the brain is also involved in conditions such as ADHD, anxiety and Alzheimer’s Disease.

The results of the study found that in the brains of experienced meditators, the practice of any of the three meditation types switched off activity in the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex. This means that, during meditation, experienced mediators do not “zone out” or slip into default mode but remain acutely aware. The research also found that even when the default mode area of the brain was active for experienced meditators, other parts of the brain involved in self-monitoring and cognitive control were active at the same time. This was not the case for people who were new to meditating.

Perhaps the most interesting finding came when the researchers measured activity in the brains of regular meditators when they were not meditating but when they were resting or had been given a task. For these people, brain patterns of activity were the same when meditating as when doing anything else. This suggests that the benefit of meditation is not localised to the meditation itself but permeates to the whole of life as a result of reprogramming your brain. The Yale researchers speculated that regular meditators develop a new default mode of the brain that is centred less on the self and more on the present.

This ability to be in the present is important because it is central to the experience of happiness.

Happiness now

Returning to Harvard again, researchers from that university contacted 2250 volunteers at random intervals via an iPhone app. The volunteers were asked how happy they were, what they were currently doing and whether they were thinking about their current activity or something else pleasant, neutral or unpleasant. More than 250,000 pieces of data were collected in the study.

The results showed that, on average, people spend 47 per cent of their time not thinking about what they are doing. In fact, on any given activity, except lovemaking, people’s minds wander for 30 per cent of the time. The results also showed that mind wandering is a better predictor of happiness than the actual task you are engaged in. This held true, except for lovemaking, exercise and talking to people. Aside from these exceptions, mind wandering was found to be the cause, not the result, of unhappiness.

Through meditation you train your mind to focus its attention in the now and science is confirming what spiritual teachers have been advocating for centuries: a mind that can focus on the present moment is a happy mind.

Meditation variation

Of course, there is a variety of meditation techniques that have grown through various traditions and the evidence is that, although broadly having similar outcomes for your brain, the different approaches do have slightly different effects.

There is the “focused-attention” type of meditation in which the practitioner concentrates on an object or emotion. Then there is the “open monitoring” style, which involves being mindful of your breath or thoughts. There is also a style that has been dubbed “automatic self-transcending” meditation, which allows individuals to transcend their own mental activity and lose themselves. Research on these different approaches published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition showed some interesting differences.

In focused-attention styles of meditation (including Tibetan Buddhist, Zen Buddhist and some Chinese Qigong), brainwaves of the beta and gamma types were generated. Beta waves are associated with everyday consciousness but gamma waves indicate the highest levels of focus and cognitive functioning.

By contrast, the open monitoring technique (featured in Buddhist mindfulness, some Qigong, and Vedic Sahaja Yoga traditions) resulted in increased theta activity. This is the slowest of the brainwaves mentioned here and is believed to be associated with creativity and dreaming.

Finally, the self-transcending styles (including Vedic Transcendental Meditation and some Chinese Qigong) induce alpha-wave activity in the brain. This alpha activity represents a relaxed and effortless alertness.

Whatever the variations, what the styles of meditation have in common is getting you past your chattering “monkey mind” and the effects of this not only alter your consciousness but also have real physical effects.

Keep your brain young

Research suggests that meditation improves immune function, reduces blood pressure and enhances cognitive functioning. It also leads to measurable physical changes in the brain that combat the effects of ageing. To discover this, researchers compared active meditation practitioners with an average age of 52 to people who did not meditate but were of the same age and sex. The styles of meditation practised were predominantly Shamatha, Vipassana and Zazen. The meditators had been meditating on a regular basis for between five and 46 years.

The researchers examined the brains of all the subjects using a type of brain imaging known as DTI (diffusion tensor imaging), which allows analysis of the connectivity within the brain. The brain images showed that meditators had stronger connections between brain regions and showed less age-related loss of brain function. Importantly, these effects occurred throughout all brain areas, including the frontal lobe, temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital lobe, corpus collosum (that connects the two halves of the brain), limbic system and brain stem.

The most significant differences between meditators and non-meditators were in the nerves that connect the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord (cortico-spinal tract), the nerves that connect the front and back of the cerebellum (superior longitudinal fasciculus) and the nerves connecting the limbic system (emotions) to the frontal cortex (uncinate fasciculus).

In essence, meditation appears to slow brain degeneration associated with ageing and also promote connectivity within the brain. The net effect of meditation on the brain, then, is anti-ageing. It is likely that meditation causes changes on a micro-anatomical level, leading to these results possibly via the immune system.

Mind-body synchrony

Meditation may also enhance synchronisation of your mind with your body and it may do it to a greater degree than even something as wonderful and powerful as ballet.

Dancers do extraordinary things to achieve the control over their body they need to progress in their field. If you want to go beyond primary-school performances and be able to perform at a serious level as a dancer, you will have to engage in hours upon hours of training. All this will allow you to use your body as an instrument. The whole aim of a dancer is to develop awareness of, and precise control over, their muscles. Logically, you would think this would lead to an integration of mind and body. However, if you want to achieve synchronisation of body and mind you are far better off meditating.

Research done at the University of California, Berkeley, was aiming to establish how close the connection is between your emotions and your physical body since we use terms that suggest the link is strong, such as “bursting a blood vessel in anger” and “feeling the heartache of sadness”. To test the link the researchers sampled dancers with at least two years of training in modern dance or ballet and compared them to people who were practitioners of Vipassana meditation with at least two years practice. There was also a control group who had no experience in dance, meditation, yoga, Pilates or sport.

The subjects were wired to measure their bodily responses while they watched emotionally charged scenes from movies and used a rating dial to measure how they were feeling. While everybody in the study had a similar emotional reaction to the movie scenes, the meditators showed a strong correlation between the emotions they reported and the speed of their heartbeats. There was surprisingly little difference between the dancers and the control group, who both showed a lesser connection between feelings and physical response.

The theory about what is happening here is that, while dancers learn to synchronise their bodies in time and space, they are not necessarily learning to align them with their internal state. By contrast, meditators attend to what is happening within them and become attuned with their physical body. There is no value judgement here and certainly no denigration of dance, but if you want to achieve mind-body integration, rather than spread your legs in a jeté or bend them for a plié, perhaps you should cross them and meditate.

Happy meditators

It has been established that people who meditate regularly have more activity in the parts of the brain associated with positive emotions and happiness. As we have shown here, there is ample evidence that meditation fundamentally changes both the physical structures of your brain and how your mind operates in ways that support happiness. You don’t have to meditate to be happy but it is a good foundation on to which to build your happiness if you choose it.

Terry Robson is editor of WellBeing. He is a journalist, broadcaster, and author. His latest book Failure IS an Option is available through ABC Books.