Why mindfulness works

Some studies suggest that meditation can help people relax, manage chronic stress and even reduce reliance on pain medication. Some of the most impressive studies to date involve a treatment called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which combines meditation with psychotherapy to help patients deal with thoughts that lead to depression. Randomised controlled trials have shown that the approach significantly reduces the risk of depression relapse in individuals who have previously had three or more major depressive episodes.

But many other studies on the effects of meditation have used only small numbers of subjects, lacked follow-up and generally been less scientifically rigorous than other medical studies — clinical trials for new drugs, for example.

Despite its popularity, there has been relatively little rigorous study into the supposed benefits of meditation Credit: Getty Images. While questions about the clinical outcomes of meditation persist, other studies have focused on a more fundamental issue: does meditation physically change the brain?

Meditation that requires one to sit still and focus on the mere act of breathing can encourage mindfulness, says psychologist David Creswell , who directs the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. But most people spend most or all of their day being anything but mindful. They skip from one thought to another. They daydream. They ruminate about the past, and they worry about the future.

They self-analyse and self-criticise. Rather than being mindful, most of us spend most of our day skipping from one thought to the next Credit: Nappy. In a study, Harvard researchers asked 2, adults about their thoughts and actions at moments throughout their day via an iPhone app. He cites a study showing a correlation between mindfulness and a number of indicators of well-being. One study finds that the more mindfulness we practice, the better we feel Credit: Getty Images. When people who meditate say they are paying attention to the present moment, they may be focused on their breathing, but maybe also on an emotion that surfaces and then passes, a mental image, inner chatter or a sensation in the body.

The idea is to be view these moments with a detached and non-judgmental curiosity. Van Dam acknowledges that some good evidence does support mindfulness. The analysis found meditation and mindfulness may provide modest benefits in anxiety, depression and pain. He also cites a review published in Clinical Psychology Review for mindfulness-based therapy that found similar results. Two trials published in Science Advances also support mindfulness practices. The first found mindfulness-like attention training reduces self-perceived stress, but not levels of the hormone cortisol, a commonly used biological gauge of stress levels.

The other trial links mindfulness-like attention training to increases in thickness of the prefrontal cortex, a brain region associated with complex behavior, decision-making and shaping personality. The authors called for further research into what these findings could mean clinically.

Van Dam characterizes the research methods used in both of these studies as sound. Varying mindfulness-like approaches have been investigated over the years, making comparisons of different studies difficult. Mindfulness is rooted in Buddhist thought and theory.

By the early s, the concept of mindfulness had ballooned in popularity. She scanned them not while they were meditating, but while they were performing everyday tasks.

Functional MRI left showing activation in the amygdala when participants were watching images with emotional content before learning meditation. After eight weeks of training in mindful attention meditation right note the amygdala is less activated after the meditation training. Working with patients selected and screened by Shapero, Desbordes is performing functional magnetic resonance imaging scans before and after an eight-week course in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT.

Researchers will measure how quickly subjects can disengage from negative thoughts, typically a difficult task for the depressed. The process will be repeated for a control group that undergoes muscle relaxation training and depression education instead of MBCT. The work, which received funding from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health , has been underway since and is expected to last into Desbordes said she wants to test one prevalent hypothesis about how MBCT works in depressed patients: that the training boosts body awareness in the moment, called interoception, which, by focusing their attention on the here and now, arms participants to break the cycle of self-rumination.

Desbordes is part of a community of researchers at Harvard and its affiliated institutions that in recent decades has been teasing out whether and how meditation works. Imaging finds different forms of meditation may affect brain structure. Researchers found the relaxation response showed improvements in the two gastrointestinal disorders. Is meditation always relaxing? Investigating heart rate, heart rate variability, experienced effort and likeability during training of three types of meditation.

International Journal of Psychophysiology; 97, 38— How Does Mindfulness Work? More info on this topic. Mindfulness Home. What is mindfulness? Benefits of mindfulness. Begin mindfulness. How mindfulness works. Evidence for mindfulness. Mindfulness for stress. Mindfulness for pain. Mindfulness for racial justice. Sources for guided meditation. How does mindfulness change the brain? Quick summary There is a diverse body of research that consistently associates mindfulness with certain changes in the structure and function of the brain, as well as changes in behavior.

Mindfulness may lessen emotional experience of pain Another change in the brain impacts how we experience pain. This suggests that that mindfulness may lessen the emotional experience of pain. Mindfulness may lessen fearful responses Using brain imaging tools, such as fMRI, scientists have shown that the threat response, which begins in a region of the brain known as the amygdala, is calmed in meditators.