Category: Mindfulness

Facts about meditation include that it can change your personality, improve gut health and change the brain.

Below are some of the most popular facts about meditation studies published here on PsyBlog.

Click the link in each of the facts about meditation to learn more about the study.

1. Meditation fact: it changes your personality

Meditation is linked to higher levels of extraversion and openness to experience and lower levels of neuroticism, research finds.

Neuroticism is a personality trait that is strongly linked to anxiety, sadness, irritability and self-consciousness.

Extraversion, along with its well-known attribute of engaging with other people, is linked to higher levels of positive emotionality.

In other words, people who meditate probably experience more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions.

Openness to experience is the quality of being receptive and curious, as well as imaginative and sensitive to feelings.

2. Deep meditation linked to improved gut health

Regular deep meditation could lower the risk of mental and physical health problems as well as improve gut health, a study of long-term meditators suggests.

The research found that Tibetan Buddhist monks had substantially different gut microbiomes from their secular neighbours.

The gut microbiome has been strongly linked to mood and behaviour.

It affects the stress response, hormonal signalling and the vagus nerve, which are all part of the parasympathetic nervous system.

3. Mindfulness meditation has some distressing side-effects

Mindfulness-based meditation is often thought to have no problematic side-effects — but that is not one of the true facts about meditation.

When asked the right questions, some admit it makes them hypersensitive, others that it causes nightmares and that they continue to re-experience traumatic events, research reveals.

The most common side-effect from meditation is ‘dysregulated arousal’, which means either people feel too agitated or too flat.

In other words, some experience anxiety and others feel emotionally disconnected after meditating.

Emotional disconnection might be a positive for some people, although it depends on the situation.

4. Mindfulness best for anxious and depressed

While meditation is often thought of as a purely beneficial experience, a study finds otherwise.

People with negative patterns of thinking, such as anxiety or depression, are more likely to have bad experiences while meditating.

The research found, people who practised deconstructive forms of meditation were at an increased risk of unpleasant experiences compared with those using other types.

‘Deconstructive’ practices of meditation include Vipassana (insight) and Koan practice (used in Zen Buddhism).

In comparison, the risk was lower for attentional and constructive types of meditation.

In other words, if you are anxious or depressed it may be better to stick to mindfulness, breathing and loving-kindness meditation.

5. Fact: How meditation changes the brain

The uplifting emotions that many feel when practising meditation are accompanied by specific changes in the brain, research finds.

Meditation does not just lift depression and anxiety, neuroscientists now think it acts on the brain in a similar way to therapy and antidepressants.

The method of meditation used in the study was Transcendental Meditation.

Transcendental Meditation involves repeating a ‘mantra’ to oneself for around 15 to 20 minutes per day.

Transcendental Meditation is thought to be one of the most widely used types of meditation around the world.

6. Just 10 minutes meditation works

Just 10 minutes meditation by a total novice is enough to improve thinking skills, research finds.

People who listened to a 10-minute meditation tape were more accurate and performed faster on a cognitive test afterwards.

All the people in the study had never meditated before in their lives.

Longer meditation sessions, or multiple sessions meditation might provide greater improvements to people’s cognitive abilities.

7. A body scan reduces anxiety quickly

A single one-hour session of meditation using a ‘body scan’ can reduce anxiety and improve heart health, research finds.

It is well-known that repeated meditation is beneficial, but this study shows how even a relatively small amount can help.

Even one week after a single session of meditation, people still had lower anxiety levels than before.

The type of meditation used in the study was a ‘body scan’.

A body scan involves focusing intensely on one part of the body at a time over a thirty-minute period.

This was done after first spending twenty minutes doing a meditation induction and was followed by ten minutes self-guided meditation.

8. Meditation conserves the brain’s gray matter

Meditation conserves the brain’s gray matter — used for processing thoughts — against age-related degeneration, a study finds.

From around the late twenties, people’s brains start to reduce in size and weight.

With these changes come worse memory, slower processing and the other cognitive changes associated with age.

The research shows that older people who meditated had preserved more gray matter.

So, not only can meditation preserve the brain’s white matter — used for communication between different areas — it can also preserve the brain’s gray matter, which is where cognition ‘happens’.

9. Fact: Meditation helps prevent memory loss

Meditation and yoga are more effective than memory games or crosswords for fighting memory problems linked to Alzheimer’s, according to a study.

Researchers compared two groups of people aged over 55 who reported memory problems like losing things, forgetting names and appointments.

One group were given crosswords and memory training to do over 12 weeks.

The other group did both yoga and meditation for an equivalent amount of time.

People in the yoga group practiced 20 minutes of Kirtan Kriya meditation, which is a part of Kundalini yoga.

Kundalini yoga involves focusing on breathing, chanting as well as the visualisation of light.

People who did yoga and meditation had better visuo-spatial memory: the type used for navigating and recalling locations.

Yoga and meditation also had better results in reducing depression and anxiety.

It helped people develop higher levels of resilience and increased their ability to cope.

10. Fact: Meditation reduce loneliness

It one of the facts about meditation that it can reduce feelings of loneliness and the expression of genes which cause inflammation, a study suggests.

After the eight-week study, participants who had been meditating felt significantly less lonely.

But the benefits did not end there, the researchers also found that meditation altered the genes related to inflammation.

After meditating, participants showed lower levels of the inflammatory marker C-reactive protein and there were beneficial alterations in a genetic transcription factor (NK-kB) which has been found to be important in heart disease.

While inflammation is one of the body’s natural reactions to disease and other attacks, when it becomes long-lasting it can cause other diseases and depression.

→ Read on: Mindfulness Meditation: Guide And Research On Attention

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Mindfulness meditation is a practice that involves being intensely aware of the present moment.

In mindfulness meditation, one focuses on the senses without interpretation or judgement.

People practising mindfulness meditation use methods like guided imagery, breathing techniques and postures to achieve a focused state.

There all sorts of benefits of meditation, including lowering stress, better sleep and improved concentration.

You can find more about the research on mindfulness meditation by scrolling down, but first here is a quick guide on the technique.

Quick guide to mindfulness meditation

Here is a quick primer on how to used mindfulness meditation.

Mindfulness meditation is like chess: the rules are relatively easy to explain, but the game itself is infinitely complex.

And, like chess, the names and techniques of mindfulness meditation are many and varied but the fundamentals are much the same:

1. Relax the body and the mind

This can be done through body posture, mental imagery, mantras, music, progressive muscle relaxation, any old trick that works.

Take your pick.

This step is relatively easy as most of us have some experience of relaxing, even if we don’t get much opportunity.

2. Be mindful

Bit cryptic this one but it means something like this: don’t pass judgement on your thoughts, let them come and go as they will (and boy will they come and go!) but try to nudge your attention back to its primary aim, whatever that is.

Turns out this is quite difficult because we’re used to mentally travelling backwards and forwards while making judgements on everything (e.g. worrying, dreading, anticipating, regretting etc.).

The key is to notice in a detached way what’s happening but not to get involved with it.

This way of thinking often doesn’t come that naturally.

3. Concentrate on something

Often meditators concentrate on their breath, the feel of it going in and out, but it could be anything: your feet, a potato, a stone.

The breath is handy because we carry it around with us.

But whatever it is try to focus all your attention onto it. When your attention wavers, and it will almost immediately, gently bring it back.

Don’t chide yourself, be good to yourself, be nice.

The act of concentrating on one thing is surprisingly difficult: you will feel the mental burn almost immediately.

Experienced practitioners say this eases with practice.

4. Concentrate on nothing

Most say this can’t be achieved without a lot of practice, so I’ll say no more about it here.

Master the basics first.

Explore

This is just a quick introduction but does give you enough to get started.

It’s important not to get too caught up in techniques but to remember the main goal: exercising attention by relaxing and focusing on something.

Try these things out first, see what happens, then explore further.

→ Here are some more mindfulness exercises to fit into daily life.

Concentrating without effort

The early psychologist, William James wrote that controlling attention is at “the very root of judgement, character and will”.

He also noted that controlling attention is much easier said than done.

This is unfortunate because almost every impressive human achievement is, at heart, a feat of attention.

Art, science, technology — you name it — someone, somewhere had to concentrate, and concentrate hard.

Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to concentrate without effort?

Not to feel the strain of directing attention, just to experience a relaxed, intense, deep focus?

So naturally the million dollar question is: how can attention be improved?

Psychologists are fascinated by the sometimes fantastical claims made for mindfulness meditation, particularly in its promise of improving attention.

It certainly seems intuitively right that mindfulness meditation should improve attention — after all mindfulness meditation is essentially concentration practice — but what does the scientific evidence tell us?

Research on mindfulness meditation

The problem with attention is that it naturally likes to jump around from one thing to another: attention is antsy, it won’t settle — this is not in itself a bad thing, just the way it is.

Attention’s fidgety nature can be clearly seen in the phenomenon of ‘binocular rivalry’.

If you show one picture to one eye and a different picture to the other eye, attention shuttles between them, wondering which is more interesting.

A simple lab version of this presents a set of vertical lines to one eye and a set of horizontal lines to the other.

What people see is the brain flipping between the horizontal and the vertical lines and occasionally merging them both together, seemingly at random.

People usually find it difficult to see either the horizontal or the vertical lines — or even the merged version — for an extended period because attention naturally flicks between them.

If the binocular rivalry test is a kind of index of the antsy-ness of attention, then those with more focused attention should see fewer changes.

So reasoned Carter et al. (2005) who had 76 Tibetan Buddhists in their mountain retreats meditate before taking a binocular rivalry test.

They sat, wearing display goggles and staring at the lines, pressing a button each time the dominant view changed between horizontal, vertical and merged.

The more button presses, the more times their attention switched.

In one condition their meditation was ‘compassionate’, thinking about all the suffering in the world while in the other it was ‘one-point’ meditation focusing completely on one aspect of their experience, for example their breath going in and out.

Although the ‘compassionate’ form of meditation had no effect, the ‘one-point’ meditation reduced the rate of switching in half the participants.

The results were even more dramatic when the Buddhists carried out the one-point meditation while looking through the goggles.

Some of the most experienced monks reported complete image stability: they saw just the horizontal or vertical lines for a full 5 minutes.

When compared to people who do not meditate, these results are exceptional.

8-week training in mindfulness meditation

Of course we don’t all have 20 years to pass in a mountain retreat learning how to concentrate, so is there any hope for the rest of us?

A study by Dr Amishi Jha and colleagues at Pennsylvania University suggests there is (Jha, Krompinger & Baime, 2007).

Rather than recruiting people who were already superstar concentrators, they sent people who had not practised mindfulness meditation before on an 8-week training course in mindfulness-based stress reduction, a type of meditation.

This consisted of a series of 3-hour classes, with at least 30 minutes of meditation practice per day.

These 17 participants were then compared with a further 17 from a control group on a series of attentional measures.

The results showed that those who had received training were better at focusing their attention than the control group.

This certainly suggests that mindfulness meditation was improving people’s attention.

Testing a one-month retreat

Dr Jha and colleagues were also interested in how practice beyond beginner level would affect people’s powers of attention.

To test this they sent participants who were already meditators on a mindfulness meditation retreat for one month.

Afterwards they were given the same series of attention measures and were found to have improved in their reactions to new stimuli.

In other words, they seemed to have become more receptive.

Attention improved in 5 days

Attentional improvements from mindfulness meditation, though, have recently been reported even quicker than 8 weeks.

A study carried out by Yi-Yuan Tang and colleagues gave participants just 20 minutes instruction every day for five days (Tang et al., 2007).

Participants practised a Chinese form of mindfulness meditation called ‘integrative body-mind training’, which uses similar techniques to other types of meditation.

They found that after only this relatively short introduction participants demonstrated improved attention compared to a control group, along with other benefits such as lower levels of stress and higher energy levels.

Opening the doors of perception

There is even evidence that meditation can improve a major limitation of the brain’s attentional system.

Attentional blink is the finding that our attention ‘blinks’ for about half a second right after we focus on something (follow the link for the full story).

Meditation, however, seems to be able to increase our minds’ attentional bandwidth.

Slagter et al. (2007) gave participants 3 months of intensive meditation training and found that afterwards the attentional blink was seriously curtailed.

In other words people were capable of processing information more quickly and accurately.

Perhaps, then, meditation really can open the doors of perception…

This research on meditation’s effect on attention is just the tip of the iceberg.

Other studies have also suggested that meditation can benefit motivation, cognition, emotional intelligence and may even sharpen awareness to such an extent that we can control our dreams (Walsh & Shapiro, 2006).

And these are just the psychological benefits, there also appear to be considerable physical benefits.

Mindfulness meditation and new ways of being

As William James pointed out attention is so fundamental to our daily lives that sharpening it up is bound to spill over into many different areas of everyday life.

When attention goes wrong people are frequently beset by unsettling experiences, but when it goes right we are capable of all sorts of incredible abilities, like multitasking the cocktail party effect, and even curtailing the attentional blink.

In fact, attention is so fundamental to consciousness that it’s no exaggeration to say that what we pay attention to makes us who we are.

Potentially, then, mindfulness meditation offers a way to remake ourselves, leaving behind damaging or limiting habits and discovering new ways of being.

→ Read on: Benefits of mindfulness and mindfulness exercises.

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