The Mindful Mind: How Meditation Influences Your Brain

2020 has pushed every single one of us. We’ve been carrying our own unique burdens this year through a public health crisis, natural disasters, political conflict, racial injustices, and a complete revision of life as we know it… Whatever those events have done to influence your own life, you’ve had to do an incredible amount of adjusting, coping, and persisting. Having to substantially pare down in-person interactions and non-essential activities has meant that we’ve not only seen a shift in our social activity, but we’ve also experienced a change in the way we manage our mental health.

Now that we’ve hit 9 months in the US spent in quarantine, I’ve consciously adjusted my focus to trying to find the positives that came out of such a challenging year. For me, one of the biggest takeaways I’ll leave this year with is the reminder that I have a powerful practice at my fingertips. One that requires absolutely no resources and that has a treasure trove of benefits.

A Free (And Freeing) Practice

That practice is mindful meditation. When I found myself stuck in the same negative thought spirals throughout the year, I pulled meditation back into the picture. I’ve been a fair- well, actually a poor-weather meditator for years. I struggled to keep a consistent practice. However, this practice became hard to ignore once I started looking into the research.

My first true exploration of meditation was a college course called “Introduction to Buddhist Meditation.” I took it on a whim with my sister to fulfill an anthropology requirement, but I ended up taking away from it far more than I expected. I initially felt really silly thinking about myself meditating. I didn’t take it seriously and I didn’t have a clue the benefits it could provide. It took several weeks of experiential lab classes before I finally started to notice in particular a shift in my resilience within my academic life. I changed my tune and began to crave the feeling that came from a good meditation session.

My professor highlighted the work of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of the book, Full Catastrophe Living, and founder of the Meditation Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at UMass. Kabat-Zinn teaches mindfulness from a scientific lens. He has helped his students to use mindfulness to manage pain, anxiety, and other brain functions.

When I realized I was in desperate need of some more focused meditation work earlier this year, I was on a dual mission to find out why meditation makes me feel so good and if it’s actually doing anything significant to my brain. I started by finally finishing Kabat-Zinn’s book (sorry to my professor, I skimmed for the class). And then I delved into the more recent research.

What Happens In Your Brain While You Meditate?

The Basics

There’s a variety of meditative and mindfulness practices. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to focus on the general principles that most practices have in common (follow along on Instagram for some deeper exploration and practice).

Mindful meditation is the practice of bringing awareness to the present moment. This awareness is often guided by a focus on the breath or a “home base.” Meditation is often mistaken for a means to an end and a practice with a strict purpose of non-thinking. As in, you’re supposed to discipline yourself every time you lose focus and you fail the meditation if your thoughts stray.

That is actually counter to the purpose of mindful meditation. The true goal is to be aware without making judgments when you inevitably need a nudge back to that awareness. You’re bringing awareness to your thought patterns and to your present state. In my opinion, meditation helps you to know yourself better and to strengthen important cognitive skills.

Stream of Consciousness or Consciousness of Thought?

Often, as we carry on throughout the day, we have a constant stream of thoughts swirling around. We rarely turn our focus onto those thoughts and where they’re coming from. We don’t tend to put in any conscious efforts to slow the stream. Sometimes we don’t even realize it’s flowing at all.

Picture all the thoughts that run through your head as you rush to get ready in the morning, move through a busy day at work, complete your commute home, prepare dinner, get ready for the next day… it’s overwhelming to think of all that is swirling through your head on any given day.

And, it’s even more overwhelming to think about how those thoughts are streaming by and we are so unaware of them. Have you ever gotten home from a drive and realized you don’t actually remember what happened along the way?

On the flip side, have you ever calmed your mind and fully immersed yourself in the bodily and mental sensations of breathing? Sitting? Walking? Eating?

Sometimes I meditate just for the sole purpose of tempering the rapids of my mind. For just one moment in the day. To center and ground myself. To check in, take notice, and maybe plan my day according to what I observe to be brewing in my mind. That alone is powerful. But, there are also scientifically studied benefits of this practice that I hope will tempt you to give it a try.

Flex Your Attention

With all that the 21st century has brought us, technological advances and social-cultural changes have not been kind to our attention spans. We experience near-constant distractions on a routine basis, which puts stress on our concentration. When you’re consistently interrupted, or trying to multitask, your brain is bouncing between stimuli to try to focus on.

In meditation, you are actively working the networks in your brain that support concentration and sustained attention. When you recognize your mind wandering during meditation, and subsequently return your attention to your breath or home base, you are flexing those connections. The more you work specific circuitry in the brain, the better the connections become.

Meditation Physically Changes Your Brain

Our brains are not static organs. Instead, they are constantly creating new networks and pruning unused networks. Learning a new skill or exercise can build new networks, as can putting in a more concentrated effort on a minimally used skill.

One neuroscientist and researcher from Harvard, Dr. Sara Lazar, has conducted several studies looking at actual structural changes to the brain. Amongst her studies, she has used MRI scans to quantify and visualize the impact of meditation practice on the brain. One of her studies compared non-meditators to meditators and found that the meditator’s brain had more grey matter (neurons) in their brains, particularly in the frontal cortex. This is the part of the brain responsible for attention and executive functions.

Another study took participants who had never meditated before and sent them to an 8-week MBSR program. The participants’ brain scans from before and after the program were then compared, and resulted in some seriously cool findings.

First, there was growth in the hippocampus (responsible for memory, learning, and emotional control) and the temporoparietal junction (important for functions of perspective-taking, empathy, and compassion). Even more interesting, the “after” scans showed a decrease in the size of the participants’ amygdalas. The amygdala is responsible for our fight or flight response and processing of negative emotions. The shrinking of the amygdala actually correlated with participant report of decreased feelings of stress.

All this physical change was a result of just 8 weeks of meditating 30-45 minutes per day.

Check out this interview with Dr. Lazar from the early days of covid-19 quarantine for more!

Are You Holding Tension Right Now?

What’s going on in your body as you read this? Are your teeth clenched? Your shoulders tensed? Are you holding in your stomach? Hands in a fist?

Have you ever taken notice of what your body feels like in the middle of a meeting at work or as you’re trying to get to sleep?

In the practice of body scan meditation, one systematically brings attention to different areas of the body and the associated sensations. Again, this is a non-judging practice. A practice of increasing awareness.

Body scan meditation has been linked in research to a decrease in stress hormones.

Personally, I do a quick version of a body scan pretty much any time I can remember to while I’m at work. A quick check-in usually tells me I’m holding tension somewhere in my body, especially during stressful situations. Because of the awareness I can bring to my bodily stress, I am able to tune in and make adjustments. Often, when I can consciously relax those areas of my body, I can feel a relief in my perceived stress.

How To Get Started

So by now, you’ve got a taste of just some of the benefits awaiting you with consistent meditation practice… But how do you get started?

First off, like everything else I talk about in this blog, start slowly. One thing at a time. Head over to my Instagram or sign up here if you’re interested in diving in with a community.