Demystifying Mindfulness Meditation

Jessie L. Sandoval
Jan 31, 2022
5 min read

If you’ve taken a few yoga classes, you have undoubtedly engaged in some sort of meditation exercise. But what is “meditation”? Is it listening to soothing music, or poetry, or inspirational slogans? Is it focusing on one’s breath, or bodily sensations, or a mental image, or some external object, or nothing at all? Is it contemplation of passages from the Bible, or the Sutras of Patanjali, or some other ancient text? Is it repeating a mantra over and over? Is it trying to magically send “love” to people you know, or people you don’t know, or just to yourself?

There is no good definition of “meditation” that encompasses the wide range of practices labeled as such. What they all have in common, though, is (1) they deviate from most people’s day-to-day mental activity, and (2) people usually feel better after doing them—unless of course they find “doing nothing” incredibly boring or even absurd, in which case it can be torturous!

Two kinds of meditation in particular— “mindfulness” and “loving/kindness”—have been systematically studied by scientists. A recent book by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, Altered Traits, is a highly readable summary of research on changes in brain activity during and after meditation. A central theme of their book is that meditation is not just an “altered state,” but it results in lasting changes in brain function (hence, the book’s title).1

There are two essential ingredients of mindfulness meditation: (1) Focus attention on something static, unchanging or repetitive. For example, one might visualize standing on a beach, watching the waves roll in and recede, again and again… (2) When irrelevant thoughts intrude—and they will—acknowledge them but objectify them. (For example, “I am having a thought about feeling sad about the loss of my mother,” or “I am having a thought about being afraid of contracting COVID.”) This objectification makes it easier to put it aside, and to return attention to watching the waves roll in and out.

Brain scans show that mindfulness meditators have increased connectivity between the frontal lobes of the brain and parts of the brain that are active when we are angry, anxious or afraid. Crucial brain structures in the experience of negative emotions are the amygdalae, deep in the brain’s temporal lobes.

The amygdala becomes especially active when we perceive some threat. It triggers the “fight or flight response,” increasing blood pressure, activating the sympathetic nervous system, releasing the “stress hormone” cortisol, and producing cytokines, which cause inflammation. Basically, the body is “pumped for action.” Unfortunately, when prolonged over time, these effects damage the body. They contribute to illnesses as diverse as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, digestive issues, suppressed immunity and some kinds of cancer.

The amygdala activates not only in response to real threats, but also to imagined threats and memories of stressful events. Moreover, it can be activated by perceiving other people as threatened. Goleman and Davidson compared the responses of meditators and nonmeditators to photographs of people exhibiting pain, anger or fear. Mindfulness meditators had reduced amygdala activation, relative to the nonmeditators. (Interestingly, “loving/kindness” meditators had an increased amygdala response—perhaps a topic for another essay. For now, it makes the point that not all meditation is the same.)

Most neuroscientists believe that the frontal lobes are the seat of conscious control of action. The increased connectivity between the frontal lobes and the amygdalae suggests that mindfulness meditation increases one’s voluntary control of emotional reactions. Consistent with this conclusion, some research indicates that mindfulness meditation reduces cortisol levels produced in response to stress, and it can reduce inflammatory responses even to pathogens of which we are unaware.

Why do these brain changes occur? The short answer is that mindfulness meditation is a learning process; and learning of any kind (we now know) changes brain structure over time.

But what is being learned?

In daily life, our minds flit from sensation to sensation, memory to memory, thought to thought. Yoga calls this citta vritti, “mind chatter” or “monkey mind”. Some of our thoughts are triggered by immediate events (e.g., a loud noise, or a car approaching you at an intersection). But, many of our thoughts are triggered by association to other thoughts. The problem is that it is often difficult to keep our attention focused on one thought. Rather, we tend to habituate to one perception or idea, making it easier for other events, external or internal, to capture our attention—until we habituate again.

Unfortunately, emotional thoughts capture our attention most effectively; we habituate to them least, and they most strongly evoke more emotional thoughts. Our minds don’t just chatter; that chatter gets us stuck in emotional ruts.

In mindfulness meditation, we are learning to monitor our own thought processes, recognizing intrusive thoughts when they occur without being taken over by them. We learn to control our attention more effectively—to “stop the chatter”—and to keep it focused on what is appropriate to our goals. (In my own research, I’ve characterized the function of attention as “the suppression of cognitive noise.”) 2

The American Psychological Association endorses mindfulness meditation for relief from anxiety, depression, and stress in general. 3 The Veterans Administration recommends it for treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because it helps sufferers to “put aside” painful memories and more effectively cope with the demands of the present.4 Mindfulness meditation has also been shown to facilitate pain management, because it helps to objectify pain as just a sensation rather than a state of being.5

Scientific evidence is quite compelling that mindfulness meditation benefits both mental and physical health. The question is then “why doesn’t everybody do it?” There are probably multiple reasons, not least of which is a healthy skepticism: Many view meditation as a practice without any scientific or medical justification, but is nonetheless embraced by gullible “New-Agers” who are prone to believing anything mystical, supernatural or superstitious. Such skepticism no longer seems warranted.

The biggest obstacle to practicing mindfulness meditation is that it takes time and patience, just like physical exercise. And even though the basics are simple, it’s not easy. For the practice to be effective, the attentional focus must be static or repetitive, essentially boring (not, for example, music or poetry). Otherwise, there is no challenge to ignoring distracting thoughts and learning to control them more effectively. The good news is that, like physical exercise, the more one practices, the easier and more rewarding it becomes.

Yoga can be particularly helpful to starting and maintaining a meditation practice. Indeed, yoga was developed centuries ago as a means of preparing the mind for meditation, not as a kind of physical exercise for its own sake.6

In a followup essay, I will discuss integrating mindfulness meditation into a yoga practice (or vice versa).

NOTES

1 Goleman, D., & Davidson, R. (2017). Altered States: Science

Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and

Body. New York: Avery. (Daniel Goleman is a long-time

science writer for The New York Times; Richard Davidson is

an accomplished neuroscientist.)

2 Neill, W. T., & Westberry, R. L. (1987). Selective attention

and the suppression of cognitive noise. Journal of

Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,

13(2), 327-334. (Much of my research has concerned how

attention controls distraction, from either external stimuli or