How Not to Be a Hot Mess - A Survival Guide for Modern Life - Craig Hase Page 0,4
your mind to come back again and again. In this meditation, we’re focusing on body sensations. So keep coming back to your body and feel it from the inside. Let’s do this for a few more breaths.
Congrats! You just meditated! You were cultivating mindfulness, or present moment awareness. You can also do this mental practice throughout your day. Whenever you remember, come back to your body and feel its sensations, posture, temperature. As you continue to read, you can train in this way, remembering to feel your body every now and again. It’s as simple as that.
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#FACTS
When I started my own meditation practice, back in 2001, there was practically no decent meditation research on the impacts of meditation on the brain, emotions, behavior. In fact, for my senior college thesis, I told my advisor I wanted to write a paper on the impacts of meditation on kids with ADHD. She looked at me pityingly and said, “That’s very nice. But what on earth does it have to do with psychology?”
I wrote the paper anyway. And the very next year Richard J. Davidson, the renowned neuroscientist and public intellectual, started publishing really good, hard-hitting, hard-science research on meditation. He triggered an avalanche. These days, over seven thousand studies have been published. So many it’s hard to even sift through the findings. So I’ll break it down for you. Really simple. Here are the top three reasons to meditate:
It lowers stress.
It helps you focus.
And it might make you a better human.
Meditation Lowers Stress
If there’s one thing meditation definitely, definitely, definitely, for-sure-according-to-science does, it’s lower stress. There are a ton of studies that show this. Good studies. Really good studies. Studies with active control groups, and biomarkers, and robust samples, oh my! I won’t get into every one of these studies right this moment, but here’s one to give you just a taste.
In this particularly fun experiment, some scientists at Stanford University took a bunch of folks with social anxiety disorder and asked them to write down their worst anxiety experiences.2 Sound awful? Keep reading. They wrote about things like being trapped in a subway car while having a panic attack. Or being forced to give a speech in front of derisive classmates.
Then the researchers running the experiment put these same subjects in an fMRI machine, which is like being wrapped in a whirring, clacking, sewer pipe, and they read back to them the very stories they had just written, along with their most damning self-assessments, such as, “I am incompetent.”
Unsurprisingly, the circuits of their brains related to stress and anxiety lit up like a Christmas tree.
The experimenters then split the group in two. They taught one group mindfulness techniques and they taught the other group to do arithmetic to distract from negative thinking. And then they ran all the subjects through the fMRI machine all over again, complete with listening to their anxiety journals and painful self-assessments.
Any guesses about what happened? Spoiler: The arithmetic group didn’t improve. They were still super stressed by the experience. But the group that learned mindfulness? They saw dips in their brains’ stress response—they were less freaked out than they’d been before.
Other studies have compared mindfulness to cognitive reappraisal, mindfulness to relaxation, and mindfulness to just being put on a waitlist. And in each case, mindfulness lowered stress significantly more than the competing treatment.
So we can say with real confidence that mindfulness lowers stress levels. But how? Good question. Let’s take a look. Mindfulness, as we just mentioned, is the simple act of being aware. Nonjudgmentally and on purpose.
Simple enough, right?
But the crazy thing is that being aware, nonjudgmentally and on purpose, breaks the cycle of rumination. And rumination, it turns out, is a hellacious contemporary affliction, a gruesome epidemic of the soul, the psychological cholera of hyper-tech, post-industrialist societies.
To understand this, it’s helpful to get a handle on how our stress response works.
Humans evolved in dangerous environments. Every once in a while something super bad happened, and our bodies needed to respond. Our heart rates would go through the roof, our blood would be pulled out of our extremities, and our nervous systems would go berserk. That way we could run like hell or fight like hell or just freeze and play dead. Way back then, though, it was pretty obvious when the danger had passed. And when it passed the body would calm down, the mind would chill out, and we’d go back to happily picking berries and gossiping