How does mindfulness change the brain

Here we will focus on two that we believe to be of particular interest to business professionals. The ACC is associated with self-regulation , meaning the ability to purposefully direct attention and behavior, suppress inappropriate knee-jerk responses, and switch strategies flexibly.

People with damage to the ACC show impulsivity and unchecked aggression, and those with impaired connections between this and other brain regions perform poorly on tests of mental flexibility: they hold onto ineffective problem-solving strategies rather than adapting their behavior. Meditators, on the other hand, demonstrate superior performance on tests of self-regulation , resisting distractions and making correct answers more often than non-meditators.

They also show more activity in the ACC than non-meditators. In addition to self-regulation, the ACC is associated with learning from past experience to support optimal decision-making. Scientists point out that the ACC may be particularly important in the face of uncertain and fast-changing conditions.

Source: Tang et al. Source: Fox et al. The second brain region we want to highlight is the hippocampus, a region that showed increased amounts of gray matter in the brains of our mindfulness program participants. This seahorse-shaped area is buried inside the temple on each side of the brain and is part of the limbic system, a set of inner structures associated with emotion and memory. It is covered in receptors for the stress hormone cortisol, and studies have shown that it can be damaged by chronic stress, contributing to a harmful spiral in the body.

Indeed, people with stress-related disorders like depresssion and PTSD tend to have a smaller hippocampus. Below are some of the most exciting studies to come out in the last few years and show that meditation really does produce measurable changes in our most important organ.

Last week, a study from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried out at Yale University , found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network DMN , the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts — a.

Several studies have shown that meditation, through its quieting effect on the DMN, appears to do just this. And even when the mind does start to wander, because of the new connections that form, meditators are better at snapping back out of it. A review study last year at Johns Hopkins looked at the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and pain.

Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0. Meditation is, after all an active form of brain training.

Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.

In , Sara Lazar and her team at Harvard found that mindfulness meditation can actually change the structure of the brain: Eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction MBSR was found to increase cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory, and in certain areas of the brain that play roles in emotion regulation and self-referential processing. In fact, the increase in score was equivalent to 16 percentile points, which is nothing to sneeze at.

By practicing cognitive skills such as mindfulness, you can literally change your mind, your brain, and your IQ. As a service to our readers, Harvard Health Publishing provides access to our library of archived content. Please note the date of last review or update on all articles. No content on this site, regardless of date, should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.

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