People who practice mindfulness say it fundamentally changes how they experience life. For the past 40 years, researchers have been attempting to explain this in biological terms. Studies reveal that mindfulness may reduce anxiety and depression, boost your immune system, help you manage pain, allow you to unhook from unhealthy habits and addictions, soothe insomnia, reduce high blood pressure, and even change the structure and function of your brain in positive ways—perhaps in as little as 8 weeks of practice.
The most respected scientists who study the effects of mindfulness practices emphasize that the research is in its infancy compared to many other fields. It will take years and decades before there is enough peer-reviewed study with active controls and long time frames to establish firm evidence of benefits. That said, the field is emerging and the research looks promising.
The Definition of Mindfulness: Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.
The Definition of Meditation: Meditation is exploring, not erasing, the present moment as it is. When we meditate, we venture into the workings of our minds: our sensations (air moving in and out of the body or a noise wafting into the room), our emotions (love this, hate that, crave this, loathe that) and thoughts (did I remember to send that email?).
Mindfulness meditation asks us to suspend judgment of the workings of the mind and unleash our natural curiosity about what is happening in the moment, allowing ourselves to be with each moment with warmth and kindness, to ourselves and to others.
And while this may sound frivolous to some, or even a little weird, but the research suggests that developing this human capacity to observe ourselves and our surroundings non-judgmentally and with compassion has deep and nourishing effects on our well-being that ripple out into our daily lives and communities.
The Foundational Science of Mindfulness-Based Interventions
Mindfulness meditation studies were coming out of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Stress Reduction Clinic at UMass Medical Center as early as 1982. Since that time, more than 25,000 people have completed his groundbreaking multi-week program, which came to be known as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, learning to build their capacity to respond to stress, pain, and even chronic illness.
Zinn applied the basic principles of mindfulness meditation to patients in a medical setting and his work developing the MBSR program proved effective in helping alleviate the suffering of chronic and previously debilitating medical conditions such as chronic pain. It also served as fertile ground for a systematic set of research investigations in collaboration with one of the founders of the field of affective neuroscience, Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. MBSR has become the gold-standard for research into mindfulness-based interventions.
In 1992, Zindel Segal, John Teasdale, and Mark Williams collaborated to create an eight-week program modeled on MBSR. In 2002, the three published Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression: A New Approach to Preventing Relapse, now a landmark book.
MBCT’s credibility rests firmly on ongoing research. Chief among them are two randomized clinical trials (published in 2000 and 2008 in The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology) indicating MBCT reduces rates of relapse by 50% among patients who suffer from recurrent depression. Recent findings, published in The Lancet, show combining a tapering of medication with MBCT is as effective as an ongoing maintenance dosage of medication.
How Does Mindfulness Affect Health and Well-Being?
When we intentionally place our internal focus of attention in mindfulness practice we induce a unique state of brain activation during the practice. With repetition, this intentionally-created state can become an enduring trait resulting in long-term changes in brain function and structure. This is a fundamental property of neuroplasticity—how the brain changes in response to experience. With mindfulness meditation, the experience is focussing your attention in a particular manner.
A question that is raised regarding the specific features of MBSR is what is the “active ingredient” in its powerful effects. Naturally, the experience of joining with others to reflect on life’s stresses, listen to poetry, and do yoga may each contribute to the program’s scientifically proven effectiveness. But what specific role does meditation itself play in the positive outcomes of the MBSR program? One clue is that those practicing mindfulness meditation during light-treatment for psoriasis revealed four times the speed of healing for the chronic skin condition. And in other studies, long-term improvements were seen and maintained in proportion to the formal reflective meditation time carried out at home in their daily practice. Further research will be needed to verify the repeated studies affirming that long-term improvements are correlated with the mindfulness practice, and are not just the effect of gathering in a reflective way as a group.
Sara Lazar and her colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital have found that people who have been mindfulness meditators for several decades have structural features in their brains that are proportional to their number of hours of practice. But this finding, too, along with studies of “adepts”—those who have spent often tens of thousands of hours meditating—need to be interpreted with caution as to cause and effect. Are those with differing brain activity and structure simply those who’ve chosen to meditate, or has the meditation actually changed their brains? These questions are being studied as we speak in labs around the world.
MBSR has proven an excellent source of insight into these questions because it enables novices to engage in new practices which can then be identified as the variables that induce the positive changes that follow. What are these changes, whatever their specific causes? Studies of MBSR have consistently found several key developments that demonstrate its effectiveness as a health-promoting activity. These may be key to the “science of mindfulness.”
The Science of Mindfulness
11 research-backed ways mindfulness meditation may improve your health and well-being.
1) Anxiety and depression may decrease after meditation training.
Stress-related health problems like anxiety and depression might be treatable with meditation according to a meta-analysis of 47 studies. Researchers found that going through mindfulness meditation programs (including Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, and other mindfulness meditations) effectively reduces the negative components of psychological stress, with effects comparable to what would be expected from the use of an antidepressant. And a review of nine clinical trials published in JAMA Psychiatry found that when comparing routine treatments for depression, including antidepressants, MBCT reduced rates of relapse for up to 60 weeks. Willem Kuyken and colleagues found MBCT was particularly effective for patients with high levels of depressive symptoms to begin with. Further, this reduction in relapse risk was observed regardless of sex, age, education, or relationship status.
2) Immune function may improve after meditation training.
Meditators who went through an eight-week mindfulness training program had significantly more flu antibodies than their non-meditating peers after they received a flu vaccine, according to a randomized controlled study by Richard A. Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn published in Psychosomatic Medicine. After measuring the brain activity of both meditators and non-meditators they found increases in both positive feelings and antibody responses to immune system challenges. At the University of California, Los Angeles, David Cresswell, and his colleagues have found that MBSR improves immune function even in those with HIV. Improved immune system function may help explain the increase in healing found in the psoriasis treatment studies with mindful reflection during treatment.
3) Your brain may be protected from declines due to aging and stress after meditation training.
Muscle control and sensory perception are controlled by regions of the brain known as br