Should you MEDITATE?

Mindfulness meditation has been hailed as the cure for almost everything, depression, chronic pain, diabetes, even autism. In sport it is used to still the mind under competitive pressure. In business it is promoted as a tool for managing stress and increasing productivity. The military has taught snipers to meditate so they can steady their hand and emotionally detach when killing the enemy.

All of this is a long way from where meditation began.

Arising from Eastern philosophical and spiritual traditions, meditation was never developed to improve our performance at work or help us tolerate the pressures of modern life. Its original purpose was to help us understand the nature of our own mind and to arrive at a felt sense of our interconnectedness with everything, including the universe itself.

A sign of the times

We are overstimulated and overwhelmed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Technological devices deliberately designed and proven to be addictive steal our attention. Helplessly carried along by our thoughts and the emotions they evoke.

I had struggled with emotional regulation and a racing mind since childhood (autism and adhd). Coming face to face with my thoughts was, at times, terrifying. Traditional calming techniques had not worked for me nor many of my clients. I trained in hypnosis which I found to be much more helpful.

However I did not give up and began my own meditation practice in my late thirty's. I found it deeply challenging. In fact my practice did not take off until I began yoga. There is good reason for this. Whilst mediation has been practiced for over 10,000 years, yoga asanas (the physical postures) has only been around for just over 3,000 years. One of the reason often cited is that the yogi's eventually realised that meditation was hard for most people but especially some people. It got easier if people moved their body first. So physical asanas were designed to work on developing flexibility of the spine and body to allow yogi's to sit and practice meditation.

Limits of the evidence for meditation.

There is considerable bias in the research literature on short-term mindfulness training. The most positive outcomes tend to appear in studies where the teacher was also the author. Compassion and empathy, for instance, increased only in those studies conducted by the workshop provider themselves. This kind of bias is common when there is a personal or financial investment in the outcome. There is also a well-documented tendency to over-report marginal positive results and almost no published studies report negative outcomes (since few journals would publish them and few practitioners would want to draw attention to them).

With that important caveat in mind, there does appear to be some consistency in the following benefits of regular mindfulness practice.

It appears to strengthen meta-awareness, the ability to observe your own thoughts rather than be consumed by them. This is particularly valuable given the well-documented impact of social media on anxiety and depression, driven partly by our tendency to take the highly curated stories we encounter at face value.

It improves what researchers call attentional blink, our ability to scan our environment more broadly, which can also improve social interaction by helping us notice cues we would otherwise miss.

It reduces the emotional perception of chronic pain, making it more manageable.

It lowers cortisol levels, which is helpful in high-pressure social situations.

With significant practice and we are talking upwards of a thousand hours it reduces activation of the fight-or-flight response, which can positively affect stress, trauma and our capacity to manage overwhelming emotions.

The major research on meditators today tends to focus on the default mode network, the part of the brain associated with rumination, reliving the past and projecting into the future. This is the same network closely linked to depression, anxiety, adhd and obsessional thinking.

Long-term, committed practice appears to increase the frequency of insight and intuitive thinking and there is growing evidence that it slows brain ageing.

Conclusion

Mindfulness meditation can genuinely help with many of the challenges of modern life, chronic pain, stress, depression, concentration difficulties and addiction. The benefits are real. But I do not believe it is the antidote it is often presented as particularly when it is practised without any ethical framework.

So much of our chronic suffering, both physical and psychological, is rooted in the values we collectively adhere to in our western society. Mindfulness without ethics risks becoming a sophisticated sticking plaster, a way of managing the symptoms of a life lived out of alignment rather than addressing the source. Used this way it becomes a coping strategy helping us tolerate what should not be tolerated.

On the other hand, meditation undertaken with a genuine intention will help to calm the nervous system and mind. It helps us to become more attuned to ourselves and therefore more capable of genuine connection and care. Not to perform better or tolerate more. To find the quiet part of us and the calm in the chaos.