While the world is getting more and more technologically connected, a lot of people seem to be feeling more mentally disconnected—from others, and from themselves.
“I’m on mobile devices all day long,” said Anderson Cooper on tonight’s 60 Minutes (which you can watch here). “I feel like I could go through an entire day and not be present. It’s exhausting.”
Mindfulness may be the antidote, say more and more practitioners, and an increasing number of scientific studies. The ages-old practice teaches a person to be more focused on the present moment, rather than caught up in thoughts about the past or worries about the future. The practice has gained popularity in the U.S., and apparently with good reason: Every other week there seems to be a new scientific study showing just how it can change the brain. Corporations and politicians are also jumping on board, and learning how to simply be, in the present moment.
For his story on mindfulness, Cooper, who was admittedly skeptical going in, attended a weekend-long mindfulness retreat with meditation expert of 47 years, Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and developer of the popular eight-week long mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program. Kabat-Zinn’s famous definition of mindfulness is “the awareness that arises through paying attention on purpose in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”
By the end of Cooper’s retreat, which included a lot of meditation, silent meals, and no electronics, Cooper says he was so sold on cognitive benefits of mindfulness, that he’s integrated it into his everyday life and can feel the difference. As he said to his producer on 60MinutesOvertime, “It sounds like I’ve sort of drunk the Kool Aid, but in a way I have sort of drunk the Kool Aid.”
A Practice to Quiet the Monkey Mind
The tendency to over-think is “an occupational hazard of being human,” says Kabat-Zinn, responding to Cooper’s admission that he rarely feels that he’s in the present moment. “We’ll be projecting in the future or reminiscing about the past, or what went wrong, and who did what to whom, or who’s to blame….We’re creating narratives constantly.” It’s the constant narrative in our heads (i.e., the “monkey mind”) that leads to the sensation that we’re not really present in a moment-to-moment way. “The mind has a life of its own,” says Kabat-Zinn. “It goes here and there.”
So, in mindfulness, the real practice is bringing the mind back to a particular point of focus – Kabat-Zinn likes to teach people to first use the breath – as many times as it takes. And it may take a lot of redirection, since, says Kabat-Zinn, the mind’s nature is to wander. He likens the mind to the ocean – most of the time, you’re getting bounced around by the waves at the surface. But meditation, when practiced enough, lets you dip below the waves and not be at the mercy of the choppy surface agitations. When you’re below the surface, in meditation, agrees Cooper, “you’re still kind of moved by the currents, but you’re not being slapped around by the waves.” In other words, meditation lets us get some reprieve from the constant rovings of our minds.
Business and Politics Jump on Board
Cooper is certainly not alone in his newfound devotion. Everyone from politicians to businesspeople is starting to practice it, and oftentimes, introducing it to their colleagues. One of the attendees at Cooper’s retreat was Ohio democratic congressman Tim Ryan, who wrote the book A Mindful Nation. As a stressed-out congressman of 10 years, Ryan began meditating to deal with his chronic stress in 2008. He says that in meetings in Washington, mindfulness helps him manage his responses to peers who may say things to rile others up. He’s even started weekly meditation meetings for congress members and staffers of both parties—though he says no Republicans have joined in yet.
Ryan has also worked to secure $1 million in funding to teach mindfulness to schoolchildren in his Ohio district. “I’ve seen it transform classrooms, I’ve seen it heal veterans, I’ve seen what it does to individuals who have really high levels of chronic stress…. I wouldn’t be willing to stick my neck out this far if I didn’t think it was the thing that can help shift the country.”
Big companies have gotten into it, too. Google, Facebook, and Instagram are some of the companies that attend the Wisdom 2.0 conference, and are bringing meditation back to their companies. One of the job perks at Google, is that its 52,000 employees are given free lessons in mindfulness. Google’s meditation guru, known formally as the “Jolly Good Fellow,” Chade-Meng Tan, is charged with hefty responsibilities, as his official job description is to “Enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace.” Some meetings at Google start out with a couple of minutes of meditation. Not only does adding meditation to the work day make people happier and more present, but it also makes people more productive. The trick, says Tan, is to “get into that frame of mind on demand,” and meditation teaches people to do exactly this.
The Brain Science Behind Mindfulness
Lest people think that mindfulness is “new-age gobbledygook,” Cooper allowed himself to be a subject in a one-person experiment showing the neurological effects of meditation. There are dozens of studies showing the functional and structural changes meditation can bring about in the brain, and Cooper wanted to see if his own practice had any measurable effects. Researcher Judson Brewer, head of the University of Massachusetts’ Mindfulness Center, hooked Cooper up to an EEG – electroencephalography – machine, which measures the brain’s electric potentials through the scalp. Now knowing how to deactivate the stress centers of the brain, Cooper wanted to see if the recordings could capture the moment when he dropped into mindfulness.
And they did, robustly. The central region of interest was the brain’s posterior cingulate, which governs emotion processing and memory. It’s also part of the brain’s “default mode network” or DMN, the constellation of brain regions that are active when our minds are wandering – or when the “monkey mind” is at work.
Anderson was asked to first think of a memory that was anxiety-producing. His brain immediately showed the effect, with the posterior cingulate activity spiking. But when he dropped into meditation, the activity in that brain region quickly quieted down.
Meditation is really a form of cognitive training, says Brewer, who has studied the effects of mindfulness meditation for years, first at Yale and now at UMass. His specialty is using mindfulness to help people with their addictions. “This is just the next generation of exercise,” he says. “We’ve got the physical exercise components down, and not it’s about working out how we can actually train our minds.” Brewer’s research has found that mindfulness meditation can lead to measurable changes in the brains of both experts and novices.
“If you look at people out on the street, if you look at people at restaurants, nobody’s having conversations anymore,” says Brewer. “They’re sitting at dinner looking at their phones, because their brain is so addicted to it. It’s the same reward pathways as addiction…. All this is leading to societal exhaustion.”
So should more people give meditation a try? It’s probably not a bad idea—but thinking of it as a “should” won’t work, says Kabat-Zinn. If it feels like something extra you have to add to your day, that’s probably not the right motivation. “It’s not a big should,” he says. “They shouldn’t do it if it feels like a should – it’s a being.”
From: Forbes