Mi grand baby Olivia enjoys mindfulness meditation, which helps to cultivate a sense of self-awareness, of your body, of your breath, of your emotions, your feelings, your beliefs, your thoughts, but you're staying connected to a state of peace.
A study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that meditation might have a lasting effect on the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotion.
When presented with images meant to evoke various responses, fMRI scans revealed that subjects who had been practicing mindful-attention meditation, which involves focusing on your breath, were better able to control their emotions, even when they weren’t in a meditative state.
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Frontiers | Does Meditation Alter Brain Responses to Negative Stimuli? A Systematic Review | Human NeuroscienceBackground: Despite several attempts to review and explain how meditation alters the brain and facilitates emotion regulation, the extent to which meditation and emotion regulation strategies share the same neural mechanisms remains unclear. Objective: We aim to understand the influence of meditation on the neural processing of negative emotional stimuli in participants who underwent meditation interventions (naive meditators) and long-term meditators. Methodology: A systematic review was conducted using standardized search operators that included the presence of terms related to emotion, meditation and neuro-imaging techniques in PsycInfo, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. Results: Searches identified 882 papers, of which 11 were eligible for inclusion. Results showed a predominance of greater prefrontal/frontal activity related to meditation, which might indicate the increased recruitment of cognitive/attentional control resources in naïve and long-term meditators. This increased frontal activity was also observed when participants were asked to simply react to negative stimuli. Findings from emotion-related areas were scarce but suggested increased insular activity in meditators, potentially indicating that meditation might be associated with greater bodily awareness. Conclusions: Meditation practice prompts regulatory mechanisms when participants face aversive stimuli, even without an explicit request. Moreover, some studies reported increased insular activity in meditators, consistent with the hypothesis that meditation helps foster an interoceptive awareness of bodily and emotional states.
This week on our Checking In podcast, we get into how to start a meditation practice, along with potential health benefits of starting one.
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