When I’m stressed, I listen to a 20-minute mindfulness meditation tape. It always helps me feel calmer and more relaxed. Many meditative practices can do this.
Mindfulness meditation is getting a lot of attention because it seems to help with so many physical and psychological problems—like high blood pressure, chronic pain, psoriasis, sleep trouble, anxiety, and depression.
It’s also been shown to boost immune function and stop binge eating. No one knows for sure what’s behind these benefits, but physical changes in the brain probably play a role.
Mindfulness meditation is a mental discipline. You start by focusing your attention on your breath, a sensation in the body, or a chosen word or phrase.
You note the thoughts, emotions, and background sounds that arise from moment to moment, observing them without analyzing them or making judgments about what’s going on around you.
If you drift into thoughts about the past or concerns about the future, you bring your attention back to the present, for example, by refocusing on your breathing. It takes practice.
A new study, published in the May 2011 issue of Neuroimage, suggests that one effect of all this focusing and refocusing is increased brain connectivity. Researchers at the University of California-Los Angeles compared the brain activity of volunteers who had finished eight weeks of mindfulness-based stress reduction training with that of volunteers who did not do such training.
Functional MRI scans showed stronger connections in several regions of the meditators’ brains—especially those associated with attention and auditory and visual processing.
Unfortunately, the study didn’t scan the volunteers’ brains before mindfulness training, so no one can say for sure that mindfulness training was responsible for the differences.
At Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers used MRI scans to document before and after changes in the brain’s gray matter—the “processing” neurons—associated with mindfulness meditation.
The density of gray matter increased in regions governing such distinctly different activities as memory, self-awareness, and compassion, and decreased in the amygdala—the part of the brain associated with fear and stress.
We covered this intriguing research in the April issue of Harvard Women’s Health Watch.
At the moment, scientists can only speculate about the relationship between these brain changes and the health benefits associated with mindfulness meditation.
But the research adds to growing evidence that meditative practices can alter the body at a fundamental level—even, it turns out, at the level of our genes.
Meditation elicits the “relaxation response,” a state of deep relaxation first described more than 35 years ago by mind-body pioneer Dr. Herbert Benson, currently emeritus director of the Benson-Henry Institute of Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Since then, Benson and his colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center have discovered that relaxation techniques (including meditation and yoga) turn certain sets of genes on and off in people who practice them regularly.
Benson, who is the medical editor of Stress Management: Approaches for preventing and reducing stress says these genes are involved with controlling “how the body handles free radicals, inflammation processes, and cell death.”
The intervention is called mindful hypnotherapy. “Mindfulness is a type of meditation that involves focusing attention on present moment awareness.
It can help people cope with stress, but can require months of practice and training,” said researcher Gary Elkins, Ph.D., director of the Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory at Baylor University.
“Hypnosis also involves focusing attention, but it includes mental imagery, relaxation and suggestions for symptom reduction.”
Hypnosis interventions are typically brief and have been used in pain and symptom management in clinical practice. The study’s basic premise is that using hypnosis to deliver mindfulness goals could have many advantages, Elkins said.
“Combining mindfulness and hypnotherapy in a single session is a novel intervention that may be equal to or better than existing treatments, with the advantage of being more time-effective, less daunting and easier to use,” he said. “This could be a valuable option for treating anxiety and stress reduction.”
As a brief intervention, mindful therapy could be widely disseminated and is an innovative new mind-body therapy. The study is published in the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis.
Elkins noted that while mindfulness by itself can be an effective treatment for stress and anxiety for some people, it typically is provided in eight weekly sessions that last two hours or more each week and include an all-day retreat of eight or more hours.
That amount of time, more than 24 therapy hours, may be a burden in cost and time for some people. Also, research has not shown that mindfulness-based treatments are consistently superior to standard cognitive behavioral therapy, he said.
For the study of mindful hypnotherapy, the Baylor research team recruited 42 individuals with self-reported high stress. Half took part in an intervention of one-hour weekly individual sessions that included hypnosis inductions and suggestions for greater mindfulness.
Participants also were given self-hypnosis audio recordings lasting about 20 minutes, each with suggestions for a hypnotic induction, relaxation and greater mindfulness.
The second group did not take part in the intervention. Intervention material focused on present-moment awareness, nonjudgmental awareness of the five senses, nonjudgmental awareness of thoughts and feelings, self-hypnosis, compassion for self and others, awareness of personal values and meaning in life and transition to long-term practice of mindful hypnotherapy, Elkins said.
At study’s end, the intervention group reported a large decrease in stress and a significant increase in mindfulness. Most were highly satisfied with the number of sessions, the ease of home practice and the clarity of content, Elkins said.
The average participant practiced almost every day, and overall satisfaction with the intervention was 8.9 on a scale of 10.
In comparison, those who did not participate in the intervention reported no significant difference between pre- and post-study stress level. A limitation of the study was its small sample size, Elkins said.
Future studies of a larger number of people could be of value, as well as testing mindful hypnotherapy for such concerns as anxiety, depression or chronic pain, he said.
Everyone talks about being stressed, overwhelmed and anxious. The pharmaceutical and alcohol industries pray that you stay way. We know that unrelenting stress can lead to physical and emotional problems such as hypertension, ulcers, migraines and depression. But what is stress exactly? Is it tangible? Is stress a traffic jam, money or relationship problems?
The way people commonly refer to stress you would think it would at least be something you could see or touch. Maybe stress is more like the common cold; feels lousy for a while, then it either goes away or perhaps you just get distracted and stop thinking about it.
My clients learn that stress is a point of view, or a perspective. Two people experiencing the same situation can respond in very different ways. What pushes the stress button in one person can have no effect on another. So it’s not the situation or event but rather how it is perceived or interpreted.
To take it a step further; everytime someone with the fear of flying, takes off in an airplane, and experiences panic, the phobia becomes more deeply rooted. Over time, with repetition, the fear can spread. Soon the person feels uncomfortable driving to the airport, then he or she experiences discomfort just booking the flight, and then just the initial thought of taking the trip to begin with, can provoke a stressful response.
The bad news is that with repetition fear can spread and become deeply rooted; the good news is that the opposite is also an option. Relaxing confidence can become just as automatic, you can’t have one without the other. Think of the subconscious as a greenhouse, you can grow roses or poison ivy with equal efficiency.
Hypnosis is the only way to clean out your inner house, to uproot and delete the problem patterns, and to then plant the seeds supporting new preferred alternatives. By repeating the hypnotic process daily for a couple of months, the new patterns become just as deeply rooted as the problem patterns were.
My clients experience a series of sessions offering a variety of creatively effective techniques supporting healthy change. Most have never previously tried hypnosis, inspite of this the overwhelming majority feel a significant emotional release from whatever problem they had when they arrived. If you are struggling with a problem please consider hypnosis. It’s a powerful tool that’s easy to do and it feels fantastic.
A Boston area Hypnotherapist, with 10 years of medical experience as an RN, Paul has been helping clients since 2001 to overcome everyday challenges. Read more
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When I’m stressed, I listen to a 20-minute mindfulness meditation tape. It always helps me feel calmer and more relaxed. Many meditative practices can do this.
Meditation elicits the “relaxation response,” a state of deep relaxation first described more than 35 years ago by mind-body pioneer Dr. Herbert Benson, currently emeritus director of the Benson-Henry Institute of Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The intervention is called mindful hypnotherapy. “Mindfulness is a type of meditation that involves focusing attention on present moment awareness.
all-day retreat of eight or more hours.
At study’s end, the intervention group reported a large decrease in stress and a significant increase in mindfulness. Most were highly satisfied with the number of sessions, the ease of home practice and the clarity of content, Elkins said.
