Kristine M.

Deerfield, NH, USA

Science

Neuroscience

Health & Happiness

Lectures

Happiness

English

Mindfulness practices, including meditation, provide many benefits for you. Increased happiness and fulfillment, improved sleep, blood pressure, and general health, enabling you to live a more enriching life. In this short talk, Paul discusses how stress affects your brain and body and some of the science and research into how we can reverse the negative effects of living in these stressful times. The talk finishes with a short awareness meditation to help you have a more peaceful day.

Introduction To Mindfulness For Everyday

 Welcome to this session on approaching work and life mindfully. My name is Paul and I'm thankful for you joining me today and I hope you find this session helpful and inspiring and hopefully you will instill a little bit more mindfulness into your daily life, whether that be at work or in your private life. The beauty of mindfulness is that wherever you are, in whatever situation may arise, you can use mindfulness to support you in dealing with life's challenges. So through this talk, I'll be discussing what mindfulness is and how to recognize what it isn't. I'll look at some of the science of what's happening in your brain and your body when you instill these skills into your life. Then I'll finish with a short mindfulness meditation to help the rest of your day be as peaceful and productive as possible. So mindfulness is described as an active state of mind where we are focusing on the present moment, not being distracted by the past or concerns for any possible future events. We pay attention to what's happening in our inner world and also the world around us by being open and curious. Mindfulness and meditation can be thought of as two separate practices. Although there is a style of meditation called mindfulness meditation, it's recommended that people combine being mindful as a practice with mindfulness meditation because it helps to strengthen your concentration. So generally speaking, we've become a society that is increasingly mindless. Mindfulness is a lack of attention to the present moment. It is also described as an inactive state of mind that is ruled by an habitual response pattern. Living mindlessly can result in believing what we are told without questioning, reacting often negatively to stresses and events that occur around us. We might miss those nuances or clues that people drop, which can lead us to becoming insensitive. Our judgment might not be as sharp. We may not recognize our intuition, which is there to keep us safe or guide us. We might get caught up in automatic responses without questioning if there's a better way to do this. We often ignore the clues our bodies are giving us as to when to take a break or take time out until we get really sick. So we might not notice how stressed we really are. Perhaps we're eating without being aware of the taste of what we're eating. It's like we're driving on autopilot and not we're really aware of the journey. We can often use work or food or alcohol or even spending as a distraction from the present moment. Being mindless is a habit that most people aren't even aware that they've fallen into. When we are mindless, we tend to avoid anything that we don't want to face or that makes us uncomfortable and this avoidance keeps the cycle in place. So the cost of being mindless in terms of happiness and fulfillment is incredibly high. An interesting fact is that rather than getting more done, mindlessness means we usually accomplish less. Research in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology in 2019 concluded that ongoing mindfulness training showed improved job productivity and significantly greater improvement in attentional focus at work and decreases in work-life conflict. So constantly checking our phones for that Insta update, texting while we're working or driving all takes us out of this present moment. How often are people bumping into each other on the street now as they look down at their phones rather than focusing on where they're walking and just enjoying the scenery around them? Throughout our lives, we take on so much based upon what we are told and we pick up rules and beliefs without ever having the opportunity to question them. So we end up looking at the world through a lens based on our personal history. So we end up looking at the world through a lens based on our personal history, often seeing the world as we are, not as it actually is. By being mindful, we can change the lens and view the world through the filter of curiosity. We can experience our emotions without being overtaken by them. We can let go of the need to be perfect, to understand everything, to stop judging ourselves and what is happening. So when we live mindfully, we pay attention to the present moment. We make more conscious choices. We reflect. We experience less stress. We make less judgments. We feel our emotions at the time. And this provides us with a sense of living more purposefully, with less reactivity, and we generally feel happier. So this mindful approach is about letting go of judgment that something is good or bad, right or wrong, and we just accept what it is right now in all its beauty. This mindful approach is open and curious, aware and accepting of the reality of the moment. This is the key. Carl Jung said, what you resist not only persists, but will grow in size. So with this mindful approach, we can open to the reality of the present situation. And we can do this with compassion and empathy and kindness for ourselves rather than ignoring something and hoping it will go away. What you resist, persists. This form of acceptance does not mean resignation. It means we stop using force to try to change what is. We can always accept the reality while working to create something better. It's also not about being detached or devoid of emotion, living like a robot. Living mindfully, we are more present to fully feel and experience life from a deeper state of awareness. And this enables life to become an enriching experience and more fulfilling. So let's have a look at the stress response which starts in our brain. So bear with me now as we delve into a little bit of anatomy and science. The prefrontal cortex at the front of your brain. This provides our executive functioning where we focus our attention. It regulates our emotional responses. And deeper in the brain, we have an almond-shaped cluster of neurons in the temporal lobes and these are called the amygdala. The amygdala interprets images and sounds from the outside world. And if it perceives danger, it sends out a distress signal to the hypothalamus, which in turn communicates with the rest of our body. Which leads to a physical response to stress unless the prefrontal cortex regulates that response. So this physical response can be an increased heart rate, increased blood pressure, rapid breathing, dilated blood vessels. When our bodies experience such a response, they start dumping chemicals such as adrenaline into our bloodstream to support us. Extra oxygen is then sent to the brain to increase our alertness. This increased adrenaline releases extra sugar and fats into the body and all of this happens in the blink of an eye. Our stress response often becomes so familiar that we usually don't register these changes. In the world today, there are plenty of psychological stressors that can heighten the amygdala's response and can lead to what's called the amygdala hijack when it becomes overactive. So this stress response is the first round of the fight-flight-faint response from your sympathetic nervous system. Now the second round occurs in what's called the HPA axis. This refers to the hypothalamus, pituitary gland and adrenal glands. So now they become activated and become involved and even more chemicals are dumped into our bodies to help us cope with this perceived threat. Direct low-level stress keeps the HPA axis activated and when we live this way for prolonged periods of time, as many of us do, our mental and physical health starts to break down and the quality of our life is affected. MRI brain scans show that after eight weeks of mindfulness practice, the amygdala starts to shrink and the prefrontal cortex thickens. So this weakens our fight-flight response and our attention and concentration become stronger. And how much this occurs depends upon the number of hours a person dedicates to mindfulness and meditation practice. The connections between the amygdala and the rest of the brain also become weaker as our attention grows stronger. Mindfulness and activities that strengthen the prefrontal cortex reduce stress and inflammation in our bodies. And again, how much this occurs depends on how much time we spend on mindfulness activities. So there is a large body of evidence now that shows that just eight weeks of mindfulness training can result in significant benefits to our health, our wellbeing and just our overall health in our body. According to a report in the UK's Mental Health Foundation, being mindful reduces stress and pain, creates a sense of calm. It improves our emotional regulation and emotional intelligence. It increases our empathy and compassion, improves our impulse control. It also improves our productivity, our health and sleep improves. We have a reduction in negative thoughts and even addictive behavior. It also increases our resilience and makes life more meaningful. From the neuroscience research perspective, mindfulness has been shown to increase the cortical thickness in our brain, which increases our intelligence. And as I mentioned before, it decreases the amygdala activation, which will actually reduce your anxiety and also increases activity in that prefrontal cortex, which increases your self-control. So you can see mindfulness is becoming vitally important nowadays. It's not just something for alternative people or something that you practice only when you're blind, mindfulness needs to be a way of life. But you don't need to be mindful every single minute of the day, but just to remember that there's a vast difference between living mindlessly on occasions and living mindlessly every day. Now for a little bit more brain science. One of the most exciting discoveries of the 20th century is that the brain constantly renews itself and that new neurons can be born well into our eighties. This is called neuroplasticity. So for our brain to work for us, we need to use our brain. And one of the best ways to keep our brain alive and active is through exercise, voluntary exercise that is something we participate in without being forced, plays a vital role in promoting a healthy brain, which combats the effect of aging and depression. Voluntary exercise does not cause stress and leads to brain rhythms called theta waves. Theta brain waves are similar to a light meditation. Theta waves improve learning and memory function and stress impairs our ability to create new pathways in our brain and makes it harder to reach that theta level. Neurons that fire together wire together. This was said by Hebb in 1949 and aptly describes neuroplasticity. So neurons that fire together wire together. So this means that the more times you run a neural circuit in your brain, the stronger that circuit becomes. Hence how we say practice makes perfect. The more you do something, the more natural that feels. Our current research now shows that in order to learn something, even more importantly than practicing, is the ability to unlearn or break down the old neural