What is Mindfulness and Can It Really Change Your Brain?
“Life is not the way it is supposed to be, it is the way it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.” –Virginia Satir
What is Mindfulness?
If you’re like me, when I first started hearing about Mindfulness, I thought it was basically the same thing as meditation. And to be honest, I always wanted to be good at meditation, but I just couldn’t seem to get past the discomfort and constant mind-wandering that meditation brought up for me. I thought to myself: I’m just not good at this. It’s not for me. But as a graduate student, working in community mental health during my clinical practicum and internship, I found myself co-leading several therapy groups all of which had mindfulness components to them. And I learned both from my co-leaders and participants in the groups what mindfulness really is. It’s the slow journey toward acceptance of what is. And discomfort and mind-wandering are often a big part of what is. Especially when we first begin to practice mindfulness.
But how can simply being mindful of what I’m feeling, or what I’m thinking or how my breath is moving change anything?
If you haven’t seen the studies that have come out over the past few years with regards to mindfulness-based stress reduction, here’s the skinny: researchers found that on average, the brains of participants that spent about 27 minutes a day meditating actually changed in several ways over the course of EIGHT weeks.
Scans of participants brains showed:
Increases in size/density in parts of the brain and neural structures responsible for learning, memory, empathy, emotion-regulation and self-awareness (left hippocampus, TPJ and Pons)
Increase in the size of the brain responsible for mind-wandering/day-dreaming (posterior cingulate)
A decrease in the size of the part of the brain responsible for our fight/flight response (amygdala), which was correlated in participants’ reporting lower stress levels at the end of the study
The fact that we can actually incorporate something into our daily lives that has the power to literally change our brains (for free) is pretty incredible, don’t you think? I like to share different mindfulness exercises in both individual and group sessions with my clients because I find them empowering. Particularly for clients who have experienced trauma, whereby they feel a part of themselves has been irreparably damaged, I find this research and this practice creates hope.
You can download a few .pdf examples of mindfulness exercises I have created to incorporate into your daily practice along with a list of websites, apps and other resources for starting your Mindfulness journey.
