Everything
you do, be it great or small, is but one-eighth of the problem,” a
sixth-century Christian monk admonished his fellow renunciates, “whereas to
keep one’s state undisturbed even if thereby one should fail to accomplish the
task, is the other seven-eighths.”1
A
mind undisturbed marks a prominent goal of meditation paths in all the great
spiritual traditions. Thomas Merton, a Trappist contemplative, wrote his own
version of a poem lauding this very quality, taken from the ancient annals of
Taoism. He tells of a craftsman who could draw perfect circles without using a
compass, and whose mind was “free and without concern.”2
A
mind unworried has as its opposite the angst life brings us: money worries,
working too hard, family problems, health troubles. In nature, stress episodes
like encountering a predator are temporary, giving the body time to recover. In
modern life stressors are mostly psychological, not biological, and can be
ongoing (if only in our thoughts), like a horrific boss or trouble with family.
Such stressors trigger those same ancient biological reactions. If these stress
reactions last for a long time, they can make us sick.
Our
vulnerability to stress-worsened diseases like diabetes or hypertension
reflects the downside in our brain’s design. The upside reflects the glories of
the human cortex, which has built civilizations (and the computer this is being
written on). But the brain’s executive center, located behind the forehead in
our prefrontal cortex, gives us both a unique advantage among all animals and a
paradoxical disadvantage: the ability to anticipate the future—and worry about
it—as well as to think about the past —and regret.
As
Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, put it centuries ago, it’s not the things that
happen to us that are upsetting but the view we take of those doings. A more
modern sentiment comes from poet Charles Bukowski: it’s not the big things that
drive us mad, but “the shoelace that snaps with no time left.”
The
science here shows that the more we perceive such hassles in our lives, the
higher our levels of stress hormones like cortisol. That’s a bit ominous:
cortisol, if raised chronically, has deleterious impacts like an increased risk
of dying from heart disease.3 Can meditation help?
FROM
THE BACK OF AN ENVELOPE
We
first got to know Jon Kabat-Zinn during our Harvard days, when he had just
finished his PhD in molecular biology at MIT and was exploring meditation and
yoga. Jon was a student of Korean Zen master Seung Sahn, who had a meditation
center in the same Cambridge neighborhood where Dan was living. And not far
away, in Richie’s second-floor apartment off Harvard Square, Jon gave Richie
his first instruction in meditation and yoga, shortly before Richie’s trip to
India.
A
like-minded meditating scientist, Jon had joined our team when we studied Swami
X at Harvard Medical School. Jon had just gotten a fellowship in anatomy and
cell biology at the newly opened University of Massachusetts Medical School in
Worcester, an hour’s drive from Cambridge. The anatomy was what interested him
most—Jon had already begun teaching yoga classes in Cambridge.
In
those days Jon often went on retreats at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS),
then recently founded, in Barre, also about an hour away from Boston and not
far from Worcester. In 1974, several years before IMS was founded, Jon had
spent two weeks one freezing early April in an unheated Girl Scout camp in the
Berkshires, rented for a vipassana course. The teacher, Robert Hover, had been
commissioned to teach by the Burmese master U Ba Khin, who, you might remember,
was also the teacher of S. N. Goenka, whose retreats Dan and Richie attended in
India.
Like
Goenka, the main methods Hover taught were, initially, to focus on your breath
in order to build concentration for the first three days of the retreat, and
then to systematically scan the body’s sensations very slowly, from head to
toe, over and over again for the next seven days. During the scan you focused
only on the bare bodily sensations—the norm in that meditation lineage.
Hover’s
instructions included several two-hour meditation sittings during which
students vowed not to make a single voluntary movement—twice as long as those
at Goenka’s courses. These immobile sessions produced a level of pain, Jon
said, he had never experienced in his life. But as he sat through that
unbearable pain and scanned his body to focus on his experience, the pain
dissolved into pure sensations.
On
this retreat Jon had an insight, which he quickly wrote down on the back of an
envelope, that there might be a way to share the benefits of meditation
practices with medical patients, especially those experiencing chronic pain
that wouldn’t go away just by changing their posture or stopping the meditation
practice. Coupled with a sudden vision that came to him a few years later on a
retreat at IMS and that drew together disparate parts of his own practice
history into a form that would be accessible to anyone, the program now known
around the world as mindfulness-based stress reduction, or MBSR, came into
being in September of 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.4
In
his vision he realized that pain clinics are filled with people whose symptoms
are excruciating and who can’t escape the pain except through debilitating
narcotics. He saw that the body scan and other mindfulness practices could help
these patients uncouple the cognitive and emotional parts of their experience
of pain from the pure sensation, a perceptual shift that can itself be a
significant relief.
But
most of these patients—a random slice of folks from the workingclass environs
of Worcester—could not sit still for long periods of time like the dedicated
meditators Hover taught. So Jon adapted a method from his yoga training, a
lying-down body scan meditation which, similar to the Hover approach, has you
connect with and then move through key regions of the body in a systematic
sequence, starting with the toes of the left foot, and winding up at the top of
the head. The key point: it is possible to register and then investigate and
transform your relationship to whatever you are sensing at a given place in the
body, even if it is highly unpleasant.
Borrowing
from both his Zen background and vipassana, Jon added a sitting meditation
where people pay careful attention to their breath, letting go of thoughts or
sensations that arise—just being aware of attending itself, not of the object
of attention, the breath at the beginning, and then other objects such as
sounds, thoughts, emotions, and of course, bodily sensations of all kinds. And,
taking another cue from Zen and vipassana, he added mindful walking, mindful
eating, and a general awareness of life’s activities, including one’s
relationships.
We
were pleased that Jon pointed to our Harvard research as evidence (otherwise
pretty scant in those days) that methods taken from contemplative paths and put
in new forms without their spiritual context could have benefits in the modern
world.5 These days that evidence has grown more than ample; MBSR has risen to
the top of meditation practices undergoing scientific scrutiny. MBSR may be the
most widely practiced form of mindfulness anywhere, taught around the world in
hospitals and clinics, schools, even businesses. One of the many benefits
claimed for MBSR: boosting how well people handle stress.
In
an early study of the impact of MBSR on stress reactivity, Philippe Goldin (an
SRI attendee) and his mentor at Stanford University, James Gross, studied a
small group of patients with social anxiety disorder who underwent the standard
eight-week MBSR program.6 Before and after the training, they went into the
fMRI scanner, while being presented with stressors—statements taken from their
own tales of social “meltdowns” and their thoughts during them—for example, “I
am incompetent,” or “I am ashamed of my shyness.”
As
these stressful thoughts were presented, the patients used either of two
different attentional stances: mindful awareness of their breath or distraction
by doing mental arithmetic. Only mindfulness of their breath both lowered
activity in the amygdala—mainly via a faster recovery—and strengthened it in
the brain’s attentional networks, while the patients reported less stress
reactivity. The same beneficial pattern emerged when the patients who had done
MBSR were compared with some who had trained in aerobics.7
That
is but one of many hundreds of studies that have been done on MBSR, revealing a
multitude of payoffs, as we’ll see throughout this book. But the same can be
said for MBSR’s close cousin, mindfulness itself.
MINDFUL
ATTENTION
When
we started to participate in dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists at
the Mind and Life Institute, we were impressed by the precision with which one
of his interpreters, Alan Wallace, was able to equate scientific terms with
their equivalent meanings in Tibetan, a language lacking any such technical
terminology. Alan, it turned out, had a PhD in religious studies from Stanford
University, extensive familiarity with quantum physics, and rigorous
philosophical training, in part as a Tibetan Buddhist monk for several years.
Drawing
on his contemplative expertise, Alan developed a unique program that extracts
from the Tibetan context a meditation practice accessible to anyone, what he
calls Mindful Attention Training. This program starts with full focus on the
breath, then progressively refines attention to observe the natural flow of the
mind stream and finally rest in the subtle awareness of awareness itself.8
In
a study at Emory, people who had never meditated previously were randomly
assigned to practice Mindful Attention Training or a compassion meditation. A
third group, an active control, went through a series of discussions on
health.9
The
participants were scanned before and after they underwent eight weeks of
training. While in the scanner they viewed a set of images— standard in emotion
research—which includes a few upsetting ones, such as a burn victim. The
Mindful Attention group showed reduced amygdala activity in response to the
disturbing pictures. The changes in amygdala function occurred in the ordinary
baseline state in this study, suggesting the seeds of a trait effect.
A
word about the amygdala, which has a privileged role as the brain’s radar for
threat: it receives immediate input from our senses, which it scans for safety
or danger. If it perceives a threat, the amygdala circuitry triggers the
brain’s freeze-fight-or-flight response, a stream of hormones like cortisol and
adrenaline that mobilize us for action. The amygdala also responds to anything
important to pay attention to, whether we like or dislike it.
The
sweat dollops Dan measured in his study were distant indicators of this
amygdala-driven reaction. In effect, Dan was trying to tease out a change in
amygdala function—a quicker recovery from arousal—but was using a hopelessly
indirect metric with the sweat response. That was in a day long before the
invention of scanners that directly track activity in brain regions.
The
amygdala connects strongly to brain circuitry for both focusing our attention
and for intense emotional reactions. This dual role explains why, when we are
in the grip of anxiety, we are also very distracted, especially by whatever is
making us anxious. As the brain’s radar for threat, the amygdala rivets our
attention on what it finds troubling. So when something worries or upsets us,
our mind wanders over and over to that thing, even to the point of
fixation—like the viewers of the shop accident film when they saw Al’s thumb
approach that wicked saw blade.
About
the same time as Alan’s findings that mindfulness calms the amygdala, other
researchers had volunteers who had never meditated before practice mindfulness
for just twenty minutes a day over one week, and then have an fMRI scan.10
During the scan they saw images ranging from gruesome burn victims to cute
bunnies. They watched these images in their everyday state of mind, and then
while practicing mindfulness.
During
mindful attention their amygdala response was significantly lower (compared to
nonmeditators) to all the images. This sign of being less disturbed, tellingly,
was greatest in the amygdala on the brain’s right side (there are amygdalae in
both right and left hemispheres), which often has a stronger response to
whatever upsets us than the one on the left.
In
this second study, lessened amygdala reactivity was found only during mindful
attention and not during ordinary awareness, indicating a state effect, not an
altered trait. A trait change, remember, is the “before,” not the “after.”
PAIN
IS IN THE BRAIN
If
you give the back of your hand a hard pinch, different brain systems mobilize,
some for the pure sensation of pain and others for our dislike of that pain.
The brain unifies them into a visceral, instant Ouch!
But
that unity falls apart when we practice mindfulness of the body, spending hours
noticing our bodily sensations in great detail. As we sustain this focus, our
awareness morphs.
What
had been a painful pinch transforms, breaking down into its constituents: the
intensity of the pinch and the painful sensation, and the emotional feeling
tone—we don’t want the pain; we urgently want the pain to stop.
But
if we persevere with mindful investigation, that pinch becomes an experience to
unpack with interest, even equanimity. We can see our aversion fall away, and
the “pain” break down into subtler flavors: throbbing, heat, intensity.
Imagine
now you hear a soft rumble as a five-gallon tank of water starts boiling and
sends a stream of fluid through the thin rubber hose that runs through the
two-inch square metal plate strapped tight on your wrist. The plate heats up,
pleasantly at first. But that pleasantness quickly heads toward pain, as the
water temperature jumps several degrees within a couple of seconds. Finally,
you can’t take it anymore—if this were a hot stove you had touched, you would
instantly pull away. But you can’t remove that metal plate. You feel the almost
excruciating heat for a full ten seconds, sure you are getting burned.
But
you get no burn; your skin is fine. You’ve just reached your highest pain
threshold, exactly what this device, the Medoc thermal stimulator, was designed
to detect. Used by neurologists to assess conditions like neuropathy that
reveal deterioration of the central nervous system, the thermal stimulator has
built-in safety devices so people’s skin won’t be burned, even as it calibrates
precisely their maximum pain threshold. And people’s pain thresholds are
nowhere near the higher range at which burns occur. That’s why the Medoc has
been used with experimental volunteers to establish how meditation alters our
perceptions of pain.
Among
pain’s main components are our purely physiological sensations, like burning,
and our psychological reactions to those sensations.11 Meditation, the theory goes,
might mute our emotional response to pain and so make the heat sensations more
bearable.
In
Zen, for example, practitioners learn to suspend their mental reactions and
categorization of whatever arises in their minds or around them, and this
mental stance gradually spills over into everyday life.12 “The experienced
practitioner of zazen does not depend on sitting quietly,” as Ruth Sasaki, a
Zen teacher, put it, adding, “States of consciousness at first attained only in
the meditation hall gradually become continuous in any and all activities.”13
Seasoned
Zen meditators who were having their brains scanned (and who were asked to “not
meditate”) endured the thermal stimulator.14 While
we’ve
noted the reasons to have an active control group, this research had none. But
that’s less an issue here, because of the brain imaging. If the outcome
measures are based on self-reports (the most easily swayed by expectations) or
even behavior observed by someone else (somewhat less susceptible to bias) then
an active control group matters greatly. But when it comes to their brain
activity, people have no clue what’s going on, and so an active control matters
less.
The
more experienced among the Zen students not only were able to bear more pain
than could controls, they also displayed little activity in executive,
evaluative, and emotion areas during the pain—all regions that ordinarily flare
into activity when we are under such intense stress. Tellingly, their brains
seemed to disconnect the usual link between executive center circuits where we
evaluate (This hurts!) and circuitry for sensing physical pain (This burns).
In
short, the Zen meditators seemed to respond to pain as though it was a more
neutral sensation. In more technical language, their brains showed a
“functional decoupling” of the higher and lower brain regions that register
pain—while their sensory circuitry felt the pain, their thoughts and emotions
did not react to it. This offers a new twist on a strategy sometimes used in
cognitive therapy: reappraisal of severe stress—thinking about it in a less
threatening way—which can lessen its subjective severity as well as the brain’s
response. Here, though, the Zen meditators seemed to apply a no-appraisal
neural strategy—in keeping with the mind-set of zazen itself.
A
close reading of this article reveals a mention only in passing of a
significant trait effect, in a difference found between Zen meditators and the
comparison group. During the initial baseline reading the temperature is
increased in a staircase-like series of finely graduated rises to calibrate the
precise maximum pain threshold for each person. The Zen practitioners’ pain
threshold was 2 degrees Centigrade (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than for
nonmeditators.
This
may not sound like much, but the way we experience pain from heat means that
slight increases in temperature can have dramatic impact both subjectively and
in how our brain responds. Though that difference of 2 degrees Centigrade may
seem trivial, in the world of pain experience, it is huge.
Researchers
are, appropriately, skeptical about such traitlike findings because self-selection
in who chooses to stick with meditation and who drops out along the way might
also account for such data; perhaps people who choose to meditate for years and
years are already different in ways that look like trait effects. The maxim
“Correlation does not mean causation” applies here.
But
if a trait can be understood as a lasting effect of the practice, that poses an
alternative explanation. And when different research groups come up with
similar trait findings, these converging results make us take the result more
seriously.
Contrast
the Zen sitters’ recovery from stress reactivity with burnout, the depleted,
hopeless state that comes from years of constant, unremitting pressures, like
from jobs that demand too much. Burnout has become rampant among health care
professions such as nurses and doctors, as well as those who care at home for
loved ones with problems like Alzheimer’s. And, of course, anyone can feel
burned-out who faces the rants of rude customers or continual implacable
deadlines, as with the hectic pace of a business start-up.
Such
constant stress sculpts the brain for the worse, it seems.15 Brain scans of
people who for years had faced work that demanded up to seventy hours each week
revealed enlarged amygdalae and weak connections between areas in the
prefrontal cortex that can quiet the amygdala in a disturbing moment. And when
those stressed-out workers were asked to reduce their emotional reaction to
upsetting pictures, they were unable to do so—technically, a failure in
“down-regulation.”
Like
people who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, victims of burnout are
no longer able to put a halt to their brain’s stress response—and so, never
have the healing balm of recovery time.
There
are tantalizing results that indirectly support meditation’s role in
resilience. A collaboration between Richie’s lab and the research group
directed by Carol Ryff looked at a subset of participants in a large,
multisite, national study of midlife in the United States. They found that the
stronger a person’s sense of purpose in life, the more quickly they recovered
from a lab stressor.16
Having
a sense of purpose and meaning may let people meet life’s challenges better,
reframing them in ways that allow them to recover more readily. And, as we saw
in chapter three, meditation seems to enhance wellbeing on Ryff’s measure,
which includes a person’s sense of purpose. So what’s the direct evidence that
meditation can help us meet upsets and challenges with more aplomb?
BEYOND
CORRELATION
When
Dan taught the psychology of consciousness course in 1975 at Harvard, Richie,
then in his last year of graduate school, was, as mentioned, a teaching
assistant. Among the students he met with weekly was Cliff Saron, then a senior
at Harvard. Cliff had a knack for the technical end of research, including the
electronics (perhaps a legacy of his father, Bob Saron, who had managed the
sound equipment at NBC). Cliff’s adeptness soon made him a coauthor on research
papers with Richie.
And
when Richie got his first teaching post at the State University of New York at
Purchase, he took Cliff along to manage the laboratory. After a stint there—and
coauthoring a slew of scientific papers with Richie—Cliff got his own PhD in
neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He now directs a lab at
the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis, and has
often been on the faculty at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute.
Cliff’s
astute sense of methodological issues no doubt helped him design and run a
crucial bit of research, one of the few longitudinal studies of meditation to
date.17 With Alan Wallace as retreat leader, Cliff put together a rigorous
battery of assessments for students going through a three-month training in a range
of classic meditation styles, including some, like mindfulness of breathing,
meant to increase focus and others to cultivate positive states like
loving-kindness and equanimity. While the “yogis” pursued their demanding
schedule of meditating six or more hours a day for ninety days, Cliff had them
take a battery of tests at the beginning, middle, and end of the retreat, and
five months after the retreat had concluded.18
The comparison group was people who had signed
up for the threemonth retreat but who did not start until the first group
finished. Such a “wait-list” control eliminates worries about expectation
demand and similar psychological confounds (but does not add an active control
like HEP— which would be a logistic and financial burden in a study like this).
A stickler for precision in research, Cliff flew people in the wait-list group
to the retreat place and gave them exactly the same assessments in the
identical context as those in the retreat.
One
test presented lines of different lengths in rapid succession, with the
instruction to press one button for a line that was shorter than the others.
Only one out of ten lines was short; the challenge is to inhibit the knee-jerk
tendency to press the button for a short line when a long one appears. As the
retreat progressed, so did the ability of the meditators to control this
impulse—a mirror on a skill critical to managing our emotion, the capacity to
refrain from acting on whim or impulse.
This
simple skill, statistical analyses suggested, led to a range of improvements on
self-reports, from less anxiety to an overall sense of wellbeing, including
emotion regulation as gauged by reports of recovering more quickly from upsets
and more freedom from impulses. Tellingly, the wait-list controls showed no
change in any of these measures—but showed the same improvements once they had
gone through the retreat.
Cliff’s
study directly ties these benefits to meditation, lending strong support to the
case for altered traits. A clincher: a follow-up five months after the retreats
ended found that the improvements remained.
And
the study dispels doubts that all the positive traits found in long-term
meditators are simply due to self-selection, where people who already had those
traits choose the practice or stay with it in the long run. From evidence like
this, it seems likely that the states we practice in meditation gradually spill
over into daily life to mold our traits—at least when it comes to handling stress.
A
DEVILISH ORDEAL
Imagine
you are describing your qualifications for a job while two interviewers glare
at you, unsmiling. Their faces reveal no empathy, not even an encouraging nod.
That’s the situation in the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), one of the most
reliable ways known to science to trigger the brain’s stress circuits and its
cascade of stress hormones.
Now
imagine, after that dispiriting job interview, doing some pressured mental
arithmetic: you have to subtract 13s in rapid-fire succession from a number
like 1,232. That’s the second part of the Trier test, and those same impassive
interviewers push you to do the math faster and faster—and whenever you make a
mistake, they tell you to start all over at 1,232. That devilish test delivers a
huge dose of social stress, the awful feelings we get when other people
evaluate, reject, or exclude us.
Alan
Wallace and Paul Ekman created a renewal program for schoolteachers that
combined psychological training with meditation.19 Whereas Dan had used the
shop accident film to bring stress into the lab, here the stressor was the
Trier test’s simulated job interview followed by that formidable math
challenge.
The
more hours those teachers had practiced meditation, the quicker their blood
pressure recovered from a high point during the TSST. This was true five months
after the program ended, suggesting at least a mild trait effect (five years
afterward would be still stronger evidence of a trait).
Richie’s
lab used the Trier with seasoned (lifetime average = 9,000 hours) vipassana
meditators who did an eight-hour day of meditation and the next day underwent
the test.20 The meditators and their age- and gendermatched comparison group
all went through the TSST (as well as a test for inflammation—more on those
results in chapter nine, “Mind, Body, and Genome”).
Result:
the meditators had a smaller rise in cortisol during the stress. Just as
important, the meditators perceived that dreaded Trier test as less stressful
than did the nonmeditators.
This
cooled-out, more balanced way of viewing that stressor among the seasoned
meditators was not tapped while they were practicing but while they were at
rest—our “before.” Their ease during both the stressful interview and the
formidable mental math challenge seems a genuine trait effect.
Further
evidence for this comes from research with these same advanced meditators.21
The meditators’ brains were scanned while they saw disturbing images of people
suffering, like burn victims. The seasoned practitioners’ brains revealed a
lowered level of reactivity in the amygdala; they were more immune to emotional
hijacking.
The
reason: their brains had stronger operative connectivity between the prefrontal
cortex, which manages reactivity, and the amygdala, which triggers such
reactions. As neuroscientists know, the stronger this particular link in the
brain, the less a person will be hijacked by emotional downs and ups of all
sorts.
This
connectivity modulates a person’s level of emotional reactivity: the stronger
the link, the less reactive. Indeed, that relationship is so strong that a
person’s reactivity level can be predicted by the connectivity. So, when these
high-lifetime-hour meditators saw an image of a gruesome-looking burn victim,
they had little amygdala reactivity. Age-matched volunteers did not show either
the heightened connectivity or the equanimity on viewing the disturbing images.
But
when Richie’s group repeated this study with people taking the MBSR training (a
total of just under thirty hours) plus a bit of daily at-home practice, they
failed to find any strengthening of connection between the prefrontal region
and the amygdala during the challenge of upsetting images. Nor was there any
when the MBSR group simply rested.
While
MBSR training did reduce the reactivity of the amygdala, the long-term
meditator group showed both this reduced reactivity in the amygdala plus
strengthening of the connection between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala.
This pattern implies that when the going gets tough— for example, in response
to a major life challenge such as losing a job—the ability to manage distress
(which depends upon the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and
amygdala) will be greater in long-term meditators compared to those who have
only done the MBSR training.
The
good news is that this resilience can be learned. What we don’t know is how
long this effect might last. We suspect that it would be short-lived unless
participants continued to practice, a key to transforming a state into a trait.
Among
those who show the most short-lived amygdala response, emotions come and go,
adaptive and appropriate. Richie’s lab put this idea to the test with brain
scans of 31 highly seasoned meditators (lifetime average was 8,800 hours of
meditation practice, ranging from just 1,200 to more than 30,000).
They
saw the usual pictures ranging from people in extreme suffering (burn victims)
to cute bunnies. On first analysis of the expert meditators’ amygdalae, there
was no difference in how they reacted from the responses of matched volunteers
who had never meditated. But when Richie’s group divided the seasoned
meditators into those with the least hours of practice (lifetime average 1,849
hours) and the most (lifetime average 7,118), the results showed that the more
hours of practice, the more quickly the amygdala recovered from distress.22
This
rapid recovery is the hallmark of resilience. In short, equanimity emerges more
strongly with extended practice. Among the benefits of longterm meditation,
this tells us, are exactly what those Desert Fathers were after: a mind
undisturbed.
IN
A NUTSHELL
The
amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows dampened activity
from a mere thirty or so hours of MBSR practice. Other mindfulness training shows
a similar benefit, and there are hints in the research that these changes are
traitlike: they appear not simply during the explicit instruction to perceive
the stressful stimuli mindfully but even in the “baseline” state, with
reductions in amygdala activation as great as 50 percent. Such lessening of the
brain’s stress reactions appears in response not simply to seeing the gory
pictures used in the laboratory but also to more real-life challenges like the
stressful Trier interview before a live audience. More daily practice seems
associated with lessened stress reactivity. Experienced Zen practitioners can
withstand higher levels of pain, and have less reaction to this stressor. A
three-month meditation retreat brought indicators of better emotional regulation,
and long-term practice was associated with greater functional connectivity
between the prefrontal areas that manage emotion and the areas of the amygdala
that react to stress, resulting in less reactivity. And an improved ability to
regulate attention accompanies some of the beneficial impact of meditation on
stress reactivity. Finally, the quickness with which long-term meditators
recover from stress underlines how trait effects emerge with continued
practice./.
6
