Could Mindfulness Help You Control Your Anger?

I still remember the time I hit one of my close friends.

It happened many years ago. We were exiting a chemistry class together, and he was teasing me…mercilessly. I repeatedly asked him to stop, but he wouldn’t. Rather than shrugging it off, though, I hit him hard on the arm. Both of us were shocked, but only I was left feeling shame, too.

I know I’m not the only one who has let anger get the best of them only to regret it afterwards. While anger can sometimes be useful, more often than not it’s damaging. If we respond to inconsequential slights or perceived wrongs with yelling, snubbing, or violence, it can escalate conflict, wreaking havoc on our relationships.

How can we keep our cool and not let anger get out of hand? Recent studies suggest mindfulness could help.

Mindfulness, a state of being often developed through meditation practices, involves paying attention to our present circumstances with acceptance and non-judgment, while enhancing our equanimity. In a study published in Mindfulness, David DeSteno and colleagues gave half of the participants a daily mindfulness practice to do at home for three weeks, while the other half practiced solving cognitive puzzles and problems. The mindfulness practice guided participants to focus on their breath and body sensations, monitor thoughts and mind-wandering, and develop a non-judgmental orientation toward their experience.

Then, in the lab, participants did a test measuring their “executive functioning” or cognitive control—which includes the ability to inhibit unwanted behavior—and then delivered a short presentation about their future goals to another person. Unbeknownst to the participants, the listener was a confederate of the researchers and always delivered a scathing critique of the talk, no matter its content.

Afterwards, participants were first asked how they felt (including how angry they were) and then told they’d been “randomly assigned” to create a tasting sample for their critic using a few ingredients—one of which was super spicy hot sauce. Researchers used the amount of hot sauce added to the sample to represent a participant’s willingness to inflict harm on the other person.

Results showed that meditators gave significantly less hot sauce to the person who critiqued them than non-meditators did—even though they were equally angry after the critique. In other words, meditators were less willing to be vengeful.

Meditators gave significantly less hot sauce to the person who critiqued them than non-meditators did—even though they were equally angry after the critique. In other words, meditators were less willing to be vengeful.

According to DeSteno, this result fits in well with the Buddhist theory of what mindfulness meditation is all about.

“It’s doing exactly what the developers of meditation hoped that it would do: increase ethical behavior by preventing people from inflicting harm on other people in a situation where that’s the normative response,” he says.

How does this work? Interestingly, the meditators’ reduced desire for revenge didn’t seem to come from increased cognitive control, as measured by the test. DeSteno hypothesizes that mindfulness may work in a bottom-up fashion, rather than helping people inhibit behavior or suppress emotion in a controlled, top-down way. This could be good news for those who want to control their anger but find it hard to do.

“Rather than trying to control an impulse that you have, which is stressful and requires effort, mindfulness decreases your ‘impellance’ or desire to cause harm in the first place,” he says. “That means you’re less in conflict with your motivation.”

Though it could be that mindfulness practices make people more dispassionate around anger, DeSteno says, he believes they actually reduce aggression by increasing compassion, so that people just have less desire to hurt others. Previous studies, for example, have shown how mindfulness may lead to more compassionate behavior and less surface acting, or expressing a different emotion than you feel. In any case, says DeSteno, it does seem clear that “mindfulness is a practice that can reduce hostility and violence whatever environment you’re in.”

Another recently published study suggests this may true for at least one particular situation: conflict in a marriage.

In the study, couples completed surveys on their overall levels of mindfulness and were then hooked up to blood pressure monitors and electrocardiogram machines to measure heart rate variability (the variation in time between heartbeats, with higher levels associated with better health and emotional regulation). Then, the couples were asked to discuss a conflict in their marriage that was of deep concern to them both.

After analyzing the cardiovascular data, the researchers found that more mindful individuals had better heart readings during conflict—in particular, better heart rate variability and lower systolic blood pressure—than those who were less mindful. This suggests that mindfulness helps people keep their cool during conflict—decreasing their health risks, while also potentially reducing aggression (which has been tied to these markers).

“If a person has higher blood pressure in a situation like marital conflict, they’re going to have more hostile behaviors and report feeling angrier during the conflicted conversation,” says lead researcher Jonathan Kimmes.

Interestingly, he and his colleagues also found that if one member of the couple was high in mindfulness, the other partner also had better heart readings during the conflict, regardless of their own mindfulness levels. This means that both partners may benefit from one person’s mindfulness—perhaps creating a ripple effect that can reduce tensions. Kimmes believes that a more mindful person is likely to communicate in a calmer tone and use less provocative language during conflict—a signal not lost on the other person, whose heart calms down in response.

If one member of the couple was high in mindfulness, the other partner also had better heart readings during the conflict, regardless of their own mindfulness levels.

“A conversation or conflict is a dynamic process, where we’re always reading how the other person is reacting,” says Kimmes. “That means that if we can enhance one partner’s trait mindfulness, it may have downstream effects interpersonally.”

Though Kimmes’s study is preliminary, it does add a new dimension to research connecting mindfulness to marital satisfaction. In addition, it mirrors results from other studies demonstrating the positive effect of one person’s mindfulness on others—such as more mindful teachers improving their classrooms’ emotional climate, or more mindful parents enhancing the well-being of their children.

Together, these two studies suggest that the way mindfulness reduces our aggression may not be through conscious impulse control. And if that’s true, reducing conflict in marriages and other relationships may take less effort and willpower than we thought.

 

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, one of Mindful’s partners. To view the original article, click here.

 

How to Bounce Back from an Angry Outburst

When the Gloves Come Off

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Tara Talks: Who We Are, Beyond the Changing Forms (6:02 min.) - Tara Brach

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Opening to impermanence reveals who we are beyond these changing forms.

In this short video, you’ll find a moving example of how bringing full presence to our deepest losses connects us with timeless love.

Listen to and watch the full talk at:
River of Change – Part 1: Bringing a Wise Heart to this Impermanent Life

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Can Meditation Change Your Genes?

If it weren’t for the rats, I wouldn’t be writing about epigenetics and meditation. Epigenetics is one of those scientific subjects that, after a solid and respectable start, jumped the shark. It burst into the scientific mainstream in the last decade or so with fascinating, even paradigm-shifting, discoveries in how genes operate, offering explanations for mysteries from why identical twins differ in the inherited genetic diseases they develop to how our physical environment and social experiences reach into our DNA, altering the blueprints of our lives.

Many of the findings have solid scientific support. Lately, however, studies on the epigenetic effects of meditation have been popping up like dandelions in April, making claims that, unfortunately, rest on shaky science—the shark is well and truly jumped. “The science just isn’t as strong as some people are making it out to be,” said neuroscientist Cliff Saron of the University of California, Davis. Saron is hardly a meditation basher: He co-led a study showing possible epigenetic effects from mindfulness meditation.

Let me back up and then return to those rats. “Epigenetics” refers to changes in DNA that do not alter the four basic chemicals that, strung along the double helix like beads on a necklace, constitute the genetic code. Those chemicals, designated A, T, C, and G, code for the proteins that cells make: dopamine receptors, enzymes like telomerase, and everything else required for life. Unlike alterations that change an A to a C, for instance, or a G to a T, or eliminate letters entirely, an epigenetic change leaves the letters alone. Instead, it slaps on a molecular silencer or a molecular turbo-charger, affecting whether they are able to make the protein they spell out and in what quantities.

You’ve almost certainly inherited genes that suppress tumor formation; if they are epigenetically silenced, your anti-cancer defenses are as weak as the starship Enterprise without its deflector shield. You might have inherited a gene that causes schizophrenia; if it is epigenetically silenced, you won’t develop that devastating illness. Epigenetics is a big reason why DNA is not destiny: Just because you have a gene doesn’t mean that gene will be active.

If the life that just happens to us exerts epigenetic effects, can activities we choose also exert such effects?

Now for those rats. In a breakthrough 2004 paper, scientists led by Michael Meaney of McGill University discovered that how baby rats are treated by mom can, via epigenetic mechanisms, silence genes involved in the rat pups’ stress response. When a rat mother is inattentive to her pups, rarely licking and grooming them, a gene that allows the brain to respond to stress hormones is silenced. That causes production of stress hormones to spike (to make up for the brain’s unresponsiveness); the rat becomes a neurotic mess, freezing when placed in unfamiliar surroundings, jumping like a turbo-charged flea when startled, and chronically flooded with stress hormones. Life experiences such as quality of maternal care, Meaney showed, can reach into DNA and affect gene activation via epigenetics. Nurture had trumped nature.

That study launched the scientific search for other experiences with epigenetic effects. In 2009 Meaney’s team found that the brains of people who committed suicide and had suffered abuse as children contained significantly more “be silent!” switches on the gene involved in the stress response—the same gene that was silenced in rats raised by neglectful mothers. Epigenetic silencing seems to impair the stress-response system in people much as it does in rat pups, making it hard to cope with setbacks and adversity, thus raising the risk of suicide.

As we go through life, we accumulate epigenetic changes. Both random chance and experiences— with parents, friends, life itself—can reach into our very DNA, silencing some genes and amping up others. Remarkably, the longer identical twins have lived together (presumably sharing more experiences), the more similar they are epigenetically.

That raises an obvious question: If the life that just happens to us exerts epigenetic effects, can activities we choose also exert such effects? There is no shortage of research suggesting such “mind over gene” effects. For instance:

A 2011 study found that 30 experienced meditators in the three-month “Shamatha Project” meditation retreat had, by its end, significantly greater activity of an enzyme called telomerase, which keeps the protective tips of chromosomes, called telomeres, intact. (Cells with shortened telomeres, according to a prevailing but not unquestioned theory, age faster.) Greater telomerase activity might reflect epigenetic changes that increase the activity of the telomerase gene.

A 2012 study of long-term meditators found different patterns of DNA activation, possibly reflecting epigenetic effects, during periods of self-reported “higher states of consciousness” compared to ordinary awareness.

A 2014 study led by Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, found lower expression of genes involved in inflammation and of molecules that activate genes (an epigenetic effect) in 19 experienced meditators after a day of intensive meditation, but not in a control group of 21 non-meditators. Such epigenetic regulation of genes involved in inflammation “may represent some of the mechanisms underlying the therapeutic potential of mindfulness-based interventions,” the researchers concluded.

Fifteen experiments that measured epigenetic changes after mind-body therapies such as tai chi and MBSR reported that genes involved in inflammation (particularly those in what’s called the nuclear factor kappa beta, or NF-kB, pathway) were turned down after the therapy, a 2014 review found. That should cause lower levels of chronic inflammation, whose health consequences range from cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. Reduced gene expression is an epigenetic phenomenon (though it can result from non-epigenetic effects, too). A 2017 review of 18 such studies also found support for the idea that mind–body interventions turn down NF-kB.

As we go through life, we accumulate epigenetic changes. Both random chance and experiences—with parents, friends, life itself—can reach into our very DNA, silencing some genes and amping up others.

These and other studies of meditation and epigenetics come with asterisks, however. Many had no control group. Most had only a few dozen participants (the “higher states of consciousness” paper included merely two). And for every study that finds NF-kB silencing with meditation, another finds no such thing. Bottom line on the epigenetic effects of meditation? “The scientific literature is extremely mixed,” said Julienne Bower of UCLA, coauthor of a 2016 analysis finding that some mind–body therapies can have anti-inflammatory effects, including by switching genes on and off.

Nonetheless, most papers gloss over these scientific weaknesses. Overenthusiasm might explain why some researchers fail to use control groups, study only small numbers of people, or otherwise choose methodologies more likely to find an effect. “There is a tension between wanting to say something exciting and being very, very careful, which we should always do as scientists,” said John Denninger, director of research at the Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and coauthor of the 2014 analysis I mentioned above.

Nor is it clear whether meditation has a unique effect on epigenetics. “One of the issues is that we are constantly changing,” said UC Davis’s Saron, a leader of the Shamatha Project. “Does going to the gym cause epigenetic changes? Does playing golf with your best friends? Probably, because epigenetic effects are happening all the time. Mindfulness might have those effects, too, but that doesn’t mean only mindfulness does…Maybe going to a gorgeous place, eating incredibly delicious meals, catching up on your sleep, and being with people who have made the same commitment as you is what causes epigenetic changes,” not the meditation part of the retreat. Unfortunately, studies so far fail to account for those uncontrolled variables (a problem for mindfulness studies generally, found an exhaustive 2017 review). With meditation and epigenetic effects, UCLA’s Bower said, “We’re still at the stage of asking, Is there anything there?”

Here’s where I remember those rats. Science has yet to prove there’s “anything there” when it comes to meditation exerting epigenetic effects. But the rats showed that some experiences can do so. Only more, and more rigorous, research will show whether meditation can.

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Bookshelf: Habits and Aging

In The Telomere Effect, a New York Times bestseller from early 2017, psychologist Elissa Epel—who has researched how mindfulness and other self-regulation programs could affect cellular aging—teamed up with Nobel prize-winning physiologist Elizabeth Blackburn. Together they produced a review of the science surrounding how life habits may lengthen telomeres (the structure at the tip of a chromosome), which are thought to affect the aging process.

 

This article appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

 

When You Meditate, You Might Also Be Regulating Your Genes

Stress and Your DNA

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Why Mindfulness is for Everyone

The present moment. It’s a wondrous thing. From some perspective, it’s all we’ve got, since nothing happens that doesn’t happen within it. And yet, somehow, we’ve managed to almost ruin it. Like an overzealous parent at his son’s or daughter’s tee-ball game, we’ve put too much pressure on it. So modest, so ordinary, so simple—the present moment has been forced to become a really big deal. Supposedly, you arrive there and everything is beautiful, all problems are solved, and all cares float away.

So modest, so ordinary, so simple—the present moment has been forced to become a really big deal.

It’s no wonder all the hype surrounding mindfulness has spawned more than a few skeptics, who rightly think, “Nothing could be that good.” And yet, in spite of all the overblown rhetoric, there remains something innately appealing about the notion of being mindful. My email address has mindful in it, and when I’m asked for it by a salesperson, a pause often ensues. They might say, “Mindful. That’s really lovely. I want some of that.”

When the Foundation for a Mindful Society was formed and launched Mindful, we were moved by something very basic: the power of being right where we are. Now we’re celebrating—along with our readers, contributors, and supporters—our fifth anniversary, and are proud to say that mindful.org is in its seventh year.

We called it Mindful because that’s something we are, not something we have to do. It’s not another chore or an us vs. them affiliation. It’s not owned by any group or social class. The ability to be on the spot—aware of what’s going on inside, outside, and all around, connecting with others—is part of being human. And that’s what Mindful committed to at the beginning and what we’re reaffirming as we enter our sixth year of publication: mindfulness for all.

To deliver on that, we have to be honest about the true challenges of committing to the present moment, through thick and thin. (That’s why we’re launching our Get Real series in this issue.) We need to commit to language that leaves no one saying, “That’s just not for me.” We have to be honest about science and how hard it is to prove benefits. We have to listen to you and learn from mistakes, because practicing real mindfulness means making one mistake after another and being willing to laugh our way back into place.

Practicing real mindfulness means making one mistake after another and being willing to laugh our way back into place.

When we started Mindful, we wanted to find out if there were people out there who felt as we felt. You have responded. Our modest circulation of 45,000 at the outset will soon be doubled, to over 100,000. And mindful.org keeps expanding daily, with users visiting to the tune of over a million page views per month.

We will keep it up, because the many stories we’ve heard from you give us faith that while mindfulness may not be a panacea, it is something that can make a very big difference in our health and the health of our families and communities. Please keep telling us your stories. Write to us at mindful@mindful.org or post on social media. Let us know how you are and who you are, because mindfulness is uniquely suited to you.

Here’s to many more years of healthy minds and healthy lives. See you in the present moment!

View our gallery of moments from the last 5 years

 

 

This article appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

 

Beyond the Comfort Zone

5 things people get wrong about mindfulness

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The Mindful FAQ: How to Meditate with a Cold

Q: What should I do if I have a cold and can’t breathe without coughing and sniffling?

I’m not a physician, but I’d recommend treating your cold and its symptoms wisely, and consider mindful coughing and compassionate sniffling! The practice of mindfulness is unique in that there are no right conditions for doing it. The intention is that mindfulness is practice independent of conditions, as long as we are capable of being aware. Which is pretty much that period of time between your very first breath and your very last. If you’re reading these words, this applies to you!

If we believe that mindfulness is something we do to make ourselves peaceful or is to be practiced when we have plenty of time or only when conditions are right, we are missing the point.

(Funny story: I once attended a mindfulness workshop where the facilitator announced at the very end of the workshop, “So, let’s all pause one last time and take our final breath together.” I had NO IDEA that attending this workshop was going to be my final act on earth! I couldn’t stop chuckling to myself at her choice of words while everyone else was dutifully and seriously attending to their respective breaths.)

If we believe that mindfulness is something we do to make ourselves peaceful or is to be practiced when we have plenty of time or only when conditions are right, we are missing the point. A cold is a small but noticeable personal challenge and is totally worthy of our attention in practice. We’re going to be sneezing, blowing our noses, scratching our eyes, and feeling a tickle in our throats anyway, so why not see if we can be fully with it and notice how much we resist these moments when we are uncomfortable? Perhaps we might even cultivate a bit of equanimity in the face of the common cold. Couldn’t hurt, could it?

This article appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

 

How You Argue Could Make You Sick

Take Your Mind for a Walk

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The Mindful Survey: How We Meditate

What’s your preferred meditation practice?

73% prefer seated meditation, while 5% like walking meditation best, and 10% like the body scan best. 12% would rather use other meditation methods, including running, breathing exercises, or lying down.

Do you own a meditation cushion and/or bench?

How often do you meditate?

62% of survey participants meditate at least once per day, 12% meditate every other day, and 12% once or twice a week. The remaining 14% do so occasionally or have never meditated.

Do you meditate regularly?

Do you encourage others to meditate?

85% of participants recommend that others try meditation. Maybe the other 15% see it as something that’s better to discover for yourself.

Have you ever received instruction in a mindfulness technique?

What’s your favorite place to meditate?

• “When weather permits, I love to meditate in the garden; otherwise, my bedroom, where I have a dedicated yoga and meditation space.”
• “In church.”
• “At a mosque.”
• “At a meditation center.”
• “In a temple.”
• “In a rocking chair in my bedroom.”
• “On the beach.”
• “In a hot bubble bath, with candlelight and incense burning.”
• “I am in my car 90% of the time, so mostly in the car.”
• “In bed, before getting up for the day.”
• “During yoga class.”
• “Outside of school, waiting for my children to finish for the day.”
• “In the forest preserve by my home. If I am feeling anxious, I like to meditate under the tree. If I am feeling sad, I like to meditate in a wide-open field—it makes me feel so alive!”
• “My La-Z-Boy recliner in the living room.”

Do you use a meditation app?

 

Aside from sitting meditation, where and when do you most apply mindfulness in your daily life?

• “During my work day as a therapist.”
• “To deal with pain.”
• “Taking mindful pauses, especially when I’m outdoors. I stop what I’m doing, notice what’s around me, try to tune in to something like a bird call or the wind, and just appreciate that for a moment or two.”
• “Being more present with my children and husband. Mindfulness has also helped me decompress in Chicago traffic and in the grocery store!”
• “When dealing with challenging people.”
• “In my relationship with my son, who is severely impacted by autism, and with my 5th-grade students— it helps me learn who they really are.”
• “Before bed to help me sleep.”
• “In the evening, focusing on incidents or experiences to feel grateful for each day.”
• “Dealing with depression and anxiety.”
• “When I’m traveling, so I don’t miss the unique details around me!”

Do you have a personal meditation instructor?

 

This article appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

 

How to Practice Mindfulness

Mindful’s Top 10 Guided Practices of 2017

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The Medicine of the Moment

Beginning in 1979, when Jon Kabat-Zinn went into the basement of the University of Massachusetts medical school and led a small number of patients through a program he dubbed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)—combining meditation with simple yoga movements—mindfulness was not a word you heard much. There were no studies of the effectiveness of mindfulness practices published in scientific journals, and your doctor was not likely to have heard of it, much less prescribe it.

Now, almost 40 years on, there are racks and racks of popular books on the subject and special publications galore in supermarket and bookstore aisles. Over 650 studies of the effects of mindfulness were published in 2016, which is more than double the number in 2013. Aetna, one of the world’s largest health insurers, now has a chief mindfulness officer; mindfulness is taught in grade schools, high schools, and colleges; and UMass has now become the first university whose medical school contains a Division of Mindfulness.

Judson Brewer—who is the acting director of the newly created Division of Mindfulness and has been the director of research at the Center for Mindfulness for several years—is both a medical doctor and a PhD. And he embraces mindfulness with the same inspiration that launched MBSR: Mindfulness practice is a methodology that has a place not just in monasteries and retreat centers but in doctor’s offices and hospitals. Brewer is proud to stand on the shoulders of pioneers like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Saki Santorelli, who ran the Center for several decades before his recent retirement.

Brewer also knows that while mindfulness has grown in popularity and acceptability, a mixed blessing lurks there. When something takes on the aura of a fad, in the way of Pet Rocks or Fidget Spinners, the very fact of popularity has a notorious way of trivializing something and reducing its credibility within established institutions. And in the rush to respond to the demand for something that promises some relief from suffering, breathless overpromotion inevitably ensues. In fact, a recent paper by a group of 15 researchers called for a halt to extravagant claims surrounding mindfulness, citing a need for more careful definitions of exactly what mindfulness is when it is studied, more rigorous clinical studies, and a check on media reports and advertising of mindfulness as a virtual cure-all.

 

 

This is an excerpt of Mindful’s feature on health care from the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine. Subscribe to the digital issue of Mindful to get immediate access to the April issue.

 

 

UMass Medical School Creates First Division of Mindfulness

Can Compassion Training Help Physicians Avoid Burnout?

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Joy – Part 3 of Present Heart: The Universal Expressions of Love - Tara Brach

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Part 3: Joy – blossoms in the moments our hearts open boundlessly to reality, to the 10,000 joys and sorrows.

This series reflects on four primary expressions of an awake, wise heart: lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. In each talk we explore the habitual patterning that blocks our full realization of these innate capacities, and the understandings and practices that nurture their unfolding.

Happiness cannot be found
through great effort and willpower,
but is already here, right now,
in relaxation and letting go.

Lama Gendun Rinpoche

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How Mindfulness Helps You Get Unstuck

Has someone ever sent you an angry email, and then you found yourself, weeks later, thinking about it while you’re wide awake at 2am?

Emotions can be a major source of distraction, according to researchers Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman, who have chronicled what we know thus far about the meditator’s mind in a new book, Altered Traits, Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body.

In this whiteboard session for Harvard Business Review, Davidson and Goleman talk about one of the most important discoveries: repeated practice helps us untether from emotional cues that keep us mired in distraction — specifically, rumination.

More emotional control

Research suggests mindfulness practice can strengthen the connections between the brain that direct our decision-making and impulses, so that when we encounter a strong emotional trigger, we’re not pulled to immediately react.

“[Mindfulness]  strengthens the prefrontal (cortex’s) ability to say no to emotional impulse,” says Goleman. This increases resilience because it helps us hold things more lightly —  like that snarky email — and not devote all of our attention to emotional cues. Davidson explains:

The “recover more quickly” is really an important attribute of what we think of as resilience. Resilience is, in many ways, the ability to recover more quickly from adversity. So instead of ruminating about the email that ticked you off for several weeks after, you can come back down and recover.

Goleman cautions that the science of mindfulness — what we know, what we don’t — is still in the early stages of study. There are benefits, but there is a lot of hype as well. Since the early 2000s, research on mindfulness has been expanding rapidly. Here’s a look at 10 leaders in the field, what their research has shown us, and the future directions their studies are taking.

 

Video from HBR.org

 

Meditators Under the Microscope

Why Emotional Self-Control Matters

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Meditation: The Heartspace Where All is Welcome (18:36 min.) - Tara Brach

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This meditation scans through the body, and awakens attention to the open, inclusive awareness that all life arises in. We then explore experiencing that openness in the region of the heart, saying yes to life and including whatever is here with unconditional presence.

Free download of Tara’s 10 min meditation: “Mindful Breathing: Finding Calm and Ease” when you join her email list.

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Tame Bad Habits with This 10-Minute Mindfulness Practice

This guided meditation was recorded live at the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School

• First, find a comfortable position. We can begin just by settling into a comfortable posture, whatever that posture is for us right now.
• Now, tune into body sensations. Check in with your body. What does your body feel in this moment — are you holding tension in any places? Perhaps checking in with the feet and other touch points: the knees, the hips, our hands, our shoulders. Even this breath, breathing itself. Just being really curious: What’s alive for us right now in our bodies.
• Name the cravings in your mind. For the next few minutes we’ll play with working with cravings. Once we’re settled and anchored in this body, just bring to mind something that really gets our juices flowing, whether it’s a food or something else we really like. We’re also bringing to mind those itches that we feel like we have to scratch. Many of us that are in “Inbox Zero,” which is this constant race to keep our inboxes and our e-mail accounts as small as possible. We can bring this to mind: What does it feel like? When I opened up my computer and I have 58 new e-mails in the last hour. So whether it’s something pleasant, or whether it’s something unpleasant that we feel like we have to deal with, just bringing that situation to mind. Really checking in to see what this urge to do something feels like in our body; this urge to hold onto the pleasant or the urge to make the unpleasant go away.
• Now, notice how the craving shows up in your body. As we identify where it is in the body, we can dial up the curiosity. What does it feel like? Perhaps even naming to ourselves the physical sensations that are most predominant. We can even explore how this feeling shifts and changes as we bring this curious awareness to it. We can even dial up the curiosity a little bit more. If we had to pick is it more on the right side or the left side of our body? Is it more in the front or the back of our body? And what happens simply by curiously exploring where it is? How long does this sensation last? Is one sensation replaced by another that becomes more predominant? And if we notice that the sensation is fading away that was brought up by imagining that food or the e-mail inbox.
• Notice what it feels like now just to rest in awareness in the body. Notice what it feels like to know that we can become aware of these sensations — That we don’t have to be slaves to our cravings, we can explore them with curiosity, moment to moment.
• Finally, explore any other urges or cravings that surface. For the next few minutes. Simply resting in awareness of our bodies. Being on the lookout for these urges: Urges to get lost in fantasies or those urges to beat ourselves up over something that might have happened earlier in the day or in the week. Just diving right in. Exploring. Holding each sensation with this kind, curious awareness.

 

This guided meditation provides additional information to a feature article titled “Constant Craving” which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit

5 Ways to Kick Bad Habits

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UMass Medical School Creates First Division of Mindfulness

Marking unprecedented support for the role of mindfulness in health care, the University of Massachusetts Medical School announced in December the creation of a new division dedicated to its academic study. The Division of Mindfulness, the first of its kind, encompasses the university’s existing Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, started by Jon Kabat-Zinn in the 1980s. Within a medical school, a “division” indicates that an area, such as endocrinology or psychiatry, is designated as something requiring long-term focused study in order to develop increasingly more effective treatments.

By creating “the infrastructure to support researchers and clinicians to further the scientific knowledge of mindfulness and of how the mind works,” this new designation greatly increases the opportunities for research (as well as sources of funding for such research) and in supporting the application of mindfulness in the health fields and beyond, explains new division chief Judson Brewer, MD, PhD, an associate professor of medicine at the school and director of research at the center.

Likening the development to when “a teenager comes of age and leaves the house,” Brewer explained that the decision to establish an entire medical division dedicated to mindfulness is in many ways the natural next step for an area that’s grown exponentially over the past four decades. “This really highlights how far the field has progressed and matured,” he said.

Remarking that the notion of a medical school division dedicated to studying the impact of meditation was “virtually inconceivable” when he and others began doing this work, Kabat-Zinn was clearly pleased. “That this has come about is diagnostic of a new and increasingly widespread recognition of the deep potential synergies between the domains of medicine and meditation…as well as recognition of the challenges involved in maintaining and optimizing human well-being and health across the lifespan.

“We are now understanding the seamless interconnectedness of brain, mind, body, experience, and well-being,” he added. This show of support for furthering the inquiry “has the potential to inform the development of increasingly effective targeted clinical programs under the umbrella of a far more participatory model of medicine and health care.”

For Brewer and his team—which will be expanding thanks to increased funding designed to attract the best researchers and clinicians in the field—the possibilities are exciting.

On the neuroscience front, Brewer said, they will work to refine and confirm “hypotheses on the mechanisms of action”—in other words, actually testing targeted scientific theories of how and why mindfulness works in specific ways and in specific instances—instead of the more exploratory models commonly employed now.

In the clinical realm, he anticipates increasing the number of “efficacy studies that refine treatment and training” in mindfulness interventions, such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.

And he says he’s particularly excited about the development of “novel treatments,” including digital therapeutics, which is already a focus in his lab, as well as opportunities for greater collaboration.

When asked whether this change raises the bar to “prove” the benefits of mindfulness, Brewer said it’s important for the division to be the “standard-bearer on not overhyping” what mindfulness can—and what it can’t—do: “There’s plenty that’s true! It doesn’t help anyone to overhype anything.”

 

 

This article appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

 

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A Major Turning Point for Mindfulness in Health Care

When I started at the UMass Medical Center in 1976, the idea that one day there would be a Division of Mindfulness within the Department of Medicine was virtually inconceivable. That it has come about is diagnostic of a new and increasingly widespread recognition of the deep potential synergies between the domains of medicine and meditation (the words themselves are obviously linked at the etymological hip) as well as recognition of the challenges involved in maintaining and optimizing human well-being and health across the lifespan.

When I started at the UMass Medical Center in 1976, the idea that one day there would be a Division of Mindfulness within the Department of Medicine was virtually inconceivable.

Thanks to the rapidly growing science of mindfulness, we are now understanding the seamless interconnectedness of brain, mind, body, experience, and well-being — to say nothing of the contributions to health and well-being that stem from social interconnectedness and environmental/planetary concerns. Our scientific understanding of mindfulness has the potential to inform the development of increasingly effective and targeted clinical programs under the umbrella of a far more participatory model of medicine and health care, in which our patients learn to engage in mindfulness practices shown to beneficially affect health and well-being as a complement to their medical treatments. In that sense, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) can be seen as a public health intervention, designed to over time move the bell curve of society as a whole toward greater health.  Jud Brewer and the Department of Medicine are to be congratulated for bringing things to this pioneering new threshold.  The new Division of Mindfulness will reaffirm UMass’s leadership position in this cutting edge field and will serve as an effective launching platform for the next generation of research and clinical developments at the institution where mindfulness in medicine began.

 

Jon Kabat-Zinn
Professor of Medicine emeritus
UMass Medical School

Founder, MBSR and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society

 

This statement provides additional information to a feature article titled, “The Medicine of the Moment” in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

UMass Medical School Creates First Division of Mindfulness

No Blueprint, Just Love

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Administrative Assistant

Mindful
Administrative Assistant
Halifax, Nova Scotia

Do you pride yourself on being on top of things? Prepared? Would you self-describe as an office ninja? Mindful magazine is looking for a cracker-jack organizer and people-person who can manage office resources, provide support, and be the administrative glue that holds it all together. The ideal Administrative Assistant must have a jump-in-and-get-it-done attitude, be technically savvy, demonstrate exceptional customer service, and see it as a point of pride to meet the many and diverse needs of a busy office environment. An affinity for the mission of giving the world the mindful tools it needs to make it a better place wouldn’t hurt either.  

Who we are:

Mindful is an independent nonprofit media company located in Halifax dedicated to inspiring, guiding and connecting anyone who wants to explore mindfulness—to enjoy better health, more caring relationships, and a more compassionate society. Check out our website at mindful.org.

What you’ll be doing:

Administrative:

• Office Management: attending to the flow of people, physical resources, space, and needs.
• Administration: providing staff support and performing ongoing business-related functions.
• Research: building and tracking quizzes and surveys in Survey Monkey and MailChimp
• Email: managing permissions and brokering and responding to industry and other inquiries.

Editorial:

• Support business and post-issue production needs of editorial and art departments: payables, review copy requests, publisher relations, preparing PDFs for distribution and digital publication.

What you need to have:

• Experience in office environment.
• Proficiency with office technology including MAC and PC operating systems and applications and the Microsoft suite of applications.
• Comfort with and/or willingness to learn back-end of relevant web applications and creating PDFs with Adobe InDesign.
• Aptitude and enthusiasm for providing support.
• Ability to manage time and demands and prioritize.

Additional Information:

This full time permanent position is located in Halifax.  The salary will take experience into account.  All benefits – health, dental, and vision – are employer-paid, and the work week is 35 hours. The office itself is architect-designed and located in the city’s vibrant north end. Candidates must be eligible to work in Canada.  

To apply, please send your resume and cover letter to cindy@mindful.org and include “Administrative Assistant” in the subject line. Deadline: March 2, 2018.   

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Are You a Micromanager? How to Be Mindful of Being Counterproductive

The French playwright, Charles-Guillaume Étienne, once wrote: “On n’est jamais servi si bien que par soi-même.” Roughly translated as, “one is never served so well as by oneself.” This phrase is popular with micromanagers everywhere, but it’s often incorrectly translated as, “if you want something done right, do it yourself.”

Etienne’s original statement was the more precise one. When you take over a project and begin to micromanage, you are only serving yourself. Studies have shown that micromanaging is counterproductive. It decimates team morale by breeding a culture of distrust. It also leads to team members creating roadblocks for fear of making a wrong move.

Studies have shown that micromanaging is counterproductive. It decimates team morale by breeding a culture of distrust.

Sometimes, though, we aren’t aware that we’ve gone down the prickly path of micromanagement. Anxiety, stress, fatigue, and other emotions can cloud our better leadership judgement. It helps to take a step back and look for the telltale signs that you have become a micromanager.

Signs that you’re a micromanager

There are many ways that you can micromanage someone without realizing it, but here are some of the more obvious signs that you need to take a few steps back:

• You ask for materials repeatedly prior to a project’s deadline
• You take team members off of certain tasks for fear they won’t complete them
• You jump on calls that you don’t need to be on
• You send email replies before your team can reply

If you recognize any of these work moves, you might be a micromanager. But help is just a few short breaths away. Mindfulness can help you sort and sift through habits that might be getting in the way of your team’s productivity.

Explore (and break free from) your micromanaging habit in 5 steps

1. First, be aware that you are doing it. Whenever you decide to write an email, grab a phone call, or not delegate a project, ask yourself why you are doing these things and write it down. What are you feeling physically? Are you afraid? Why?
2. Then, think twice. Do you want to send that email, grab that call, or hoard a project. Can someone else do it? Isn’t this the reason why you are the team leader — so you can bring out the best of people around you rather than frustrate them and thwart their work?
3. Next, try letting go. Let your team members handle projects after you have delegated. Set deadlines so you can keep track, but don’t feel the need to jump into every detail. The nerves that come with letting someone else handle important projects are real — and worth noting — but you’d be surprised at what your capable team can do. In a recent case study that took place in a long-term care facility, researchers found that micromanaged teams often felt demoralized, less motivated, and less productive. On the flip side, teams that were guided (with clear goals) but not micromanaged felt a stronger sense of accomplishment and were more productive.
4. Explore anxiety. When you start to feel anxious, let those thoughts come and go — just as you would with meditation — but don’t act on them. Take note, allow yourself to feel where the anxiety is located in your body without getting pulled in by associated anxious thoughts or feelings. You can do that by noting when those thoughts are present (e.g. noting when the tension in your shoulders appears after frustrations felt towards a colleague). Refresh your intentions toward your own work for the day.
5. Reflect on this experiment. Check in with yourself after one month of being more mindful of micromanaging. Has your team’s morale gone up? Are employee engagement rates rising? Are things getting done at a smoother and swifter rate?

The upside to letting go (a little bit): Empowering your team

Micromanaging brings with it a slew of negativity. A lack of team morale, the inability to learn new things or think creatively, lack of trust and team respect, crushing problem solving skills, and a high employee turnover rate are some of the main reasons why micromanaging is a bad leadership strategy.

Micromanaging brings with it a slew of negativity.

On the flip side, learning to let go results in boosted team morale, increased creative flow, stronger trust and camaraderie between team members, a less stressful or toxic environment, and a broader sense of purpose. While letting go of projects and trusting your team might be anxiety-provoking, being mindful of your management style can prevent good team members from turning and running in the opposite direction.

 

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Compassion – Part 2 of Present Heart: The Universal Expressions of Love - Tara Brach

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Part 2: Compassion – the tender resonance of heart – awakens as we allow ourselves to be touched by our shared vulnerability.

This series reflects on four primary expressions of an awake, wise heart: lovingkindness, compassion, joy and equanimity. In each talk we explore the habitual patterning that blocks our full realization of these innate capacities, and the understandings and practices that nurture their unfolding.

 

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A 5-Minute Gratitude Practice: Focus on the Good by Tapping into Your Senses

Waking up this morning, I glanced at my cell phone and noticed the weather app ominously predicting many days of snow and icy temperatures ahead. Brrr! I could feel the chill of dark thoughts starting to gather. I could feel my body creak with cold and aging.

Life’s challenges were seemingly everywhere. And yet…I was smiling. I was cheerful. I was grateful. What? Was I crazy?

As one of my New Year’s resolutions, I’d made a point of tuning my awareness toward appreciation of life’s small delights. I was curious about what I would discover if I focused intentionally on the things that I appreciated. This morning, as I let wakefulness peel the dark back, I could smell my neighbor’s coffee brewing. The snow outside gently buffered the sounds of the world. I could sense my husband’s warm weight in the bed. I took a long moment to enjoy the muted winter light edging in around the slats of the window blinds.

There was nothing particularly special going on, but I noticed that being grateful for little things was already lifting my dark thoughts. Difficulties were still present, but awareness of my gratitude was shifting my view, letting me see that everything was not dark and cold—in fact, many sights and sounds were quite lovely.

There was nothing particularly special going on, but I noticed that being grateful for little things was already lifting my dark thoughts.

Would you like to join me in cultivating a bit of gratitude together?

Mindfulness Practice: Cultivate Gratitude Through the Senses

1. Use the breath to anchor yourself in the present moment. Our minds are always so easily pulled to busyness. Bring particular attention to feeling the breath, or something in the body, as you bring your shoulders down and orient your attention toward gratitude.
2. Next, bring to mind a sight you are grateful for. Move through your senses, and find one thing to start with that you appreciate that comes to you from the world of sight, if you have this available. It could be a color…a shadow…a shape…a movement. Remember, it will never be like this again. What do you see right now, and can you feel grateful that you get to see this, whatever it is?
3. Now, shift to a scent you appreciate. As you continue to work with your senses, now take time to tune in with appreciation to an aroma. What do you notice? What about that glorious or interesting or subtle smell is making you smile? It could be gratitude for something familiar: a scent that brings comfort, upliftment; or maybe it’s something you’ve never smelled before, and it just piques your curiosity, ignites you, enlivens you.
4. Moving on, tune into any sounds around you. Allowing the world of smell to gently recede into the background, on an in-breath, shift your attention to your ears and the world of sound. Maybe notice what it feels like to really listen. How many sounds can you notice, and can you feel grateful that you’re able to experience sound, if you are? What can you notice about these sounds—far away? close? Perhaps you could play a piece of music that brings you joy, and have gratitude that it’s so available? Or maybe it’s the sound of children laughing, the sound of loved ones breathing, the sound of the beating of your own heart.
5. The world of touch and texture beckons us next. We find so much to be grateful for in touch! If there’s someone near who you can hug or who can hug you, notice how this makes you feel filled with gratitude for the joy of human contact. Or perhaps you have a beautiful pet that you can stroke and cuddle, or some lovely material with a texture that feels warm to the touch, soft, evocative. Let your senses ignite your gratitude! There’s so much to be appreciative of.
6. Shift to noticing and appreciating objects around you. Now take a moment to look around: Look down, look up, and from side to side. Appreciate how much effort must have gone into anything at all you own or use. Someone conceived of the need and many people worked on the details of the design. Much care even went into the packaging to deliver your item to you safely. What do you feel when you let yourself be grateful that all that talent went into making your life a little easier?
7. As you end this practice, carry this attitude of gratitude with you. One last little grateful tip: Why not offer your thanks to each person who does anything at all for you today? Even if it is their job to help you? When you’re grateful, when you let your heart open up and be filled with appreciation, notice how being grateful makes you feel.

I’m so grateful that you tuned in to this gratitude practice, and I appreciate your time, your effort, and your energy to be present, awake, and alive to your precious life. Have a beautiful day.

 

This mindfulness practice provides additional information to an article titled, “Thanks for This,” which appeared in the April 2018 issue of Mindful magazine.

 

 

 

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