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Hi, everybody. Welcome back once again. Today we get to talk about mindfulness meditation, its effects on anxiety, different ways to practice it and incorporate it into your daily life. For this first part of the episode, we're going to be getting some of the information from a couple of different scientific articles. One is from Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. Another is from Psychology Research and Behavior Management. I'll put links to both of these articles in the show notes if you want to look at them up close. We know that there are various styles of meditation. One of the most commonly discussed forms of meditation is one called transcendental meditation. And this is where you focus, you concentrate on a single stimulus like a word or a mantra or a sensation uh, sound or object. Maybe just the sensation of your breath. And every time your mind wanders, you redirect it back to the object of your meditation. It's really about training concentration. This is not the type of meditation that we're going to be talking about today.

We are talking about mindfulness meditation, which is a different type of meditation. It is where you intentionally bring your attention in a non judgemental way to internal and external experiences that exist in the present moment. So instead of only focusing on one single, single stimulus, like a word, a mantra or your breath, we are focusing on being aware of all of the internal and external experience that are available right now in the present moment. So this can include awareness of different physical bodily sensations, different thoughts that pass through your head, different bodily states: I've got tension in my neck. I've got a stomach ache, that type of thing. It can include consciousness. It can include the environment around you. All of these things. While at the same time having a feeling of, or encouraging a feeling, an attitude. Of openness and curiosity and acceptance of the whole experience. So this nonjudgmental attitude. So it's about paying attention in a particular way. This is a quote from. Kabat Zinn. "Mindfulness meditation is paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally".

So mindfulness meditation is interesting because it is going to interfere in more than one point in our emotion generation process. Remember, we've talked about this many times. We have this process model of emotion generation that tries to show us what happens during the process of generating an emotion. We'll have an event or a circumstance or a situation, and that situation is going to be perceived according to our attention and then it will be appraised according to how it's going to affect our wellbeing, and that will produce an emotional response. So this is the process model of how emotion is generated. If we can interfere at one or more of these four points. It will influence the type of emotion that is going to be generated. Well, mindfulness meditation interferes at the level of attention, right? Because it's focusing our attention on present sensations. We're being brought back to the present moment and the experiences contained in the present moment. That's where our attention is being focused. And so it is an attention allocation strategy. But it's more than that. It's more than just an attention strategy. It is also a form of reappraisal.

So how is it that mindfulness interferes in appraisal? Well, because mindfulness is not just about paying attention to the present moment, being, being sensitive to what's happening right now, both internally and externally. It's also about practicing a certain type of meaning for that. So it helps us not only attend to the present moment, regardless of the content of our present experiences, whether they're pleasant or unpleasant, we are attending to the present sensations, but we are also practicing an attitude of acceptance and openness about whatever experiences may arise. So we're practicing feeling everything and not resisting any of it, just accepting it as part of our experience. So when you have distracting thoughts or feelings, you don't ignore them. You don't repress them. You don't resist them. You acknowledge them, you observe them in a nonjudgmental manner, just as they arise. And this observing of them allows you to detach from them. So training mindfulness meditation is about training this capacity to observe your own experience. You're training a part of your brain, which is able to observe your feelings and your thoughts and your sensations and your emotions. There's this part of you that can observe all of that. And what this does is it helps you to defuse in a way defuse from your emotions. So when we're fused with our emotions, Then we end up saying things like I am sad, I am anxious, I am angry. We fuse with that emotion. It becomes part of, not part of who we are, it is who we are. It is the whole of our experience. It is us. But when we practice defusing, we practice observing our emotions non-judgmentally, we're not trying to resist them because when we resist them, That tends to magnify them, magnify their effect. But we just accept them. But we're observing them. And so we're practicing essentially recognizing that ,Well, Let's compare emotions to clouds. You have clouds that look angry, clouds that look threatening, clouds that look anxious .These can be compared to different emotions that we have. When you are fused with your emotion, then you are the cloud. You are whatever cloud is there at that moment. But when you defuse from your emotion, then you are the sky. And you observe these clouds that pass through. You observe a sadness cloud. You observe a calm cloud. You observe a wispy cloud, you observe an anxious cloud, you observe a threatening cloud, but all of these emotions pass through you, and move on and, because you are the sky. So it's a practice of identifying yourself with that part of you which is more enduring than your emotional process that happens to be going on in you right now, and all of the physical sensations that you're having in your present moment, physical and emotional and psychological sensations. All of these different parts of your experience will change. But you can still remain and observe these things. It's a metacognitive ability, the ability to think, to observe, to reflect on all of these different experiences that will come and go. So mindfulness meditation is, it's about stabilizing your attention on the present moment first of all. So that's the attention piece, but it's also about acknowledging that your sensory and your emotional experience at the moment is momentary. It is momentary. It is part of a process that's in flux, that is in change. And so that allows you to watch it change. That allows you to sort of release it without having an emotional reaction to it, without giving it a meaning larger than the fact that it is happening right now, and it will soon change into something else. So it's about the ability to attend to the present moment, regardless of the content that you're going to experience in that present moment, being able to recognize and accurately label different emotions that you might feel. So observing these clouds that pass through the sky, being able to describe them. This is a sadness cloud. This is an anxious cloud. It gives you this more refined sense of awareness through this tandem of developing greater sensitivity and consciousness of your present experience while at the same time, recognizing that it is a momentary experience, and that it is a process and that it is in flux and you are the sky. You have clouds that pass through you, but that you are the sky.

And both of these studies that I mentioned talk about how training in mindfulness meditation has been found to significantly reduce anxiety in many different studies, both in clinical and experimental settings. Perhaps part of the way that it does this is by helping people to not overreact to negative stimuli, but simply accept them. Not resist them, not try and repress them, but simply accept them. And as we talked about before that, When we accept our anxiety, when we're willing to experience an unpleasant emotion, then that generally makes that emotion diminish and it allows it to move on and process and become something else. Because ironically, as we mentioned before, A lot of times, what makes anxiety, what keeps anxiety high or other negative emotions high is the attempt to keep it low.

So where mindfulness meditation helps us recognize that we aren't the cloud. We're not identifying with the emotion. We are the sky. We have these emotions, we aren't anxious, but we have an anxious feeling. And that helps us to reframe and re- perceive the present moment as something which is in process, in which is constantly changing. And that we have this more permanent part of us that can observe all of that.
Now specifically about mindfulness meditation and its effect on anxiety in particular and other problematic conditions like chronic pain, like depression, like eating disorders, there is a lot of promising data, a lot of promising research that shows good effects on anxiety. However, there are other studies that show that it doesn't always benefit a huge amount. And so the question arises, why? Why is it that some studies are showing a lot of benefit, others are showing not much benefit. Why this difference in the results? Well, of course we need more research to be able to answer for sure, but I do have a hypothesis about it. My theory is based on the fact that mindfulness is something that requires a lot of brain concentration. It's a high cognitive load activity, which we talked about high cognitive load activities a couple episodes ago where we talked about how there are moments when it's appropriate, where it's useful, where it's helpful to use high cognitive load activities, but those are the moments when you have zero or low. Anxiety where you have almost no emotional distress. That's when you can really utilize those high cognitive load activities. What happens when your emotional distress levels rise is that the resources to your brain get diminished. So when you have high levels of emotion intensity, emotional distress high levels of anxiety, you get less blood flow to your brain and those higher thinking powers that, those executive level functions in your brain, are not going to be accessible. And so that's my theory is that the reason why meditation hasn't always been shown to be helpful is because it is something that requires a lot of thinking. Now we also talked about something that can shortcut this process that can make it so that thinking heavy practices, thinking heavy strategies, can become easier. They can even become accessible in moments of high distress if we will practice them. We talked about how research shows that any type of strategy that we practice over and over again can become so easy that it becomes automatic. And we compared it to physical skills, right? Like playing a musical instrument, like sports, or like sewing, various other examples. The more we practice them, the more automatic and effortless they become. So, whereas at the beginning, these skills require a lot of cognitive focus and attention, it's, it's tiring to even work on learning a new instrument for 30 minutes, because there's so much thinking involved. The more that you practice it, the more things become automated. The more things become unconscious. You don't have to think about them anymore. And your brain doesn't have to use so much of its executive function to perform that task. It becomes unconscious and easy. And the same can be applied to any kind of anxiety management strategy. The more that we practice it, the easier it becomes, the more automatic it becomes, the less cognitive interference it takes to be able to execute that task. A lot of these studies that I looked at that were examining whether or not mindfulness meditation would have some kind of effect on anxiety were doing something like having four or five training sessions where the PR the participants are taught principles and techniques for mindfulness meditation and then they are observed and tracked, et cetera. Well, in my estimation, four or five sessions is not enough practice to really make something automatic. Comparing it to an instrument, again, you can't learn to play the piano in four or five sessions. It doesn't work that way. And mindfulness meditation is similar. It's something that requires you training your brain to focus its attention on something that you're not used to focusing on. When we have problems with anxiety, our brain tends to always go to the future. Anxiety lives in the future. It's a future oriented emotion. And so learning to train your brain to come back to the present, to focus on present sensations, that is a new skill. That's going to involve a lot of brainpower. And it's not something that you're going to be able to develop to the point where it becomes automatic and super easy, in four or five sessions. It's something that you have to be able to practice uh, over and over again, like these physical skills. If you can incorporate them into your daily routine and you can practice them consistently over a period of weeks, months, years they become easy. They become automatic. And you can get to the point where you do them without thinking. You have a mastery of the skill. It becomes something that you do effortlessly. And so it's my opinion that these studies in which mindfulness meditation did not actually help the anxiety reduce, of the participants, it's because there was not enough practice of this skill. Because there's enough evidence out there showing good results, promising results from engaging in mindfulness meditation. Not all of the studies show the same results. However, because, I believe in those cases, there's not been enough practice to make it become automatic. When it becomes automatic, when it becomes just a way of living, it's something that your brain does automatically, effortlessly, without thinking almost, then it can be accessible even in moments when you are experiencing anxiety. Anxiety tends to turn off those high executive functions. And so you have to have a lot of tools in your toolbox that either are bodily, physiologically, going to calm you down from the body up, or also that have been practiced so much that they're automatic and they don't require a lot of brain power.

So that's what we need to do with mindfulness meditation. We need to practice it. Find ways to include it in our daily living. So that's what we're going to talk about now. We're going to talk about ways to practice it. The more we practice it, the easier it gets, the more automatic it gets. So, of course there are semi formal ways to practice it. Like with guided meditations. There are several apps. If you just google them, you can find all kinds of different apps that have guided meditations. One that I have used, I don't have any affiliation to this app. I've just used it, and found several guided meditations on there that I thought were good. It's called the calm app, but there are many, many others. So when you go on these apps, they'll have different types of guided meditations, and that can be useful because then you don't have to come up with the the meditation yourself. You can just relax listen to the voice of the person who's directing the meditation and follow the different things that they direct you to do. However, there are other less formal and less time-consuming ways to practice mindfulness that you can do at any moment during the day. Many of you may have already tried this or heard of this practice where you just try and notice, stop and notice five things that I can hear right now, five things that I can see right now, five things that I can sense through touch right now. The place that my feet are touching the floor or my shoes. The place that my legs are touching the chair or the feel of the temperature of the room on my skin. All of these different things. I like to focus on those three senses, hearing, sight and touch because those are easy to find five of each. Smell and tastes are going to be harder. Smell particularly because our brains are programmed to habituate to smells in our environment. So once we've been somewhere for a little while, we can't really perceive the smells in the environment anymore. Unless some kind of new smell comes into the environment and then we can perceive it. But if you're, if you're walking in nature, for example, and you're moving your environment, then you might be able to perceive different smells as you walk around. Taste also is not going to be an easy one for you to find five things unless you're eating. So you can practice that while you're eating and try and identify the different elements of taste. This is one way to be more mindful and just notice what you're feeling.

You can also do a body scan and just close your eyes and scan your head from top to bottom and ask yourself, how does my body feel? How does my forehead feel? How does my head feel? How do my shoulders feel? How does my chest feel? How does my back feel? How do my legs feel? And just try and be aware of the sensations and those parts of your body. Then you can also ask yourself, how am I feeling emotionally? This, we talked about a while before, when we talked about that app called "how we feel" that can help us to be more aware of how we're feeling emotionally.

Now, what about when the coming into the here and now and into the present moment is not very pleasant? What about when there are painful sensations, either physical or emotional in the present moment? What about then? Well, of course, mindfulness meditation is about accepting all of the sensations, including the unpleasant ones and being able to observe them. As I mentioned before, I had three years of chronic illness where I had, I experienced a lot of chronic physical pain. And I did several guided meditations during this time that are intended to help with dealing with chronic pain. You know, the pain's not going to go away, but there's a way to have mindfulness meditation around that pain in a way to make it more bearable. And the way that these guided meditations worked is that they would help me to remember, basically that I am the sky, that I am having a cloud of pain. It would help me to try and identify exactly where in my body I was feeling the pain. To try and imagine if that pain had a color, what I would identify as its color. If I were going to give that pain a shape, what I would call that shape. And also to identify any ways that it seems to be moving or fluctuating, maybe it kind of moves over to the right a little bit. Maybe it kind of gets a little bit less intense for a moment and then intensifies. And just practicing this observation of the pain. And what I started to recognize was that even though the pain was always with me it wasn't always the same. And sometimes it would move a little bit to another part of my body. Sometimes it would shift in intensity. Sometimes it would be a little bit less. And just going through this action of noticing that the pain was not static helped me too develop this detachment from it where I'm observing the pain. And I'm recognizing that I am the sky, not the cloud. And that just made it a lot more manageable. Somehow it de- intensified the pain.

And the same thing can apply to emotional pain. One thing that I like to remember when I come to the present moment and I notice that I'm feeling some kind of emotional pain, I like to remember this quote by Anne Weiser Cornell. It is that everything" inside you wants to save your life." So I like to think about the fact that my brain and my emotions, they all evolved to help me adapt, to help me survive to help me thrive. And so I like to be observant of what's happening and just be curious about the fact that this particular unpleasant thought or unpleasant emotion that's coming through how it's trying to help me, even if it's not effective, even if it's not really actually helping me, it wants to try and help me. This is sort of a way for me to have an acceptance of that thought that we talked about how you need to have this attitude of openness and acceptance toward, whatever you experience in that moment. So I try and be curious about, isn't this interesting that my brain is bringing this up at this particular time. Thank you brain for trying to help me. And then. I attend to the thought. I notice it. And then I direct my brain toward paying attention to some more of my physical sensations, things maybe that I can hear things maybe, that I can see. And it allows me to not resist these emotions, not resist and magnify these thoughts. I don't keep them magnified and high because I'm trying to suppress them. I simply accept and allow them. And that allows them to morph. To continue in on their process and change, and move through. So the clouds keep blowing through my sky. And I don't get stuck on a particular cloud as much. I don't blow up any clouds anymore than they need to be. I simply observe what is happening without magnifying it.

One other way that I practice mindfulness meditation is in while doing different physical activities. And my physical activity of choice for mindfulness meditation is playing the piano because I'm a pianist. So mindfully meditating while playing the piano involves me doing the following. It's not just practicing in any old way. It's practicing in a very specific way, where I try and focus on the feeling of my finger pads as they touch the keys. And the different sensations of the keys as I play them at different speeds, the different sensations in my joints and my wrist, my elbows, my shoulders as I move them. I also focus on the sounds that I'm producing. The different sounds, the different qualities and colors of the sounds, the highs, the lows, those that feel pleasant, those that feel unpleasant. And I especially like to focus on any melodies that I can produce. This goes back to our episode last time, where we talked about the properties of music and particularly melodic music in the range of the human voice and its capacity to calm us down physiologically. Then I start to pay attention to the way that my body is responding to these melodies. I also pay attention to the way the light is coming in, in the room. And the way the temperature feels both on the keys and on my skin. So all of these different aspects of my experience. I like to do it while I am playing the piano. It seems to focus my mind more easily on the present because my body is engaged in a physical activity. You can do this with various other physical activities if you don't play an instrument. You can do it with different kinds of sports. You can even do it with just walking in nature. It's specifically good to do it in nature rather than in a neighborhood or in an indoor track, for example, because when you're out in nature, there's a lot more things there's a lot more stimulus um, that is inherently relaxing to our brains. And there's a lot of wind moving the leaves and light filtering through in certain ways in different animal sounds, birds, insects, that you can focus on and pay attention to. The important thing here is to be, do it without your, without your earbuds. Don't be listening to music. Don't be listening to a podcast. Go out and walk and pay attention to your present experience. Pay attention to everything that your body can sense in that moment, both internally and externally. This is a really great way to practice mindfulness. You can schedule three or four sessions a week where you go out and walk and you just try and pay attention, at least for part of the time. When we first start out, it feels like a lot of work to really focus our minds on the present moment, they keep wanting to run back to the future because we have this habit focusing on anxious, future oriented thoughts. So it feels like a lot of weight to bring, bring our minds back to the present. So just start with a small goal. Really small. You can just start with that five things goal, and say that as I walk, I'm going to notice five things that I hear, five things that I see five things that I touch and that's it. As you do that more and more, you can expand that goal and you can do it, you can have a goal to do it for 10 things, 20 things. Or for a certain number of minutes. But the important thing is to start it really small so that it feels really accessible. And the more that you practice it, even if you're just practicing a tiny amount, just practicing that tiny goal, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. So you start with that tiny amount. And once you have habituated that tiny amount, you have made that habitual, then you can gradually expand it a little at a time. Let's keep it small. We don't need to be anxious about these goals. We don't need to be anxious about this mindfulness practice. It should be very approachable, very accessible, something you can easily do every day. So start now with just a small little goal that you're going to do every day to just find some way to focus on your present sensations. To be able to practice allocating your attention toward the present, that brings it away from that future focus where your anxiety is living and it brings you back into this here and now. Anxiety doesn't live there. And so you will have a different sensation. You will have different emotions once you come back to the here and now. Any emotions, any thoughts that come up? We don't resist them. We just observe them. We remember that we are the sky. And these are clouds that are passing through. And that this is part of a process, as it isn't permanent. It's part of something that is continually in flux. So that's what I'd like to offer to you today and encourage you to find some little tiny way to practice it this week. Thanks.
See you next time.