Jeremy Mohler

Writer and meditation teacher

Meditation calms the part of the brain associated with anxiety

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Some years ago, neuroscientists performed a study that confirmed some of meditation’s most powerful benefits.

They hooked two groups of people up to an MRI machine and applied heat to their forearm. The first group were people who had never meditated before or only a few times. The second group were expert meditators who had meditated at least 10,000 hours in their lives.

They exposed each participant to the heat, which was painful but not hot enough to burn the skin. Then they told them that a “beep” indicates that 10 seconds later the heat would be applied again.

With the beep, the people who hadn’t meditated acted as if the heat had already started. The part of the brain associated with fear and anxiety — the amygdala — fired up. The brains of the expert meditators, however, stayed calm, as if nothing was about to happen.

After the heat ended, the expert meditators returned to normal, resting brain activity quickly, while the others continued experiencing discomfort and anxiety.

The takeaway: meditation strengthens our ability to stay present rather than worry about the future or ruminate about the past.

But that’s not the biggest finding.

Get this. Not only did expert meditators avoid anxiety but they also felt the pain more vividly. They had more activity in the parts of their brain related to “saliency,” or focus, while feeling the heat.

It’s a myth that meditation turns you into a cold, calculating robot. Mindfulness turns up the dial on intimacy — with other people, being in nature, eating food, all of our experience.

Yes, there’s plenty of pain in life, but there’s pleasure too. And it’s a win-win. The more you face pain directly rather than agonize over it, ignore it, numb it, etc., the more you learn and grow.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering isn’t.

Want to be more mindful?

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Listen to the podcast version

I talked about this post on my podcast, Meditation for the 99%. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

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Do you think too much? That’s exactly why you should meditate.

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As a new meditation teacher, I’m evangelical about the practice, asking just about everyone whether they’ve tried it.

“No, I think too much,” is the most common answer. Or something like, “I gave up because I couldn’t clear my mind.”

I want to grab their shoulders and shake them — but that wouldn’t be so on-brand of me, would it?

By judging their experience, they’re missing the exact point of meditation — that it helps you accept whatever state your mind is in, whether it’s ruminating, worrying, planning, reminiscing, etc.

That’s the practice: accepting that your mind never stops and gently guiding your attention back to the present moment, over and over again.

Notice. Accept. Come back. Notice. Accept. Come back. That’s it.

After a few minutes of this, your mind will begin to wander less. You’ll be able to keep your attention for longer periods of time on your breath, noises around you, and sensations in the body. You’ll be a little more mindful. Your mind won’t be clear but full — of feelings, sounds, smells, and tastes.

But meditation isn’t just about enjoying your senses.

Neuroscientific research is revealing that meditation produces structural changes in the brain. Studies have found that regular meditators can experience thickening in areas related to cognitive processing. There’s also evidence that meditation can shrink the amygdala, the “fight or flight” part of the brain that processes emotions like anxiety, fear, and aggression.

That accepting part of the practice has an additional benefit: you learn that you don’t necessarily have to believe your thoughts.

Some thoughts are useful, most aren’t. You’re planning what to make for dinner and the thought of grilled chicken reminds you of what your husband ate at Denise’s birthday dinner last weekend, which reminds you of that awkward conversation you had with Denise’s new boyfriend, which makes you think that you’re a socially awkward person, which…

We spend so much time glued to the movie screen in our head, believing whatever we think — not as truth, necessarily, but as if it were real.

I remember the first time I realized that I could choose whether to believe the movie. It was in my mid-20s, just as I was starting to become curious about meditation.

My girlfriend at the time invited me to a class led by psychologist Tara Brach. She was joined by a Buddhist monk from Nepal named Tsoknye Rinpoche, a short, surprisingly young man with thin, metal-rimmed glasses and a fresh buzzcut.

Rinpoche guided us through a 20-minute meditation and then talked about how mindfulness can help calm overwhelming emotions. I noticed myself tune out right as he finished his first sentence with the words “essence love.”

Judgements flooded my mind: I’m better than these people. I don’t need this hippie stuff. I’m normal.

But then he cracked a joke: “If you want to go to India, either stay in the cheapest hotel or a five-star hotel. Because the cheapest hotel is also no good.”

I wrote that night on a personal blog I had been keeping: “His stories and ideas lulled me into pondering large questions, and then, with his humor, he shook me out of that thinking before I could get comfortable. He didn’t let me tune out in my normal way of believing I am bigger or deeper than the situation I am in.”

Looking back, it wasn’t so much about what Rinpoche had said. This new experience — being able to notice when I was leaving the present moment by thinking — likely had more to do with that I had just meditated.

For the first time, I had a sense that I could choose whether to believe what was on the movie screen, or as Brach calls it, a “trance.”

“Our conditioning is to pull away and avoid direct contact with raw feelings,” she says. “The result is a trance — we are split off from the wholeness of our aliveness, intelligence, and capacity to love.”

No wonder you feel so scatterbrained, unable to focus on work, your relationship, friends, all the things that matter to you.

You get so wrapped up in the movie that you forget to breathe fully, feel your body, and pay attention to what’s around you. You go on autopilot, leaning into the future, which gives you a never-ending sense that something is wrong, missing, incomplete.

Working out, drinking, deep conversation, sex, etc. can give you focus — but only for a few minutes or a couple hours at best. Your mind’s wandering ways come roaring back in a flash.

You think, I can’t stop thinking, which is yet another judgment that takes you away from the present moment.

Then you sit down to meditate for the first time, and the movie doesn’t stop. You try to focus on your breath, relax, bliss out, but the thoughts keep coming. You think, why can’t I just relax? Maybe this meditation thing isn’t for me. I think too much.

Tragically, you fail to see these judgements are simply more thoughts. Instead, you believe them as if they were part of the movie, 100 percent real.

Ready to get serious about meditation?

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Listen to the podcast version

My podcast, Meditation for the Masses, is mindfulness for the 99 percent. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and everywhere podcasts are available. Stream this episode below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More

Give yourself permission to meditate when you’re stressed out

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I used to smoke cigarettes every day. Never more than two or three, but for long enough — a few years in my mid-20s — to be ashamed about it.

Smoking felt like an instant escape from feeling stressed. That hit of nicotine, the fresh outside air, the burn in my lungs flipped a reset switch inside of me.

But only for a few minutes. The stress came creeping back in, with an added layer of shame for doing something that was actively killing me.

Stress is killing us, particularly those who are struggling to keep jobs and pay the bills. U.S. life expectancy dropped in recent years for the first time since the flu pandemic of 1918.

The main cause? A spike in liver cirrhosis, opioid overdoses, and suicides, ways of dying fueled in part by stress.

Then there’s the stress that doesn’t kill but gnaws at us throughout the day.

The last four decades of capitalism — often called “neoliberalism” — has forced more and more people to manage their own care. Corporations have held down paychecks and pocketed record profits, while both political parties have cut and privatized support from the government.

Our lives are now filled to the brim with decisions. About which health insurance plan to sign up for. About which funds should go in your 401k — if you’re lucky enough to have one. About how to piece together enough work hours to pay the bills. About what to share on social media.

Talk about a recipe for stress, anxiety, busyness, exhaustion — a sense of never being able to fully relax.

Meditation isn’t going to fix an economy and political system that are stressing us to death. We can’t meditate our way to a “massive redistribution of economic and political power,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. called it.

But it can help take some of the edge off, and even help us make healthier choices in the midst of stress.

How? By making us more mindful, which is the opposite of escaping.

Mindfulness is paying attention, right here, right now, non-judgmentally.

Most of the time we’re not mindful, on autopilot, thinking about the past or future. I’m eating dinner and the fried chicken reminds me of a show I watched last night, which reminds me that I need a new TV, which reminds me of an argument I had with my dad one time in Santa Cruz, which reminds me that I want to live somewhere else with better weather, which…and on and on and on.

That non-judgmentally part is the key. Because what if we really are dealing with something stressful, like a shitty job or no job at all?

Stress is inevitable. What’s not inevitable is the story we add on top of the stress.

The mind not only constantly wanders but it also constantly judges things, including our thoughts. Usually this comes in the form of should or shouldn’t. Like, I shouldn’t be feeling stressed— which is yet another thought that takes us away from the moment.

That shouldn’t is what made me grab for the pack of cigarettes back in the day.

When we judge ourselves for being stressed out — or whatever emotion we’re feeling — we get further caught up in our head, ignoring what we see, feel, taste, smell, and hear.

That’s why a cigarette felt so good — it brought me back to my body for at least a few seconds. I could smell the burning tobacco. I could feel the smoke in my lungs. I was in the moment…for a few seconds.

Meditation is practicing not judging ourselves. We allow everything into our awareness equally and fully, even our stories about what’s happening— and then we let go and fall back into a present moment that is always here to catch us.

Your noses itches. You bring your attention back to the breath. Your back hurts. You bring your attention back to the breath. You think that you aren’t a good meditator. You bring your attention back to the breath.

Eventually, your mind settles into an open awareness, relaxing as pure consciousness — not grasping or pushing away or judging. Just being.

Stress becomes yet another aspect of your experience, which is far too large and expansive and whole to be summed up in a story.

Ready to get serious about meditation?

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