Physiological Changes Induced From Mindfulness Meditation

 While it can be easy to assume there is little we can do to control our personal physiology since our genes are predetermined and make up a large component of our physiologic phenotype, it turns out shaping our environment and our response to external stimuli can allow for desired (or undesired) physiologic changes to occur. Common methods people employ to improve their health mediated by our physiology include behaviors such as exercise, sleep management, dieting, and doing activities they love. A less common avenue people take, however, are mindfulness practices.  

Mindfulness meditation practices are often met with stigma and skepticism for people who have never tried it, something I experienced myself when I started meditating at the beginning of the semester. While mindfulness is a relatively new field and faces its own challenges for researchers, many studies have found morphometric changes occur in many regions of the brain with consistent mindfulness exercise, which are likely induced by physiological changes. Key areas of the brain that have been found to change include the hippocampus (a region largely associated with memory processing), and the anterior cingulate cortex, mid-cingulate cortex, and orbital frontal cortex (structures associated with emotion regulation and self-awareness). Physiologically it has been suggested that enhanced emotional regulation from mindfulness practices catalyzes the ability to return to a homeostatic baseline faster following an unpleasant stressor in comparison to non-meditators or when people first started meditating. This quicker recovery to a homeostatic baseline has also been linked to stress modulating through increased parasympathetic nervous system activity and altering the SAM and HPA axes, often reported as decreased cortisol levels and heart rate variability across multiple studies. 

 

Through my first six weeks of mindfulness meditations, I have experienced increased sleep quality, much less anxiety and nervousness before games and tests, along with elevated happiness and mood (which is often reported in scientific literature regarding meditation studies). It is important to note I am not praising mindfulness practices as a silver bullet to reducing stress and improving well-being alone, but instead suggesting mindfulness be a tool that should be considered with the same respect given to exercise and proper circadian rhythm management. While some might argue that the physiological changes correlated with mindfulness practices may be unfavorable in some regards (i.e. experiencing lower intensities of emotion and not responding to acute stress appropriately), I believe practicing mindfulness is more advantageous when we will in a world where chronic stress accounts for most health detriments experienced today. 

 

Blase, K. L., & van Waning, A. (2019). Heart Rate Variability, Cortisol and Attention Focus During Shamatha Quiescence Meditation. Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback, 44(4), 331–342.

 

Heckenberg, R. A., Eddy, P., Kent, S., & Wright, B. J. (2018). Do workplace-based mindfulness meditation programs improve physiological indices of stress? A systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 114, 62–71.

 

Tang, Yi-Yuan, et al. “The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, vol. 16, no. 4, Apr. 2015, pp. 213–225.