Mind over matter isn’t just your grandmother’s expression. You really do have the power to harness your mind to overcome troublesome issues, both emotional and physical.
The technique is called mindfulness meditation, and it’s designed to focus your entire awareness in the
Mind over matter isn’t just your grandmother’s expression. You really do have the power to harness your mind to overcome troublesome issues, both emotional and physical.
The technique is called mindfulness meditation, and it’s designed to focus your entire awareness in the present moment. You just have to learn how to release it to benefit from its healing potential (it does take some practice — more on that later). According to the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, you can use mindfulness meditation to ease chronic pain and learn to better manage your pain. Mindfulness might even help with anxiety, depression, stress, gastrointestinal distress, headaches, and even high blood pressure. And you can learn it without getting out of your favorite chair.
What Is Mindfulness Meditation?
Mindfulness meditation has its roots in Buddhist tradition. One form of mindfulness is to focus on the in-and-out flow of breath from your body, paying attention to the present moment without judging it or reacting to it. Slowly, your thoughts, stress, and emotions become balanced and accepted.
“The concept of mindfulness is simply moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, bringing your focus of attention on what’s here in this moment," says Steven D. Hickman, PsyD, director of the University of California at San Diego Medical Center for Mindfulness and an associate clinical professor in the UCSD psychiatry department. "We do this by a variety of methods, primarily meditation. It’s really a way of being that reduces stress, helps you make clear decisions, and helps you react based on the facts of the situation.”
How can something so simple be so effective? According to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), meditation could work in several ways. One explanation is that it affects both your sympathetic (“fight or flight”) nervous system and your parasympathetic (“calming”) nervous system: It decreases the activity of the sympathetic system and increases the parasympathetic activity, resulting in a lower respiratory rate, a lower heart rate, and improved blood flow. Another possibility is that meditation simply helps the mind pay better attention.
The Mind and Body Connection
Hickman uses a lemon as an example of how the mind can influence the body’s reactions. Imagine looking at a bright yellow lemon, he says. Now picture yourself cutting a wedge of it. Mentally raise it up to your eyes and look at it. Then, imagine squeezing the juice into your mouth. By doing this, "100 times out of 100, people say they start salivating — so there’s a connection between the mind and body we take for granted," he says. "A sequence of events happened in your body as a result of something that didn’t even touch your body and only existed in your mind, yet it affected your body.”
Mindfulness Meditation for Pain
According to the NIH, an estimated 70 million people in the United States live with chronic pain. In the last 10 years, scientists have uncovered several benefits of mindfulness meditation such as better attention, decreased sensitivity to pain, and a drop in levels of emotional reaction.
Recently, researchers at Wake Forest University conducted a pain study by applying heat to the back of the legs of volunteers. Pain intensity was measured before and after meditation. The study participants reported 40 percent less pain and 57 percent fewer unpleasant feelings when stimulated after meditation. Interestingly, imaging studies of the brain showed more activity in areas associated with pain awareness and less activity in parts of the brain tied to emotional reactivity to pain.
"There is an emotional component to [pain],” Hickman says. “People with chronic pain often worry about how long it’s going to last or if it’s going to get worse. By staying in the present moment with the pain, you can release the attachments to what it will be like the n