effects of meditation effects of meditation the psychological and physiological effects of meditation have been studied. in recent years, studies of meditation have increasingly involved the use of modern instruments, such as fmri and eeg, which are able to observe brain physiology and neural activity in living subjects, either during the act of meditation itself or before and after meditation. correlations can thus be established between meditative practices and brain structure or function. eeg has been used for meditation research. since the 1950s hundreds of studies on meditation have been conducted, but many of the early studies were flawed and thus yielded unreliable results. contemporary studies have attempted to address many of these flaws with the hope of guiding current research into a more fruitful path. in 2013, researchers found moderate evidence that meditation can reduce anxiety, depression, and pain, but no evidence that it is more effective than active treatments such as drugs or exercise. another major review article also cautioned about possible misinformation and misinterpretation of data related to the subject. effects of mindfulness meditation a previous study commissioned by the us agency for healthcare research and quality found that meditation interventions reduce multiple negative dimensions of psychological stress. other systematic reviews and meta-analyses show that mindfulness meditation has several mental health benefits such as bringing about reductions in depression symptoms, improvements in mood, stress-resilience and attentional control. mindfulness interventions also appear to be a promising intervention for managing depression in youth. mindfulness meditation is useful for managing stress, anxiety and also appears to be effective in treating substance use disorders. a recent meta analysis by hilton et al. (2016) including 30 randomized controlled trials found high quality evidence for improvement in depressive symptoms. other review studies have shown that mindfulness meditation can enhance the psychological functioning of breast cancer survivors, is effective for people with eating disorders and may also be effective in treating psychosis. studies have also shown that rumination and worry contribute to mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety, and mindfulness-based interventions are effective in the reduction of worry. some studies suggest that mindfulness meditation contributes to a more coherent and healthy sense of self and identity, when considering aspects such as sense of responsibility, authenticity, compassion, self-acceptance and character. brain mechanisms main article: mechanisms of mindfulness meditation the analgesic effect of mindfulness meditation may involve multiple brain mechanisms, but there are too few studies to allow conclusions about its effects on chronic pain. changes in the brain mindfulness meditation is under study for whether structural changes in the brain may occur, but most studies have weak methodology. a meta-analysis found preliminary evidence for effects in the prefrontal cortex and other brain regions associated with body awareness. however, the results should be interpreted with caution because funnel plots indicate that publication bias is an issue in meditation research. a 2016 review using 78 functional neuroimaging studies suggests that different meditation styles are associated with different brain activity. attention networks and mindfulness meditation psychological and buddhist conceptualizations of mindfulness both highlight awareness and attention training as key components, in which levels of mindfulness can be cultivated with practise of mindfulness meditation. focused attention meditation (fam) and open monitoring meditation (omm) are distinct types of mindfulness meditation; fam refers to the practice of intently maintaining focus on one object, whereas omm is the progression of general awareness of one's surroundings while regulating thoughts. focused attention meditation is typically practiced first to increase the ability to enhance attentional stability, and awareness of mental states with the goal being to transition to open monitoring meditation practise that emphasizes the ability to monitor moment-by-moment changes in experience, without a focus of attention to maintain. mindfulness meditation may lead to greater cognitive flexibility. in an active randomized controlled study completed in 2019, participants who practiced mindfulness meditation demonstrated a greater improvement in awareness and attention than participants in the active control condition. alpha wave neural oscillation power (which is normally associated with an alert resting state) has been shown to be increased by mindfulness in both healthy subjects and patients. sustained attention tasks of sustained attention relate to vigilance and the preparedness that aids completing a particular task goal. psychological research into the relationship between mindfulness meditation and the sustained attention network have revealed the following: in a continuous performance task an association was found between higher dispositional mindfulness and more stable maintenance of sustained attention. in an eeg study, the attentional blink effect was reduced, and p3b erp amplitude decreased in a group of participants who completed a mindfulness retreat. the incidence of reduced attentional blink effect relates to an increase in detectability of a second target. a greater degree of attentional resources may also be reflected in faster response times in task performance, as was found for participants with higher levels of mindfulness experience. selective attention selective attention as linked with the orientation network, is involved in selecting the relevant stimuli to attend to. performance in the ability to limit attention to potentially sensory inputs (i.e. selective attention) was found to be higher following the completion of an eight-week mbsr course, compared to a one-month retreat and control group (with no mindfulness training). the ant task is a general applicable task designed to test the three attention networks, in which participants are required to determine the direction of a central arrow on a computer screen. efficiency in orienting that represent the capacity to selectively attend to stimuli was calculated by examining changes in the reaction time that accompanied cues indicating where the target occurred relative to the aid of no cues. meditation experience was found to correlate negatively with reaction times on an eriksen flanker task measuring responses to global and local figures. similar findings have been observed for correlations between mindfulness experience in an orienting score of response times taken from attention network task performance. participants who engaged in the meditation breath attention score exercise performed better on anagram tasks and reported greater focused attention on this task compared to those who did not undergo this exercise. executive control attention executive control attention include functions of inhibiting the conscious processing of distracting information. in the context of mindful meditation, distracting information relates to attention grabbing mental events such as thoughts related to the future or past. more than one study have reported findings of a reduced stroop effect following mindfulness meditation training. the stroop effect indexes interference created by having words printed in colour that differ to the read semantic meaning e.g. green printed in red. however findings for this task are not consistently found. for instance the mbsr may differ to how mindful one becomes relative to a person who is already high in trait mindfulness. using the attention network task (a version of eriksen flanker task) it was found that error scores that indicate executive control performance were reduced in experienced meditators and following a brief five-session mindfulness training program. a neuroimaging study supports behavioural research findings that higher levels of mindfulness are associated with greater proficiency to inhibit distracting information. as greater activation of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (acc) was shown for mindfulness meditators than matched controls. participants with at least 6 years of experience meditating performed better on the stroop test compared to participants who had not had experience meditating. the group of meditators also had lower reaction times during this test than the group of non-meditators. following a stroop test, reduced amplitude of the p3 erp component was found for a meditation group relative to control participants. this was taken to signify that mindfulness meditation improves executive control functions of attention. an increased amplitude in the n2 erp component was also observed in the mindfulness meditation group, thought to reflect more efficient perceptual discrimination in earlier stages of perceptual processing. emotion regulation and mindfulness research shows meditation practices lead to greater emotional regulation abilities. mindfulness can help people become more aware of thoughts in the present moment, and this increased self-awareness leads to better processing and control over one's responses to surroundings or circumstances. positive effects of this heightened awareness include a greater sense of empathy for others, an increase in positive patterns of thinking, and a reduction in anxiety. reductions in rumination also have been found following mindfulness meditation practice, contributing to the development of positive thinking and emotional well-being. evidence of mindfulness and emotion regulation outcomes emotional reactivity can be measured and reflected in brain regions related to the production of emotions. it can also be reflected in tests of attentional performance, indexed in poorer performance in attention related tasks. the regulation of emotional reactivity as initiated by attentional control capacities can be taxing to performance, as attentional resources are limited. patients with social anxiety disorder (sad) exhibited reduced amygdala activation in response to negative self-beliefs following an mbsr intervention program that involves mindfulness meditation practice. the lpp erp component indexes arousal and is larger in amplitude for emotionally salient stimuli relative to neutral. individuals higher in trait mindfulness showed lower lpp responses to high arousal unpleasant images. these findings suggest that individuals with higher trait mindfulness were better able to regulate emotional reactivity to emotionally evocative stimuli. participants who completed a seven-week mindfulness training program demonstrated a reduction in a measure of emotional interference (measured as slower responses times following the presentation of emotional relative to neutral pictures). this suggests a reduction in emotional interference. following a mbsr intervention, decreases in social anxiety symptom severity were found, as well as increases in bilateral parietal cortex neural correlates. this is thought to reflect the increased employment of inhibitory attentional control capacities to regulate emotions. participants who engaged in emotion-focus meditation and breathing meditation exhibited delayed emotional response to negatively valanced film stimuli compared to participants who did not engage in any type of meditation. controversies in mindful emotion regulation it is debated as to whether top-down executive control regions such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlpfc), are required or not to inhibit reactivity of the amygdala activation related to the production of evoked emotional responses. arguably an initial increase in activation of executive control regions developed during mindfulness training may lessen with increasing mindfulness expertise. stress reduction research has shown stress reduction benefits from mindfulness. a 2019 study tested the effects of meditation on the psychological well-being, work stress, and blood pressure of employees working in the united kingdom. one group of participants were instructed to meditate once a day using a mindfulness app on their smartphones, while the control group did not engage in meditation. measurements of well-being, stress, and perceived workplace support were taken for both groups before the intervention and then again after four months. based on self-report questionnaires, the participants who engaged in meditation showed a significant increase in psychological well-being and perceived workplace support. the meditators also reported a significant decrease in anxiety and stress levels. another study conducted to understand association between mindfulness, perceived stress and work engagement indicated that mindfulness was associated with lower perceived stress and higher work engagement. other research shows decreased stress levels in people who engage in meditation after shorter periods of time as well. evidence of significant stress reduction was found after only three weeks of meditation intervention. brief, daily meditation sessions can alter one's behavioral response to stressors, improving coping mechanisms and decreasing the adverse impact caused by stress. a study from 2016 examined anxiety and emotional states of naive meditators before and after a seven-day meditation retreat in thailand. results displayed a significant reduction in perceived stress after this traditional buddhist meditation retreat. insomnia and sleep chronic insomnia is often associated with anxious hyperarousal and frustration over inability to sleep. mindfulness has been shown to reduce insomnia and improve sleep quality, although self-reported measures show larger effects than objective measures. future directions a large part of mindfulness research is dependent on technology. as new technology continues to be developed, new imaging techniques will become useful in this field. real-time fmri might give immediate feedback and guide participants through the programs. it could also be used to more easily train and evaluate mental states during meditation itself. effects of other types of meditation insight (vipassana) meditation vipassana meditation is a component of buddhist practice. phra taweepong inwongsakul and sampath kumar from the university of