Meditation can help control your negative emotions even if you're not a mindful person, according to a new study by Michigan State University.
“Mindfulness is maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, bodily sensations, feelings, and surrounding environment.” according to The University of California-Berkeley.
According to Harvard Help Guide:
“Above all, mindfulness practice involves accepting whatever arising in your awareness at each moment.”
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The concept of mindfulness is gaining popularity lately. The practice, which is rooted in religious practice and prayer, is said to benefit immune system, enhance memory and attention, and magnify gray matter density in the brain.
Mindfulness is said to boost compassion, alleviate relationship behaviors, help people fight addiction, and reduce stress.
Scientists from Michigan State claim they have found neural evidence that mindfulness helps to keep negative feelings in track, not just in individuals who are normally prone to be mindful or skilled in meditation, but in anyone.
“Our findings not only demonstrate that meditation improves emotional health, but that people can acquire these benefits regardless of their 'natural' ability to be mindful,” said Yanli Lin, an MSU graduate student and lead investigator of the study. “It just takes some practice.”
Based on belief that mindfulness can help control emotions, the researchers wanted to find out whether someone who is not normally mindful can go into a "mindfulness state of mind" through deciding to do so, or by tackling a focused, intentional effort.
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Lin and a group of psychology researchers conducted the study in Jason Moser's Clinical Psychophysiology Lab.
A group of 68 female native English speakers were invited to take part in the study. The women had not practiced mindfulness meditation before.
Analysis showed that the women came to the experiment possessing different levels of natural mindfulness.
Each of the women wore an electrode cap, for EEG recording. They were then randomly assigned take part in one of two 18-minute activities. Some listened to an audio guided meditation, while others were required to listen to a control presentation of how to learn a new language.
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Immediately after the participants finished their meditation, the researchers showed them some disturbing pictures – a picture of a bloody corpse, for example. An EEG was used to record their brain activity while they viewed the images.
The women were asked to fill out a questionnaire before being asked to view the images either "mindfully" or "naturally."
The team found that regardless of participants’ levels of natural mindfulness, the brain was able to regulate negative emotions to the same degree. The meditation session seemed to aid the brain to recover quickly after seeing the photos, suggesting that meditation enabled the women to control their negative emotions.
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Whether the participants viewed the images “mindfully” or “naturally,” didn’t seem to affect their ability to control emotions.
“If you're a naturally mindful person, and you're walking around very aware of things, you're good to go. You shed your emotions quickly. If you're not naturally mindful, then meditating can make you look like a person who walks around with a lot of mindfulness. But for people who are not naturally mindful and have never meditated, forcing oneself to be mindful "in the moment' doesn't work. You'd be better off meditating for 20 minutes,” says co-author Jason S. Moser, associate professor of clinical psychology at MSU.
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Lin believes the findings show that meditation can improve emotional health; it can even benefit people who are not naturally mindful if they practice mindfulness meditation.
The authors say one of the challenges in conducting such research is that there are variations when defining mindfulness, as well as possible disruption of anxiety and mood disorders. The researchers tried to minimize this drawback by choosing as far as possible, a homogeneous group of participants who were all undergraduates, and were all right-handed.
The findings were published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
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