How Meditation Can Aid in the Recovery and Management of Illness

Four Rock Formation


The popularity of meditation is on the rise, with 14.2 percent of Americans practicing mindfulness  in the past year. The majority of people who meditate do so to improve their emotional and cognitive wellbeing, however, meditation can be highly beneficial for your physical health as well.  Studies have shown that meditation can reduce sensations of pain and unpleasantness by as much as a 57%, and can lower levels of cellular inflammation and improve immune function. If you’re living with chronic pain or in the process of recovering from a long-term illness, meditation can improve your overall health and quality of life. The physiological and psychological benefits of meditation make it a crucial component of self-care when you’re dealing day-to-day with the stress and discomfort of an illness.

Meditation Helps You Cope with Pain

If you’re dealing with chronic pain, you may have already  tried a slew of prescription medications, physical therapy and other treatments to cope. Chronic pain can affect all areas of your life, and can take a toll on your mental health. With the use of MRIs, scientists have determined that certain forms of meditation can activate and reinforce neural pathways in the brain associated with processing pain. Pain disorders that occur without the presence of tissue damage, like fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, are highly responsive to meditation.  Meditation also stimulates the brain to release chemicals like endorphins and dopamine, which work as natural pain relievers.

Meditation Reduces Stress To Improve Cardiovascular Health

Reducing stress is crucial for better health whether or not you’re living with an illness. Stress plays a role in causing inflammation throughout the body through the release of hormones like cortisol. When you are stressed, your heart rate and blood pressure increase, and your muscles become tense and stiff. Meditation shifts your focus away from external stressors to achieve an inner sense of calm. As a result, your sympathetic nervous system can relax, as your body no longer exerts its total energy in a flight-or-fight response. This allows you to enjoy better sleep, a better mood and better cardiovascular health.

Meditation Improves Your Mental Health and Overall Attitude

There is a significant correlation between chronic disease and mental illness.. The impact of dealing with pain in everyday life, as well as the financial, social and occupational challenges  can take a toll on your mental health. The effect can be cyclical; as you become depressed, you are less likely to attend doctors appointments, exercise and make the right nutritional choices necessary to care for yourself. Meditation helps you overcome distracting or obsessive thoughts that may hinder your path to joy. Focused patterns of breathing, visualization techniques and engaging the senses encourages you to stay present in the moment and feel in control of what’s to come. To bolster the mood enhancing benefits of meditation, involve friends and family in a meditation session and make it a group activity. Finding ways to spend time with loved ones is important when you are dealing with an illness, and meditation can be a safe, relaxing and beneficial activity you can all enjoy together.

The physiological effects of meditation can improve your health and facilitate faster and easier healing. Taking time out of your day to center your mind can also help alleviate the stress and emotional burden of dealing with an illness. Used in conjunction with your doctor’s prescribed methods of treatment, meditation can be a valuable tool when you’re living with or recovering from an illness.

‘Mindful people’ feel less pain; MRI imaging pinpoints supporting brain activity




 




Greater deactivation of the posterior cingulate cortex, a brain region associated with processing self-related thoughts, was associated with lower pain and higher trait mindfulness. Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

Ever wonder why some people seem to feel less pain than others? A study conducted at Wake Forest School of Medicine may have found one of the answers – mindfulness. “Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too much emotional reaction or judgment,” said the study’s lead author, Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the medical school, part of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. “We now know that some people are more mindful than others, and those people seemingly feel less pain.”

The study is an article in press, published ahead-of-print in the journal PAIN.




The researchers analyzed data obtained from a study published in 2015 that compared mindfulness meditation to placebo analgesia. In this follow-up study, Zeidan sought to determine if dispositional mindfulness, an individual’s innate or natural level of mindfulness, was associated with lower pain sensitivity, and to identify what brain mechanisms were involved.

In the study, 76 healthy volunteers who had never meditated first completed the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, a reliable clinical measurement of mindfulness, to determine their baseline levels. Then, while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, they were administered painful heat stimulation (120°F).

Whole brain analyses revealed that higher dispositional mindfulness during painful heat was associated with greater deactivation of a brain region called the posterior cingulate cortex, a central neural node of the default mode network. Further, in those that reported higher pain, there was greater activation of this critically important brain region.

The default mode network extends from the posterior cingulate cortex to the medial prefrontal cortex of the brain. These two brain regions continuously feed information back and forth. This network is associated with processing feelings of self and mind wandering, Zeidan said.

“As soon as you start performing a task, the connection between these two brain regions in the default mode network disengages and the brain allocates information and processes to other neural areas,” he said.

“Default mode deactivates whenever you are performing any kind of task, such as reading or writing. Default mode network is reactivated whenever the individual stops performing a task and reverts to self-related thoughts, feelings and emotions. The results from our study showed that mindful individuals are seemingly less caught up in the experience of pain, which was associated with lower pain reports.”

The study provided novel neurobiological information that showed people with higher mindfulness ratings had less activation in the central nodes (posterior cingulate cortex) of the default network and experienced less pain. Those with lower mindfulness ratings had greater activation of this part of the brain and also felt more pain, Zeidan said.

“Now we have some new ammunition to target this brain region in the development of effective pain therapies. Importantly this work shows that we should consider one’s level of mindfulness when calculating why and how one feels less or more pain,” Zeidan said. “Based on our earlier research, we know we can increase mindfulness through relatively short periods of mindfulness meditation training, so this may prove to be an effective way to provide pain relief for the millions of people suffering from chronic pain.”

 

Carnegie Mellon researchers reveal how mindfulness training affects health




AMindfulness – What is it, why do it and is it worth it? Diary of a Mindfulness Course Part One

Mindfulness – What is it, why do it and is it worth it? Diary of a Mindfulness Course Part One

 

Over the past decade, there have been many encouraging findings suggesting that mindfulness training can improve a broad range of mental and physical health problems. Yet, exactly how mindfulness positively impacts health is not clear.




Carnegie Mellon University’s J. David Creswell — whose cutting-edge work has shown how mindfulness meditation reduces loneliness in older adults and alleviates stress — and his graduate student Emily K. Lindsay have developed a model suggesting that mindfulness influences health via stress reduction pathways. Their work, published in “Current Directions in Psychological Science,” describes the biological pathways linking mindfulness training with reduced stress and stress-related disease outcomes.

“If mindfulness training is improving people’s health, how does it get under the skin to affect all kinds of outcomes?” asked Creswell, associate professor of psychology in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “We offer one of the first evidence-based biological accounts of mindfulness training, stress reduction and health.”

Creswell and Lindsay highlight a body of work that depicts the biological mechanisms of mindfulness training’s stress reduction effects. When an individual experiences stress, activity in the prefrontal cortex — responsible for conscious thinking and planning — decreases, while activity in the amygdala, hypothalamus and anterior cingulate cortex — regions that quickly activate the body’s stress response — increases. Studies have suggested that mindfulness reverses these patterns during stress; it increases prefrontal activity, which can regulate and turn down the biological stress response.




Excessive activation of the biological stress response increases the risk of diseases impacted by stress (like depression, HIV and heart disease). By reducing individuals’ experiences of stress, mindfulness may help regulate the physical stress response and ultimately reduce the risk and severity of stress-related diseases.

Creswell believes by understanding how mindfulness training affects different diseases and disorders, researchers will be able to develop better interventions, know when certain treatments will work most effectively and identify people likely to benefit from mindfulness training.

As the birthplace of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology, Carnegie Mellon has been a leader in the study of brain and behavior for more than 50 years. The university has created some of the first cognitive tutors, helped to develop the Jeopardy-winning Watson, founded a groundbreaking doctoral program in neural computation, and completed cutting-edge work in understanding the genetics of autism. Building on its strengths in biology, computer science, psychology, statistics and engineering, CMU recently launched BrainHub, a global initiative that focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors.

Accepting the Autism Diagnosis from Ronette Parker.




Ronette Parker

Ronette Parker

At AutismTalk we love Ronette Parker.




She is an autism therapist who combines the very best from both East and West with her wonderful Mindfulness and Autism library here.

We are sharing a fascinating video on acceptance of the autism diagnosis. A tough call for most parents you will agree!

Ms Parker has very kindly agreed to join us on Twitter on Monday 2nd July at 8.00 PST for a Q&A about autism, mindfulness and education. To ask Miss any questions please use send them to @AutismTalkASD and @AutismTalkASD. Please use the hashtag #AskMissMindfulness




Yoga for people with multiple sclerosis




Yoga for multiple sclerosis

Yoga for multiple sclerosis




We have covered the whole area of yoga for people with multiple sclerosis before. But thought this might be of interest to our newer readers.

Please do watch this video an read our previous blog post here.

You may also be interested in mindfulness for pain as well.

What is Yoga for Multiple Sclerosis? from taming the walrus on Vimeo.