Meditation Can Change Your Brain

You’ve heard it again and again your brain is incredible. But did you know that it’s fundamentally plastic? Able to change and adapt to stimuli, our brains aren’t rigidly formed as was previously thought.

When we learn something new, like a fact or a task, new neural pathways are created, rewiring our brains. The same goes for negative thoughts, which can loop over and over again in our minds seemingly without reprieve. But there is a solution, an ancient one that modern science has finally proven to be helpful and without substitute.

Meditation is a powerful mindfulness tool that can literally change the way your brain works. A Harvard affiliated study in 2016, took 16 participants for 8 weeks and had them meditate daily and performed MRI’s before and after. The Proof was astounding. Meditation is helpful for us to feel more secure, less rattled by stressful situations while simultaneously enhancing compassion and empathy for others. But how?

To have a better understanding of how meditation can change your brain for the better, let’s have an anatomy lesson!

Brain Anatomy:

Casually known as the assessment centre, the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (LPC) moderates our social behaviour by helping us to coordinate our cognitive behaviour, modulate our personal expressions, and decision making. This region helps us to take a step back, assess things and enforces our self- control.

Now, if the LPC is responsible for these wide-sweeping behaviours, then which little voice is responsible for how we really feel? Behold the Medial Prefrontal Cortex (MPC); it is responsible for your perspectives, experiences and constantly taps into your immediate emotional state. It is a ‘self-referencing’ centre that also allows you to have empathy for those around you. It helps you decipher those that are similar to you from those that are dissimilar, which can be very important when making social connections with others.

The Insula constantly monitors bodily sensations, guiding your response to stimuli. It can help decipher if what you’re physically experiencing is benign or serious.

The Amygdala plays a huge role in terms of our survival instincts and can be thought of as the Alarm Bell of the brain warning us when danger is afoot. It is critical to our sympathetic nervous systems response of fight or flight.  

Now that we’ve identified the squad, it becomes apparent that each of these sections are integral to how we perceive the world around us.

Living in the modern world is not easy. Our nervous system is constantly being stimulated with the cacophony of city sounds, artificial lights blinking at us constantly, not to mention dealing with our busy lives. It can be difficult to separate our personal experience from what is going on around us and with each other.

Meditation has been touted for centuries as a cure-all our human-specific problems. It has the unique ability to change our brains via neuroplasticity, helping us to adapt favourably to stressors.

When you look at a brain that doesn’t meditate, strong neural connections between the MPC, the Amygdala and the Insula; any bodily sensations you feel will trigger a fearful stress response because your brain is fixated on yourself. Anytime you get stuck in a negative fear-inducing train of thought that just keeps repeating itself, these areas are likely involved. If you’re prone to this type of thinking, then it could mean that your MPC is weak, unable to discard irrelevant information instead of seeing the situation from a balanced perspective.

But when you meditate on a regular basis, the opposite happens; the tight-knit connections between team-freak out, i.e. your MPC, the Amygdala and the Insula weaken. You become better able to filter information that is irrelevant and a hinderance, focusing on what is actually helpful. Now that the connection between this grouping is healthier, you are able to respond more calmly and rationally when something serious does arise. Amazingly enough, meditation helps you to strengthen your ability to see people as similar to you and not dissimilar (read, threatening). This is important, because it helps you to feel compassion and empathy for others and not fear.

All of this sounds incredible; who doesn’t want less stress and more compassion? The only trick, you need to make meditation a daily habit. And you have to keep meditating. Due to the malleability of the brain, these old thought patterns can return. By meditating we’ve created new neural pathways and we want to keep them strong.

If you don’t know how to meditate, please seek out the wisdom and kindness of a meditation coach or teacher near you!