Aerobic exercise increases mindfulness

So by this point you probably know that mindfulness is good for you. It reduces depression and anxiety, prevents diseases, helps you do better at work or school, and so the list goes on. But how do we actually become more mindful? Do we have to sit down and meditate every day or are there other strategies? Some researchers in Germany investigated this question. Specifically, they looked to see if regular aerobic exercise could do the trick.

Participants were randomly split into three groups: an aerobic exercise group, a relaxation training group, and a waitlist control group (i.e. received no intervention, but were offered one of the interventions after the experiment ended). All participants’ level of mindfulness was measured before and after the 12-week long intervention. Findings showed that indeed, regular aerobic exercise was correlated with an increase in dispositional mindfulness. This was especially powerful for those participants who were most inactive before the experiment.

The researchers also measured changes in mental and physical wellbeing. They found that increases in mindfulness were associated with increases in mental wellbeing, however, were not correlated with changes in physical wellbeing. So even if that new exercise regimen isn’t really helping you keep off those pounds, it may still be working out your mind. So stick with it!


Keryn Breiterman-Loader

Conversing with strangers - noticing if it's fun...or not

Mindfulness of often thought of as a seated, contemplative practice, however it is also a way of engaging with the world. This lifestyle mindfulness, so to say, involves paying close attention to the world around us, so that we notice new things and are attuned to variation and change. A recent study conducted by researchers at Harvard investigated how this sort of mindfulness relates to our relationships. In particular they were interested in synchronicities, or the way people tend to unconsciously coordinate their behavior in conversations.

In a fun experiment, participants were split into a mindful treatment group and a control group, and within each group were paired off to have conversations with each other. Participants were then separated, completed another task, and then were allowed to return to resume their conversations. Results showed that people in the control group returned to their partners at a relatively uniform amount of time, while those in the mindfulness group showed much more variation in how long they took to return.

Researchers interpreted this to mean that mindfulness increased peoples awareness of whether they were actually enjoying the conversation or not, with those who returned faster reporting that they liked their partner more compared to those who were slower to return. In the control group, however, all participants returned about at the same time.

At the end of the experiment, those high in mindfulness enjoyed their conversation more and felt more comfortable with their partners. Additionally, partners in the mindfulness group showed more closely matching heart rates than partners in the control group.



Keryn Breiterman-Loader

Mindfulness Helps Reduce Gambling

Recent research investigated whether mindfulness might be a useful intervention to help people stop gambling. Compared to a waitlist control group, those in a mindfulness enhanced cognitive behavioral program showed significantly reduced gambling and gambling urges. At a 3-month follow-up, both groups still showed improvements, and there was a decrease in the number of participants meeting criteria for pathological gambling.

Further, those participants who reported some mindfulness practice even after the intervention ended showed significantly better outcomes than participants who reported no mindfulness practice after the completion of the program. This may indicate the important of practice, as well as the direct role of mindfulness in results.

Keryn Breiterman-Loader

Mindfulness Helps Reduce Emotional Eating

Very few of us only eat when we’re hungry and then stop eating once we’re full. We also have an emotional relationship to food. Some of us eat as a response to stress and anxiety, some of us don’t eat as a response to stress and anxiety. Some of us try to restrict our food consumption to lose weight but then binge eat when we feel so deprived and starved. These kinds for relationships with food aren’t always so healthy for our bodies (have you ever heard anyone say “Oh wow I’m feeling so stressed, please pass me that bowl of sautéed broccoli and quinoa?”), and using food generally doesn’t resolve our emotional distress.

A recent review article examined 14 different published studies that all used mindfulness as an intervention for binge eating, emotional eating, or weight change. Results indicate that mindfulness interventions successfully reduce binge eating and emotional eating, but the jury’s still out for effectiveness in weight loss. The mechanism through which mindfulness helps us have a more emotionally healthy relationship with food was not discussed at length in the paper. One hypothesis is that mindfulness gives us a better strategy for dealing with our negative emotions and thus reduces our need to use food as a coping strategy. This could be similar to findings in studies on mindfulness and alcohol consumption.

Keryn Breiterman-Loader

Romantic Relationships and Mindfulness: Let’s Have a Talk

Having difficult conversations with our romantic partners can be a necessary yet stressful experience. Past research has found that people who tend to feel less secure about their relationships experience even more anxiety when dealing with conflict with their romantic partner. Other research has found that mindfulness is associated both with better stress regulation and with feelings of more secure relationships.

A recent study investigated the relationship between mindfulness, secure attachment, and stress during a difficult conversation with a romantic partner. Participants (all heterosexual couples) filled out questionnaires measuring mindfulness and attachment (how secure or insecure they feel in their relationships). Then they came into the lab one week later, where they completed some activities including a conflict discussion task with their partner. Results indicated that more mindful participants had lower levels of cortisol (a stress hormone) during their conflict discussion and were better able to regulate their negative emotion after the discussion. Further, this relationship was largely explained through the fact that mindfulness is associated with more secure attachment.

Keryn Breiterman-Loader

How Mindfulness Changes the Brain

Much recent research has discovered that practicing mindfulness meditation is associated with greater psychological wellbeing. The biological mechanism through which this happens is under current investigation. In a recent study, participants took a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course. Both before the course and after, participants had their brains scanned and they filled out questionnaires measuring their psychological wellbeing. Results indicated that participants reported greater psychological wellbeing after the course, and the brain scans revealed that participants also experienced a growth and strengthening of neural connections in certain areas of the brainstem. Further, there was a positive correlation between participants’ psychological wellbeing scores and their increased neural connectivity.

The brainstem is a very old part of the brain, and is central for regulating some of our most basic functions, like sleep, fear, arousal, and eating. The first region of the brainstem whose growth was associated with greater psychological wellbeing is one that is concentrated in serotinergic neurons (neurons that release serotonin). Serotonin has been found to effect sleep, mood, appetite, and conditioned fear, and drugs that change the levels of serotonin in the brain are currently used as treatment for many mood and anxiety disorders.

The second brain region whose growth was most correlated with increases in psychological wellbeing is one responsible for the synthesis and release of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. One of norepinephrine’s major roles is to regulate our body’s stress response. This part of the brain is also a focal area of anti-depressant drugs.

Overall, this study reveals that mindfulness causes physical changes in the brain, which in turn help give us the ability to cope with life’s challenges, and help us experience less anxiety and depression and greater happiness.

Keryn Breiterman-Loader

Hold on to your chromosomes!

Every time our body makes a new cell, we have to make a new copy of our DNA for that cell. With each copy made, we lose some of the nucleotides at the end. Though this slow damage to our chromosomes is part of our body’s natural aging process, it is counteracted by telomerase, which is an enzyme that works hard to add a nice little protective cap (a telomere) to the ends of our chromosomes.

Research has discovered, however, that there are other factors that can speed up or slow down this chromosome damage. For example, stress is one factor that speeds up the wear and tear. Mindfulness and meditation, on the other hand have been found to protect our telomeres and chromosomes. A recent randomized, controlled study found that mindfulnessmeditation leads to increased telomerase activity in blood cells. So cancel your facelift appointment – mindfulness meditation may be a key to successful aging!

Keryn Breiterman-Loader