Transcript for: Benefits of Meditation: Attention and Stress Relief
What's surprising at least to scientists is that the benefits
for meditation show up right from the beginning. You can do for example, mindfulness- that's a very popular meditation. If you do mindfulness
practice 10 minutes a day or 10 minutes three times
over the course of a day, something remarkable
happens to your attention. And it has to do with
the fact that we're all multitasking these days. People on average look at their
email about 50 times a day, they look at their Facebook
20 some times a day, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's Instagram,
there's your phone calls, there's whatever it is you have to do. And what this means for attention
is that we're challenged, that focused attention
is an endangered species. However, we need that focus
to get work done well. So it's a real problem. And meditation it turns
out even at the beginning has some of the answer- it goes like this. When you're really intensely
focused on that one thing you have to do or you want to do, the paper you're writing or
the project you're working on, then you think, "Oh, I
better check my email." And then that leads to your Facebook, and that leads to the phone
call-we call this multitasking. The brain actually does
not do multitasking, doesn't do several things
at once in parallel, rather it works in serial
and it switches very rapidly from one thing to the next. Then when you go back to that project or that whatever it was
you were so focused on, your concentration had
been at a very high level before you started doing the other things, now it's much lower and it
takes a while to ramp up to that same level. Unless, and this is so interesting, unless you've done that
10 minutes of mindfulness focused on your breath, for
example, just watched it in and out. Noticed when your mind
wandered brought it back. That's the basic move in meditation. And if you do that, it
turns out just 10 minutes of practice nullifies that
loss of concentration. And this works, for example, for people who might do mindfulness in the morning, it will wane during the course of the day but if you do 10 more minutes at lunch, 10 more minutes at a break
in the mid-afternoon, it helps you through the
day stay concentrated. So that is a very palpable concrete payoff from daily meditation
that works for beginners. There are many others too for example, in terms of handling stress. I mean, we're all stressed out these days. Beginners in mindfulness or
other meditations it turns out right from the get-go have
a better reaction to stress. What that means is that, and we see this in brain function, the area of the brain
which reacts to stress called the 'amygdala,'
it's the trigger point for the fight or flight
or freeze response. It's what makes us angry all of a sudden or anxious all of a sudden. The amygdala is quieter, it's
calmer in the face of stress and this lets us be calmer
in the face of stress. And this is another benefit that we see right from the beginning. Because meditation has
been found to work so well with anxiety and depression
and possibly PTSD where that's being looked into, one of the areas that's
seems promising is meditation with attention deficit disorder. In a way, this is a no-brainer because at base in essence,
every kind of meditation retrains attention. And what attention deficit disorder is is a problem with attention. So there's now a whole
host of studies underway mainly with kids because it's where ADD tends to show up first, where they're helping them strengthen the muscle of attention. I was in a classroom of
seven-year-olds in Spanish Harlem; this is a very impoverished
area of New York City. And those kids live in housing projects, they have very troubled lives. And some of them had ADD. In fact, half the kids in that classroom had what are called "special needs" ranging from ADD to autism. I thought the classroom
would be totally chaotic, but actually the kids
were calm and focused. And the teacher said, here's why. And then they did their daily ritual of what they called "belly buddies." Each child one by one went to their cubby, got a favorite little stuffed animal, found a place to lie down on a rug, put that animal on their belly, and then they listened to
a tape that guided them through watching belly
rise on the in breath, fall on the out breath. 1, 2, 3 on the in breath,
1, 2, 3 on the out breath. This is basically the
beginning of mindfulness or meditation for kids. You know, in cognitive science we'd say, this is the training of attention. So you can do it with very young kids, and this helps them get
stronger in their ability to concentrate. Attention deficit disorder
is basically not being able to control your mind wandering off from what you're paying attention to. Every time you watch your belly rise and then your mind wanders off and you bring it back to your belly, you are strengthening the neural circuitry for focus and countering mind-wandering- so this seems very promising. And early studies, early
pilots show that this may well counter the problems kids face in ADD. And I'm very happy to say that
major studies are underway. We're waiting for those results, but I think they are promising.