Did you know that there is a way to train your attention, feel more emotionally regulated, and generally feel less stressed? And it only takes a few minutes a day. It costs nothing, and it’s something you can do with your kids too. It’s learning how to meditate, and it’s something that you can easily learn even if you are not a spiritual person. Let’s dive into this fascinating topic.

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Have you ever meditated? I dare say that this might seem a very spiritual topic, and it of course is, but meditation is also a practice that can be used without a spiritual or religious basis, so that you can become more mindful of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations, and have better control of your mind. So I’m going to cover some really interesting research in this episode so that you can understand what the process of meditation is and why you’ll want to do it even if it feels like something that is not comfortable for you at the moment. Also, if you have meditated before, I think this episode will give you a broader understanding of meditation from a brain and cognition perspective, so that you can boost your practice and be inspired to continue doing this.

My Own Experience of Meditation

I have spent several times in my life where I have meditated regularly, and some times when I haven’t done it at all, and there is certainly a difference. For me personally the main benefits for me are clarity – getting really clear on my own thoughts when everything else is quiet; and mindfulness and control, where I can at other times of the day view my own reactions to things and make a different choice in the moment, while it’s happening, which changes my relationship with people for the better, particularly the kids, because it’s interactions with the kids that are most emotionally challenging for me. I think I began meditating regularly when I was pregnant with my second child in 2015, and that for me helped control my nerves about the birth, it helped me to visualise the labour and what tools I wanted to use to cope, and really focus on my mind and it felt like I was increasing my resilience. When I did give birth to Mitchell, there was actually one particular part that was really painful and I wasn’t on any pain relief, and I actually meditated in that moment, and it helped me reduce the pain and remove any distress in that moment. But it was only because I practised in the lead up that I was able to draw on those skills to get through that. Now, meditation isn’t only helpful for things quite as dramatic as that, it’s really been beneficial for me in my everyday life, as I said to feel calmer, more in control, and more self-aware. This year since having my third baby, I actually haven’t meditated, and it’s a goal of mine to do more of this now that Ruby is 9 months old. I have been working more on a habit of journaling which at the moment has been really helpful for me, but I certainly want to bring mediation back in too. This just shows that it’s ok to stop and start, so don’t be too hard on yourself if it’s not something you fit in everyday, or something that you’re not focusing on at the moment, and it’s never too late to start for the first time either.

So let’s jump into understanding first what meditation even is, how to do it, and then cover some of the interesting research about what is happening in the brain and what the benefits are.

What is Meditation?

So like I mentioned, meditation has of course a very spiritual history, and you can absolutely explore that more if that’s your preference, but we can also talk about the process of meditation and some options for how to meditate even if you are not a spiritual person. I have been doing yoga since 2001, and in the first style of yoga I did called Iyengar yoga I had quite a spiritual teacher and meditation was a small part of that practice for me, so meditation had been on the periphery for me for a really long time. I then learned more actively about meditation when I spent a bit of time looking into Buddhism, and even though I’m not a Buddhist, the concepts really interested me so that’s how I came to explore meditation more and more. So most simply, meditation is getting into a focused state where the object of focus is your mind and body. It involves pausing, being present, and paying attention to your thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations. Meditation is not simply relaxing and falling asleep, it’s more active than that, it’s an active attention.

Ways to Meditate

There are actually many many ways to meditate, so I’ll give a broad explanation now of some main options: First, you can sit quietly and bring your thoughts back to a single focus when you find your thoughts wandering. You might want to focus on your breath, specifically your breath coming in and out of your nose, or you might want to focus on an image in your mind. You can also be listening to something, like instrumental music, or you can do a guided meditation which opens up a huge array of things to focus on when you’re meditating, because this involves just listening and thinking about what the person is saying, and this might be positive affirmations, directions to pay attention to different parts of your body (which is called a body scan), focusing on other people or a specific person, focusing on a particular topic, changing the way you’re breathing, and there are meditations for kids which get them to hug their teddy or imagine a colour – so you can see that the options are really broad, but the main element here is the focusing of attention. Now this is often when people fall down – they sit down to meditate and their mind is racing, and they spend ages thinking about what happened at work that day, and 7 minutes later they realise and get frustrated and they think they’ve failed. Firstly, you have not failed – this is normal and almost always happens when someone is new to meditation or hasn’t meditated for a long time. This is part of the process and just highlights what happens with your thoughts when you haven’t trained yourself to control your thoughts. This is what is happening in your mind all day, it’s so full and you probably feel overwhelmed or stressed, and by pausing you’re taking time to listen to these thoughts and help control them better. So this mind wandering is just part of the process! So, just be gentle on yourself, go slow, and just return to whatever it is you’re focusing on. Even if you have to return your focus heaps of times and you spend most of your time thinking about something else, that’s ok. Just keep practicing. After 5 or 10 or 20 times you’ll get better at noticing when your mind is wandering, and you’ll be quicker at returning your focus.

If this is new for you, or it feels hard, just try starting meditation with only 3 or 4 minutes! It doesn’t have to be a long time, and you can get longer over time with more and more practice.

The other options that people sometimes talk about are walking meditations, so you don’t have to be sitting or even lying down, you can practice walking in silence and thinking about your body or breath, or you can listen to a guided walking meditation as well. So you can see here some broad options about what meditation is and how to do it, and you can try different ones and find something that is a really comfortable place to start for you.

The Wandering Mind

Now, remember I mentioned that it’s normal for your mind to race or wander when you sit down to meditate. I want to explain this a little further, and there is a fascinating model in cognitive science that explains exactly what’s going on here. It is understood that mind wandering is actually inevitable for everyone during meditation – in the scientific literature it’s referred to as mind wandering, and in spiritual practice it’s also called monkey mind. So, mind wandering is a normal part of meditation, and a model by Hansencamp and colleagues in 2012 explains more about the thought processes that happen during meditation. The model says that there is a cycle that we go through when we meditate:

• First, our mind wanders;
• Second, we become aware that our mind wanders;
• Third, we shift our attention back to the thing we were trying to focus on; and
• Forth, we sustain our attention on the object of attention.

This cycle goes on and on throughout the meditation practice – so this is a really important point – mind wandering is part of meditation, and by practicing meditation and going through this cycle many many many times, we are actually training our attention and our ability to control our thoughts. We are also training our ability to notice our own mind, this is called meta-awareness. So this is how meditation works – this is what’s going on in our mind. Some people believe that you should just try and think of nothing, or just never have your mind wander, and that’s false. Once you understand this process, you can be more compassionate with yourself, and then you’re more likely to continue practising.

Equanimity

So, meditation allows you to train your attention, making you more focused and more able to control your thoughts. The other benefit that meditation does in relation to mental processes is that it meditation aims to reduce your emotional reactivity, and increase your compassion. And you can probably already see how it’s doing this – your taking time to pause, you can focus your mind on your thoughts, you notice what’s going on in your mind, you bring compassion to yourself, and in a type of meditation called loving kindness meditation, you can use other people as the focus of your meditation and bring compassion to them. When you are watching your own thoughts, with practice you can bring a grounded centredness known as equanimity to your emotional experience, which means that you can cultivate a more even-tempered are less judgmental experience to all your thoughts, making everyday life more pleasant for you.

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The Default Mode Network

Neuroscientists have studied the parts of the brain that are involved in these mental changes. I can’t do a podcast episode on the neuroscience of meditation without mentioning the default mode network. The default mode network is a network of areas in the brain that are all connected and all talk to each other, that’s what a network is, and it’s activated when we are thinking – more specifically, when we are generating our own thoughts. When we are daydreaming or our mind is wandering, or we are thinking about the future or the past, the default mode network is active. Now if we want to be controlling our thoughts and focusing better, we want the default mode network to turn down, to activate less. And imaging studies have demonstrated exactly this. The default mode network is actually active when our mind wanders during meditation, and then when we notice that our mind has wandered, a network called the salience network is active, which is responsible for noticing what’s going on. Then when we shift our focus back to a specific object and focus our mind on this, networks that support attentional control increase their activation, and that makes sense because it’s all of these different processes that are occurring in the four part model I just described, and so there is this dance between the different networks, where the activation goes back and forth between the default mode network and the salience network, and the attentional control network. You probably have heard before about the prefrontal cortex, which is a large part of the brain that supports behavioural and cognitive control, so our ability to control our thoughts and behaviours, and there are areas in the prefrontal cortex that are included in each of these networks. So – the takeaway here is that it IS possible to train your brain, to train your attention, to watch your thoughts and behaviours over time, to think more consciously before you react, and to develop more equanimity or centeredness.

The Neuroscience of Meditation

Now I’m going to highlight some of the really interesting and more specific findings in the neuroscience literature on the topic of meditation and cognition and emotions. Meditation has been found to be hugely beneficial, in mental health conditions, and on the physical body in those that are medically unwell, but I’m not going to focus on those areas here. I am going to focus on findings that talk about benefits to cognition and emotions in healthy people.

We’ve talked a lot about attention already, so let me start with a few more specific examples of what has been shown in the scientific literature. When I described mind wandering, remember I said that your mind wanders when you’re supposed to be focusing on one thing, and if you notice your mind wandering then you try and shift your attention back to what you’re supposed to be focusing on. Just think about that in everyday life for a second, you want to be really good at focusing on a task so that you can be accurate and not make mistakes, and not get distracted by other things that might shift attention away and so you lose your train of thought or you waste time. Now, there is a published paper from Tsai and colleagues in 2018 that studied how accurate people are at a task in the face of distraction, and they studied both experienced meditators (which were people that meditated weekly for between one and seven years), and people who had never meditated before. They found a couple of really important results. First of all, immediately after one session of meditation, everyone in the study was better at focusing without getting distracted compared to how they performed after a rest – so meditation itself is having an effect on their ability to focus regardless of whether you were a meditation expert or a novice, and this is consistent with other studies. Second, they found that experienced meditators were better at focusing than the novices (after the single meditation session), so having this history of meditation practice had a benefit to accuracy of performance. So this shows that you really can train and improve your ability to focus, and that even one session makes a difference! Now in this study, the single meditation session was 30 minutes long, but another study by Norris and colleagues in 2018 also showed that attention can improve in novices after only one 10 minute session.

Meditation and Emotional Regulation

The science also supports the idea that meditation can bring about equanimity, or greater emotional regulation as I mentioned before. A review article by Tang and colleagues in 2015 summarises a range of findings that showed that meditation can improve your ability to manage your emotions, how long unpleasant emotions are experienced, and how they are expressed. They give examples of studies that found that meditation improved how much participants were distracted by unpleasant stimuli (which are just cues or things in the environment); meditation improved how the body reacted to a stressful movie, and also improved participants own experiences of how well they regulated their own emotions. Meditation is also related to actually experiencing more positive mood. In the review, Tang and colleagues explain that this is all thought to happen because taking the time to pause and pay attention to our bodily sensations and our thoughts, and practising that over time, hones the cognitive control networks which I already talked about, and this then influences other parts of the brain responsible for processing emotions, such as the amygdala. You might have heard of the amygdala before, it plays a central role in emotional processing, including the emotions of fear or anger. What’s really interesting is that when you are a novice meditator, you still see improvements in emotional regulation, but what’s happening in the brain is a greater level of control than before – in other words, your training your ability to control your emotions. BUT, with experienced meditators, you see a slightly different pattern of brain activation, where there is actually less cognitive control but greater activation in the more primary emotional processing areas, and this is thought to mean that with time, expert meditators learn to accept their state of being, they think about it less, and make judgements about it less – so they’re actually changing the way they think about their situation and their emotions so that they can have better emotional regulation. Isn’t that fantastic!

Meditation and Stress

In relation to stress, studies like Bostock and colleagues in 2019 asked participants to listen to a 10 minute meditation that was sent to their smartphones, across a period of 8 weeks. The average number of sessions was only 17 across this time period, although some people did up to 45, and the researchers found that participants had improved well-being, less distress, less job strain, and better perceptions of workplace social support compared to a group that did no meditation. They also measured blood pressure before and after the 8 weeks, and the meditators blood pressure had reduced in that period.

Meditation and Brain Structure

The one last finding that I want to highlight with regard to brains is that regular meditation actually changes the structure of your brain – studies have shown that meditation can increase the volume of certain brain structures involved in the networks I mentioned earlier, and can increase the thickness of the cortex, which which is the outer layer of the whole brain, and this happens particularly with experienced meditators – not only is it powerful to be able to change your brain structure just by meditating, but we also know that greater volume of brain structures and thicker cortex can prevent against age related cognitive decline. A study by Tang and colleagues in 2020 showed that volume of some brain structures started to change after 10 hours of meditation over a 20 day period, but if the participants were just instructed to relax their bodies for the same period of time, no difference in brain structure were found.

Meditation in Children

Now all of the studies that I have mentioned so far actually have been done with adults. However, there is some really promising research that has been done with children, here in Australia in fact. A study by Stapelton and colleagues from this year, 2024, which also included meditation expert Joe Dispenza, did 5 minutes of meditation a day with school aged children for 10 weeks. They found that for younger children, aged 4 to 8, after the program the children rated themselves as happier and doing better with schoolwork, and they were reported to have fewer emotional and behavioural difficulties. The group aged 9-11 showed an increase in emotional awareness, and a decrease in emotional and behavioural difficulties. The authors talk about the importance of children’s mental health and that emotional awareness and regulation is key in this, so meditation is a really good option if we want to start fostering this in our children. Now at just 5 mins a day, this is something that we can all implement at home if it’s not something that is done at school.

Will You Try Meditation?

Now have I convinced you to start meditating yet? It’s been a really enlightening episode, and I’ve convinced myself to start meditating again. I said in the beginning of the episode that you can start with just 3 or 4 minutes if it feels hard, and build up, and while that’s absolutely true, I’m going to give you a gentle slap in the face right now – I think that you have the capacity to sit and focus on one thing for 10 minutes. Even if your mind wanders 107 times, you can bring your focus back to one thing – it might be your breath, an image in your mind, an actual image, or a voice on a guided meditation recording. We know now that it’s ok for your mind to wander, that’s actually part of the process, so don’t let that be your excuse not to meditate. So your challenge for this week is to sit for 10 minutes and meditate. I’ll do it too and share it on my Instagram page.

I want to leave it there, and I’ll end with my favourite quote by Mary Oliver, tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? See you next time.

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Papers mentioned in the episode:

Bostock, S., Crosswell, A. D., Prather, A. A., & Steptoe, A. (2019). Mindfulness on-the-go: Effects of a mindfulness meditation app on work stress and well-being. Journal of occupational health psychology, 24(1), 127.

Hasenkamp, W., Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., Duncan, E., & Barsalou, L. W. (2012). Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation: a fine-grained temporal analysis of fluctuating cognitive states. Neuroimage, 59(1), 750-760.

Norris, C. J., Creem, D., Hendler, R., & Kober, H. (2018). Brief mindfulness meditation improves attention in novices: Evidence from ERPs and moderation by neuroticism. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 12, 277779.

Stapleton, P., Dispenza, J., Douglas, A., Dao, V., Kewin, S., Le Sech, K., & Vasudevan, A. (2024). “Let’s keep calm and breathe”—A mindfulness meditation program in school and its effects on children’s behavior and emotional awareness: An Australian pilot study. Psychology in the Schools, 61, 3679–3698.

Tang, Y. Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. Nature reviews neuroscience, 16(4), 213-225.

Tang, R., Friston, K. J., & Tang, Y. Y. (2020). Brief mindfulness meditation induces gray matter changes in a brain hub. Neural plasticity, 2020(1), 8830005.

Tsai, S. Y., Jaiswal, S., Chang, C. F., Liang, W. K., Muggleton, N. G., & Juan, C. H. (2018). Meditation effects on the control of involuntary contingent reorienting revealed with electroencephalographic and behavioral evidence. Frontiers in integrative neuroscience, 12, 17.