The last two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in exploring the psychological benefits of mindfulness meditation. Within this exciting area of research, psychologists and neuroscientists have consistently linked mindfulness practice with better emotion regulation, a vital ability that enables us to manage and appropriately respond to our many emotional experiences. Despite growing knowledge that mindfulness meditation can enhance emotional wellbeing, very little is known about how it all works. How exactly does the act of meditation help us deal with the emotional rollercoaster of everyday life? Is mindfulness training actually “transferrable” to real world situations? What’s going on in the brain? Can we even measure it?
These are the questions that fascinated our team at Michigan State University. In search of answers, we conducted a study that randomized 212 non-meditators to complete either a 20-minute guided mindfulness meditation (the mindfulness group) or listen to a time-matched TED talk on how to quickly learn a new language (the control group). Afterwards, both groups viewed a series of disturbing negative and benign neutral pictures to assess emotional reactivity—i.e., how strongly people react to the negative images compared to the neutral ones. Importantly, all participants completed these tasks while hooked up to electroencephalography, or EEG, so that brain activity could be measured with millisecond precision. At the end of the study, participants provided subjective ratings on their experience of the meditation/TED talk and the picture viewing task.
This design allowed us to ask the following three questions: are there measurable differences in brain activity during meditation relative to the control condition; does mindfulness meditation reduce emotional reactivity; and can brain activity during meditation predict emotional reactivity after meditation?
“… these findings indicate that the emotional regulatory effects of meditation might depend on the ability to stay awake during practice.”
What we found surprised us! First, the EEG revealed that there were no differences in brain activity between the meditation and control condition. Relative to a baseline resting condition during which participants sat still with their eyes closed, both the meditation and TED talk reduced alpha activity and increased theta activity. Alpha and theta activity are rhythmic electrical brain signals that are thought to reflect alertness (more alertness, less alpha) and cognitive engagement (more cognitive engagement, more theta). With this in mind, finding less alpha and more theta activity is consistent with the idea that we compared an active task (meditation/TED talk) to a passive condition (eyes-closed rest). Most importantly, the findings show that the guided meditation did not produce unique changes to brain activity, suggesting that perhaps more practice is needed before such changes can be reliably observed.
So what does this mean for the effects of meditation on emotional reactivity? If meditation didn’t alter brain activity, can we expect it to have any emotional regulatory effects? Surprisingly, the answer depends on an unexpected factor: sleepiness. It turns out that participants’ ratings of how sleepy they were during the meditation was positively correlated with emotional reactivity during picture viewing. In other words, higher levels of sleepiness during meditation corresponded to stronger emotional responses to the negative pictures, whereas lower levels of sleepiness corresponded to less emotional reactivity.
Interestingly, sleepiness didn’t matter for the control group at all—the control group showed strong responses to the negative images regardless of how sleepy they were during the TED talk. Together, these findings indicate that the emotional regulatory effects of meditation might depend on the ability to stay awake during practice! This is something that Buddhist meditation practitioners have known about for a long time. In fact, sleepiness is associated with sloth and torpor, part of the five hindrances that are thought to get in the way of meditative progress.
Last but not least, we found that meditators who showed larger increases in theta brain activity from rest to meditation were less emotionally reactive. Interestingly, this relationship held even after controlling for sleepiness and introduces the promising possibility that theta activity could be a “neural marker” of meditation quality. With that said, we don’t know how or why theta activity might be related to emotional reactivity or even if the relationship is reproducible. It’ll be up to future research to replicate the effect and untangle these exciting (and difficult!) questions.
If there is anything to take away from this study, it’s the following two ideas. Practically speaking, how and when you meditate matters! Our findings support what many meditators have known for centuries—that sleepiness and fatigue during meditation can hinder progress and that it’s probably a good idea to practice when you’re energized and alert. From a scientific perspective, measuring what’s going on during meditation is an important step in understanding how meditation works.
Dr. Lin's research leverages EEG and fMRI to study the brain mechanisms underlying the effects of mindfulness meditation on emotion regulation and cognitive control in the Cognitive Control & Psychopathology Lab at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL)
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