Fortunately, though, meditation may reverse these processes. The positive effects of meditation reach down all the way to the DNA level—even after just a few weeks of meditation, you can see reduced expression of pro-inflammatory genes in white blood cells. Genes associated with antiviral protection, on the other hand, get upregulated (their expression is increased). Think of it as playing with the volume knob on the radio: when you meditate, the level of inflammation goes down, while the power of your virus-fighting squads goes up. So here is a tip: try meditation before your next round of vaccinations. Experiments with the flu vaccine confirm that this can help produce higher antibody titres, lowering the chances of you ending up sick despite the injection. Unfortunately, fifteen minutes of Zen in the doctor’s office while you await your inoculations won’t do the trick. You need to practise for at least a few weeks ahead of time.
In case vaccinations make you think of needles, and needles make you think of pain, what a short meditation session could help you with is the level of prick-induced suffering you might experience. In one experiment, volunteers had to rate how much it hurt them when researchers applied a pad heated to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (49°C) to their leg—about as scorching as the water from a hot water tap. The study participants, who had no prior experience with meditation, were randomly divided into groups: some were instructed to meditate as their limbs were being semi-tortured, while others read excerpts from an eighteenth-century publication with a high boredom potential called The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. The results showed that a short session of mindfulness meditation reduced the perception of pain by 27 percent compared to the experience of a control group who received no special instructions. The book, meanwhile, made it about 14 percent worse. The benefits of meditation were not exclusively due to a placebo effect, either. Some volunteers had a sham analgesic cream applied to their legs before the pad was put in use, and their pain ratings were lower by only 11 percent—better than the book but not as good as meditation.
Some experiments suggest that meditation can work on pain in a similar fashion to ibuprofen (although the magnitude of the effect is still mostly unknown). When people with lots of meditation experience go for an intense one-day retreat, you can see changes in the expression of their COX2 gene. Aspirin and ibuprofen also work to dull aches because they target COX2, putting brakes on the pain-promoting enzymes it helps churn out.
Admittedly, there is still not enough evidence to claim that all meditation is a miracle drug. For now, the authors of a 2016 review published in the prestigious Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences caution against “exaggerating the positive effects” of meditation on the immune system. Something is obviously there, but how much exactly, we don’t yet know. As scientists love to say, “more research is needed.”
The type of meditation that has been the most studied so far is mindfulness meditation. That’s the very thing that is so in vogue all over the internet, from Pinterest to gossip columns on the lives of California celebrities. And no, it’s not the same as mindfulness. Mindfulness is simply being aware of the present moment, whether it’s smelling the roses or listening to the sound of running water as you do the dishes.
Mindfulness meditation, by contrast, is a practice that takes time and commitment, and which helps you become more mindful in your everyday life. Much of the research is based on something even more precise, mindfulness-based stress reduction, an eight-week program developed back in the 1970s by Jon Kabat-Zinn, professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. These days the name Kabat-Zinn and mindfulness are utterly linked (take any decent book on mindfulness and chances are, Kabat-Zinn wrote the introduction). The program itself involves intensive training in mindfulness meditation, with its key ingredients being acceptance and lack of judgement. Kabat-Zinn says our thoughts are like a waterfall, and mindfulness is like finding a cave behind the cascade: “We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.”
While practising mindfulness meditation, you are not supposed to force your mind into blankness. When your thoughts wander, and they almost always do—to your shopping list or your unanswered emails—you don’t judge yourself; you don’t say, “I’m terrible at meditation.” Instead you just try to return to the present moment, to observing sensations in your body. You don’t strive to change these sensations, either. If your left toe hurts, you don’t try to diminish the pain. You accept it.
Besides many promising direct links between mindfulness training and health, MSBR and related programs may influence our lifespans and physical wellness in a circular way. Mindfulness makes people ruminate less. It boosts empathy. Weirdly enough, mindfulness meditation can also push people to eat more veggies and fruits—and it’s not just that the yoga types usually love kale smoothies anyway, since randomized trials show these effects, too. The explanation may lie in the way practising mindful attention helps people fight cravings. Instead of just following that hollow feeling in your mouth prompting you to reach for a cookie, you acknowledge it, observe it, and let it go—and then you reach for an apple instead.
In a similar fashion, mindfulness has been shown to quench cravings for cigarettes, a finding confirmed by neuroimaging studies. When smokers who practise meditation look at images of people puffing tobacco, craving-related areas of their brains don’t light up as much as they do in other nicotine addicts. For each day per week of meditation practice, smokers light up 1.52 fewer cigarettes. This may not seem like much, but when you consider that a single cigarette shortens lifespan by eleven minutes, daily meditation may add about two hours of life each and every week. As a bonus, these mindfulness-sponsored extra days may also prove to be more pleasant—that’s because mindfulness-based stress reduction programs help alleviate feelings of loneliness. Romantic couples may thrive on these programs as well. The more mindful one partner is, the less likely they are to act in an overly negative or aggressive way during conflicts, and they will also be more forgiving.
One thing that’s particularly damaging to relationships is what psychologists refer to as “stress spillover.” Imagine you had a bad day at work. Your boss was unfair, your colleagues were annoying, your projects fell through. You come home grumpy. The moment you cross the threshold, your partner starts throwing some minor household grievance at you (perhaps the car needs to be fixed). You feel your emotions boiling, and you explode. A nasty fight follows. Mindfulness interventions, meanwhile, make people more aware of their feelings and more collected in their responses—instead of blowing up at your partner about the car, you might just say that you are upset after work and need time to yourself. The fight is averted.
Another mechanism through which mindfulness-based stress reduction may improve relationships is related to the key ingredients of mindfulness: non-judgement and acceptance. By honing acceptance skills during meditation, partners may become more tolerant of their loved ones’ shortcomings and imperfections. Instead of dwelling on the dirty socks left in the middle of the room, you just breathe deeply and let it go. Studies confirm that greater levels of mindfulness correlate to greater satisfaction in romantic relationships. Randomized experiments take it even further, showing that eight-week-long mindfulness programs can increase relationship satisfaction. Now consider that a good marriage can reduce mortality by a staggering 49 percent (to a healthy diet’s 26 percent or so), and you see why mindfulness in relationships could also be good for your centenarian potential.
There is one caveat, however. Some psychologists suggest that meditation may work only for committed relationships—no matter if they are experiencing temporary troubles or just want to add to their happiness. If a couple is not really into staying together in the first place, enhanced mindfulness could backfire. Imagine Mr. A, who for a few years now has been in an informal relationship with Ms. B. Mr. A is not exactly happy with how the whole thing is going, but he also can’t pinpoint what’s wrong. In truth, he doesn�
��t give the relationship much thought at all. They fight, they make up, life goes on. Then, one day, Mr. A signs up for a mindfulness course. After a couple of weeks he becomes more mindful of his own thoughts and feelings. He starts to notice how his stomach clenches every time Ms. B comes home from work. He picks up on more negative undertones in her comments. He realizes he is no longer happy. He decides to leave.
Assuming lack of commitment is not an issue, one type of meditation that is often recommended for couples is something called “loving-kindness.” It may sound New Agey, but the effects of this practice can be seen in brain activation patterns and in DNA changes. Loving-kindness involves thinking compassionate thoughts directed at other people, like, “may XY be happy,” “may XY be healthy,” and so on. The exercise is repeated by placing different individuals as the XY, from your loved ones and acquaintances (your mail carrier), to strangers (the old lady on the bus), and then to people you actually dislike (your unfair boss). Such training has been shown to change brain activation in areas responsible for empathy and pain perception.
While research on direct physical effects of loving-kindness is still meagre, evidence of its potential role as a tool for increasing social connectedness is more convincing. This particular type of intervention not only increases empathy but also makes people less biased and simply nicer. A common theme reported by participants after loving-kindness trainings are changes in their relationships. One professional woman who used to easily lose her temper with her elderly mother confessed, “When I enter her room now, I can feel myself soften.” After two weeks of loving-kindness meditation, people are willing to donate almost twice as much money as are those assigned to other personality development interventions. This hike in charity also coincides with changes in brain responses to suffering. And since empathy, charity donations, and social connections are all important for longevity, these findings are likely not trivial.
What may be more questionable in terms of health effects is an intervention that is often sold alongside loving-kindness: gratitude journalling. In fact, it may be quite oversold. Take a look at the shelves of any large bookstore and you will see plenty of publications touting life-changing results of gratitude, like Living in Gratitude: A Journey that Will Change Your Life, or Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks. Handy gratitude journals, with space to scribble down your thoughts each day, promise to make giving thanks easier and aesthetically pleasant—even glitter is possible if you are into stuff like that. In your journal or in your head, you are supposed to count your blessings. Write or think what you are grateful for: for being healthy, for having a warm house, for having enough food not to go hungry, for sunshine and birds, for smooth driving on the Cross Bronx Expressway (which supposedly borders on a miracle).
You can also compose a thank-you letter to someone who was nice to you or even pay them a “gratitude visit.” Just to make it clear: gratitude is not a type of meditation. It’s supposed to work through fostering positive emotions while quelling stress and worry. But the evidence on the physiological effects of gratitude is mixed. Most of the self-help literature appears to be based on a few studies conducted by the same team of researchers back in 2003. They did indeed conclude that students who, for two and a half months, wrote down five things per week they could be thankful for, be it “waking up this morning” or “the Rolling Stones” (a real example), experienced fewer symptoms of physical illness as a result. Later on a number of experiments reported better sleep, fewer headaches, and lower levels of inflammatory biomarkers in grateful people, but many other trials showed no effects of gratitude on health. A 2017 review of thirty-eight studies concluded that “those expecting huge and lasting gains, or ‘life-changing’ outcomes from the activity, are likely to be disappointed.”
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying not to do it. If you enjoy it, practising gratitude certainly won’t hurt you. It will quite likely make you a nicer person, and it may even improve your health. Yet if your time or your mental resources are limited, there are things you can try for “life-changing outcomes” that have stronger scientific evidence behind them—like mindful meditation or yoga.
The Colour of Pain
One of my husband’s work colleagues, Thorbjørn Knudsen, besides being an outstanding academic researcher, is also a skilful yogi. So skilful in fact that he was a subject of studies conducted in Germany on mind-body connections.
Knudsen looks as unlike the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi–standard as possible: when I talk with him he is dressed in a white collared shirt and dark jeans. He is clean-shaven, with short, neat hair and understated glasses. Very business school prof, very not yogi. Yet Knudsen is a living proof that you don’t need flowing robes and sandals to impress others with your yoga skills. He certainly did leave a lasting impression on the researchers at the University Hospital of Cologne—one of the largest medical institutions in Germany. For the experiments there Knudsen engaged in a practice called Nadi Shodhana, which is Sanskrit for “channel purification.” It involves breathing through alternate nostrils: in through the left one, out through the right, in and out, as slowly as possible.
He was seated in a bland research room, covered in a flowered orange blanket to keep warm, while his head was plastered all over with electrodes for measuring brain activity. As he did his Nadi Shodhana, the scientists also measured Knudsen’s heart rate and his blood pressure, which he was supposed to try lower. To get precise results, they asked to put a catheter through the blood vessels in his arms all the way to his heart. Knudsen was unexcited about the whole catheter idea: “Part of the yoga training was how to deal with pain, but still I was like, ‘Hmmm…Okay,’ ” he says.
Once he agreed to the procedure and the catheter went in, the measurements began. Knudsen kept breathing. Left nostril. Right nostril. Slow, slow, very slow. Suddenly, a commotion in the lab caught his attention. “There was this one guy observing it from the outside, and he storms in and shouts ‘Stop! Stop!’ ” he recalls. Knudsen had managed to lower his blood pressure to an astoundingly low 40 over 20, causing the scientists to panic. They were worried he was close to death or at least to passing out. But Knudsen was surprised by the whole fuss. He was perfectly fine—just doing his yoga. The researchers admitted to him after the experiment that they’d never seen such blood pressure–lowering ability before.
In another trial at the same lab, Knudsen’s body was assaulted with extreme noise, with needles, and with a bucketful of ice, all to check whether there would be any disturbance in his brainwaves as he meditated. There wasn’t. Nothing could break the calm pattern of his brain activity.
In everyday life, Knudsen sometimes likes to play with his mind-body abilities. “At some point I wanted to see how far I could go,” he says. He had a tooth in need of a root canal, so he asked his dentist to do the procedure without anaesthesia. To deal with the pain, Knudsen used a yoga practice called pratyahara, which means literally “gaining mastery over external influences.” First, you meditate to relax. Then, in that relaxed state, “you treat the pain as a person that’s very interesting to you,” Knudsen says. “It has a colour, it has a sound, it has a smell, taste. You do not force the mind to stop thinking of the pain. On the contrary, you let your mind fully experience that pain while, at the same time, you observe your mind. At some point, the mind loses interest in the pain in the same way you may lose interest in some annoying person who is sitting next to you on the plane.” Although, he admits that the pain of the root canal treatment was challenging, pratyahara made it manageable.
Already as many as one in twenty-five Americans and one in twenty-six Canadians practise yoga, and half a million Britons do so regularly, yet for most it certainly doesn’t mean pratyahara or alternate nostril breathing. They are also unlikely to be capable of managing root canal pain with their skills. In all probability, though, their health does profit from all the yoga they do—and, according to one review of studies, poten
tially more so than if they simply replaced their practice with some other form of exercise, like walking or stretching. The review concluded that “yoga interventions appear to be equal or superior to exercise in nearly every outcome measured except those involving physical fitness.” So if your goal is to complete an Ironman triathlon, then yoga is not necessarily for you, but if you want to simply stay healthy, go for it. Yoga may be good for the management of diabetes and the boosting of the immune system; and, for patients with fibromyalgia, yoga can bring greater relief of symptoms than FDA-recommended drug therapies.
Yoga might be particularly beneficial for heart rate variability—that easily measurable indicator of the proper functioning of your fight-and-flight response. A curious series of experiments involving albino rats showed that if you teach the animals something resembling yoga breathing, they’ll become more stress-resistant. Training rats in the rodent equivalent of pranayama, breath-control yoga, doesn’t involve sitting on exercise mats around a Maharishi Mahesh Yogi look-alike and sipping organic matcha. It involves conditioning them in a piece of lab equipment with a rather evil-sounding name, a “plethysmography chamber,” which resembles a small Plexiglas space rocket for rats. If you place an animal inside that space rocket, it will measure the creature’s respiratory rate, which is basically the number of inhalations and exhalations it does per minute.
To practise control over their respiratory rate, the rodents were trained with unpleasant stroboscopic LED lights that flooded their plethysmography chambers from above and below. The glare would turn off only if the animal managed to slow down its breathing to eighty breaths per minute or less. A control group of rodents, meanwhile, had to endure the lights turning on and off haphazardly, no matter what they did. Such two-hour sessions went on for a month, five times per week (life’s not easy when you are a lab rat).
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