by Jo Marchant
Instead of noticing our surroundings, we’re caught up in our mental world. This can be a happy experience: daydreaming about a luxury vacation, perhaps, or planning the perfect birthday present for a friend. But we can also conjure up negative, stressful situations. We might be eating a delicious meal, bathing our kids or walking along a beach, but in our heads we’re replaying yesterday’s argument or stressing about tomorrow’s work commitments, to an extent far beyond what’s actually useful.
Getting lost in such brooding or worry in itself makes us stressed, but it also means that we fail to notice positive things in the world around us that might temper our anxiety. Getting ready for work in the morning, already immersed in the struggles of the day ahead, we’re oblivious to the comforting warmth of our tea; a great song on the radio; our child’s smile. “You can live your life constantly missing your moments,” says Williams. We’re in a bubble, cutting ourselves off from the small beauties and pleasures that make life worthwhile.
If we’re not careful, mind and body can feed off each other in a downwards spiral, says Williams. Negative thoughts trigger stress responses in the body. But the process works in reverse too: when we’re in fight-or-flight mode, the brain becomes hyperalert to threat. The more stressed we feel, the more likely we are to come up with negative thoughts.
Mindfulness meditation helps to stop that from happening. Becoming more aware of our own thoughts allows us to step back and realize that a negative or stressful notion doesn’t necessarily represent reality, explains Williams. We don’t have to respond emotionally. It’s just spontaneous background chatter generated by the brain. And once we’ve recognized this, we can calm that chatter down.
Brain imaging studies support this idea. For example Giuseppe Pagnoni, a neuroscientist at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy, scanned the brains of people experienced in Zen meditation, which, like mindfulness meditation, involves noticing thoughts and then dismissing them. Our internal monologue of spontaneous thoughts is thought to be generated by a set of brain regions called the “default mode network,” which is most active when we’re not focused on any external tasks. Pagnoni found that the meditators could down-regulate the activity of this network, and that they were able to return to this calm state more quickly than inexperienced controls after being distracted.3
Having thoughts about the world has put us one step ahead of the zebra—but at a cost. We can become worn down by concerns over things that have already happened, haven’t happened yet, or might never happen at all. Mindfulness, it seems, may put us another step ahead—we can have thoughts, but we don’t have to be ruled by them.
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AT FIRST, despite the gorgeous view, my mind seems desperate to be anywhere but on this beach. It’s wriggling and darting, refusing to be silenced, throwing thoughts and images in front of me in quick succession. Eggs (I’m planning where to get breakfast), cab times (I’ve got a flight to catch), interview questions (I’m meeting a researcher this afternoon). Each one is calling me, tempting me to follow, to become lost in its twists and turns.
Every time I reject a chain of thought, another quickly follows, as if my mind is a market trader desperate to sell something: “You don’t like this one? Then try this!” A red jacket I bought the last time I walked down this beach. What presents to buy for my kids back home.
In an attempt to banish this mental whirlwind, I focus on the details of the scene in front of me, eyes fixed resolutely ahead. At first, the beach seems busy. Waves splash and splash, rumbling like gentle thunder. Sanderlings wheel along the shoreline. Joggers and dog walkers cross my field of vision, while groups of pelicans hang out on the water before taking wing or floating out of sight. A surfer, silhouetted black against the sky, bobs about for 20 minutes or so before he, too, is gone.
I’m immersed for a while but as time stretches on, I start to feel strangely detached from this shoreline activity. I imagine that the birds and joggers and surfers are like my thoughts; they inhabit different forms and timescales, but in the end, they all pass. They start to seem less important somehow, less real, and instead of watching them come and go, I find myself focusing farther out towards the horizon. I’m drawn to its beguiling silence, and its unwavering line of deep, still blue.
By the end of the hour, my limbs are aching and the morning sun is hot on my cheek. As I look up and down the beach after this first foray, I do feel calm and strangely connected; more a part of the larger landscape, perhaps, and less concerned with the personal minutiae of my day. I like the idea of being free of negative thoughts (who wouldn’t?) and I can see that over time, this might be a potent technique for gaining a different perspective on life. But does it really work? Most of us aren’t monks, and we can’t meditate all the time. Can a few short sessions really protect us from—or even reverse—the ravages of stress? And can that in turn affect our physical health?
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GARETH WALKER knows something about how the past and future can torment us. Ten years ago, he was working in Sheffield, northern England, as a police officer, or as he puts it, a “bobby on the beat.” The 26-year-old enjoyed his active job, and in his spare time he loved going out into the hills and walking through the beautiful Yorkshire dales.
Then one morning in 2006, Gareth woke to find that the vision in his left eye was blurry. His optician couldn’t find anything wrong. His doctor prescribed antibiotics for conjunctivitis, but it made no difference. Eventually he had an MRI scan, and the neurologist dropped a bombshell: Gareth’s immune system was attacking his optic nerve. The most likely explanation was that he was suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS).
A chronic condition in which aberrant inflammation gradually destroys the nervous system, MS can cause wide-ranging symptoms as a patient gradually loses control over his or her body. One by one, limbs, eyes, bowel and bladder can stop working. Patients also suffer pain and fatigue, as well as cognitive and emotional problems—especially depression. MS generally starts as a “relapsing remitting” form, in which attacks come on suddenly then fade. Eventually, however, the condition becomes “progressive,” meaning that the damage steadily gets worse and worse. There are few effective treatments and no cure.
It takes two such bouts of inflammation to diagnose MS, because occasionally people have just one attack then suffer no further problems. But if anything else happened, Gareth’s neurologist warned, he would be faced with inexorable, worsening disability. For three years, Gareth tried to continue living a normal life. Then, in 2009, he started to lose control of his bladder. In 2010, he was formally diagnosed with MS.
He describes the time following the diagnosis as “horrifically stressful.” Soon afterwards, Gareth started to have trouble walking, and had to take sick leave from the job he loved. And that June, he became a father.
He recalls that in August 2010, he took his wife and son for a week’s vacation, staying in a cottage in the picturesque village of Tosside. It was a chance to get away as a family and to celebrate the new baby. One sunny day, they had a picnic in a nearby nature reserve, eating their sandwiches on a bench by a stream. Gareth’s wife suggested they walk to the water, just a few feet away down a shallow but slightly rocky path. As Gareth began to pick his way across the rocks, he felt unsteady on his feet, as if he might fall.
Suddenly it hit him. If he was struggling now, how would he be in a few years’ time? He looked at his precious two-month-old boy and was struck by the thought that he would never join his son on walks like this. He would never skim stones with him, or play football with him, or countless other things that normal dads do with their kids. Instead, he’d be in a wheelchair, crippled and helpless. That single moment ruined what could have been an idyllic family celebration, and started an avalanche of fears and imaginings that he couldn’t escape.
“Every dream that I’d had about the future was suddenly taken from me,” he says. “I didn’t know what to do. It was a very, very tragic time for me.”4
Five years on, however, Gareth is apparently far from despair; in fact he says he is happier than he has ever been. He credits mindfulness meditation with transforming his life and is now one of its most influential advocates, with his own website and more than 60,000 followers on Twitter. I’ve arranged to meet him to find out more about this incredible turnaround.
He picks me up from the train station in his home of Barnsley, a former mining town in the heart of Yorkshire. It’s lunchtime on a cold January day, and he immediately drives me out of town past snow-coated fields, to the rural village of Silkstone. There’s nowhere nice to eat in Barnsley, he apologizes.
Now 36, Gareth is friendly, relaxed and down to earth, with steady gray eyes and flat northern vowels. Dressed in a red sweater and jeans, he’s slim but not to the point of frailness. He chats—about mindfulness, he could talk about its benefits all day, he says—until we arrive at our lunch spot. He looks for a disabled space, then uses a crutch to help him across the short distance from the parking lot to the café.
When we’re settled, I ask Gareth how he discovered mindfulness. Shortly after that disastrous walk to the stream, he says, someone recommended it to him as a way to cope with the stress of being diagnosed with MS. “I didn’t have a clue how to meditate,” he tells me. “I’d heard the word but I just thought it was something for hippies.” So he picked up a bestselling guide to mindfulness by an American author named Jon Kabat-Zinn: Wherever You Go, There You Are.
He started by meditating five minutes at a time, in a fairly ad hoc way. He would close his eyes and count his breaths in and out. If he had a thought before he got to ten, he went back to the beginning and started again. Nothing much happened at first. But after a few months, he noticed a change.
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IF ELIZABETH BLACKBURN leapt across a canyon between psychiatry and biochemistry in her study of telomeres, the rift that Kabat-Zinn tackled was even wider. A molecular biologist and yoga teacher from Massachusetts, he was convinced that the meditation he practiced as part of his Buddhist faith could help people for whom there was little that physicians could do; those who were dying, for example, or ravaged by pain. But he knew that doctors would never prescribe a religious practice. Then one day, while meditating on a retreat, he had a vision. He would reinvent mindfulness, stripping out its religious and spiritual aspects, to make it palatable to the medical profession.
In 1979, he developed an eight-week course that included elements of mindfulness meditation as well as relaxation techniques and hatha yoga. He called it mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), and founded a clinic at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “He told the doctors in the hospital, give me your patients for whom you have no hope,” says Trudy Goodman, who runs InsightLA, the Buddhist group I joined on Santa Monica beach, and who worked with Kabat-Zinn at the time. “People sent them, they didn’t know what else to do with them. Some people’s pain eased. Some people died peacefully.”5
Secularizing meditation was a risky strategy at the time. “People said, ‘You are watering down the teachings, it will come to no good,’ ” says Goodman. “It was unheard of to extract mindfulness from the Buddhism that we were all studying.” But it transformed the practice from a niche religious method into a cultural phenomenon.
Since Kabat-Zinn founded his clinic, more than 20,000 people have completed his eight-week program. MBSR has been featured in countless newspaper and magazine articles, and in television programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), nearly one in ten American adults now meditate.6 There is a dedicated monthly magazine, called Mindful, and hundreds of mindfulness apps. Searching for “mindfulness” on Amazon turns up nearly 19,000 books and DVDs, from spiritual journeys to practical stress reduction plans and even exercises for kids, while mindfulness sessions and lectures are run everywhere from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill.7
This is in large part because distancing mindfulness from its religious origins has opened the door to scientific studies of its potential benefits, further legitimizing the technique. There have now been hundreds of randomized controlled trials of mindfulness-based therapies. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses consistently conclude that MBSR can reduce chronic pain and anxiety, and that it reduces stress and improves quality of life in everyone from cancer survivors to healthy volunteers.8
Some are concerned by this explosion in popularity. Some Buddhist teachers complain that mindfulness has become commercialized, and that the subtleties of what it should mean have been lost.9 Psychologists have warned that mindfulness classes are increasingly being offered by under-qualified teachers presenting themselves as experts, while news headlines describe tragic consequences in vulnerable participants attending meditation retreats: during one such course in the Arizona desert, for example, participants had to meditate for long periods of time without food or water before attending a ceremony in a “sweat lodge”—three died and 18 were hospitalized with injuries ranging from heat exhaustion to kidney failure.10
Meanwhile Kristin Barker, a sociologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, sees the movement as one enormous guilt trip, describing mindfulness meditation as “do-it-yourself medicalization of every moment.”11 She highlights advice from Kabat-Zinn, such as to meditate “as if your life depended on it, because it does to such a profound extent.” The idea that our health depends on being mindful all the time turns all of us into patients who need treatment to fix our unhealthy thoughts, she warns, and makes us feel like failures if we don’t achieve this blissful state.
Gareth laughs off that last point. “Nobody can be mindful all the time,” he says.12 After a few months of meditating for just five minutes a day, though, he says he started finding it easier to stay in the present moment. As a result he felt more patient, and was less frustrated by physical challenges such as climbing the stairs. “If I could not get too far ahead of myself and just stay in the moment, things got a lot easier,” he says. After that, he started meditating for longer periods, and claims that the benefits were “astronomical.”
Most of the agony in having MS comes from the past or the future, he explains. After being diagnosed, he was tormented by thoughts about all the things he used to love—his job, rambling—that he would never do again, and about the future, such as the fear that if MS takes his eyesight, he won’t see his kids grow up (he now has two sons); or that he will have to suffer unbearable pain.
“I have to pull myself back from those thoughts countless times in any given day,” he says. And he believes that his regular mindfulness training makes this easier to do. “I’m only a 36-year-old man, how on earth am I going to be in ten years’ time? That story starts but I never let it get any further.” If he can stay in the present moment and focus on what’s happening around him, he says, most of the agony of his condition goes away and life is good—even great.
Gareth now meditates for half an hour every day. He sets his alarm early and meditates sitting up in bed, either focusing on his breath, or with headphones on, keeping his attention on the music. But he also tries to integrate mindfulness into his life. “If my son comes up and interrupts then he becomes the subject of the meditation.” This means that instead of allowing himself to become distracted while playing, he gives all of his attention to his son.
As well as helping him to enjoy and appreciate the life he has, including time with his children, Gareth believes that mindfulness has helped him to become more tolerant and empathic: “You can only empathize with someone when you notice things—like a frown on your partner’s face—and mindfulness is about noticing things.”
It also helps him to cope with pain. Gareth suffers from trigeminal neuralgia: episodes of intense stabbing pain—like an ice pick, he says—into the side of his face. These are predicted to get worse as his condition progresses. He tells me a Buddhist story about how pain has two arrows: the physical pain, and then the story we attach to that pain. The metaphor reminds m
e of the burn patients we met earlier whose pain is magnified by anxiety and fear. But rather than distracting themselves from pain with a tool like Snow World, mindfulness meditators aim to remove the emotional content by meeting pain head on.
“You let the pain in,” explains Gareth. “You embrace the pain, you invite it in for a cup of tea and give it a cuddle. It sounds crazy, but it really works. The effects of the episodes of pain that I have are far, far less.”
What about fatigue, I ask? It’s usually a big problem for MS patients. Gareth says he used to feel exhausted but not since he started meditating. He now leads a busy life by any standards; as well as juggling parenthood and coping with his condition he is back at work full-time—now at a desk job investigating complaints against the police. And he still runs his website, Everyday Mindfulness,13 with its associated Twitter account. (His most retweeted quote is from the Buddha: “Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”)
“People think of meditation as a time consumer, but the opposite is true,” he says. “It is a time provider, because of all the time that we don’t spend following useless trains of thought. I wouldn’t be able to lead the life that I lead now if it weren’t for meditation.”
I’m not sure I really “got” the point of meditation until talking to Gareth. It’s not a quick fix, requiring hours of regular practice, and more trials are needed to establish exactly who it helps and how. But here, munching sandwiches in the snowy Yorkshire dales and listening to this father and police officer describing daily pain, stress and fear that dwarfs anything I have to deal with, I can’t help thinking that if mindfulness allows him to face his demons with courage, and even joy, then it must be a pretty powerful tool.
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IT’S A bright February morning, and I’m jiggling about self-consciously in a room full of strangers. This is the Mood Disorders Center at the University of Exeter, U.K., and those here with me hope that by heading off stressful thoughts, mindfulness can protect them against the life-threatening despair of major depression.
