The immediate benefits of mindful meditation

What's surprising, at least to scientists, is that the benefits from 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 that's the fact that it has to do with the

fact that we're also multitasking these days. You know, 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 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, that 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 wrap 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 the trigger point for the fight or flight or freeze response It 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

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 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

And 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 why And then they did their daily ritual of what they

call 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

one, two, three on the in-breath, one, two, three on the out-breath. This is basically the beginning

of mindfulness or meditation for kids. You know, cognitive science would 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're 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

that major studies are underway. We're waiting for those results, but I think they're promising