Mind, Body, Healing

I’m not alone in filling my head with abstract thoughts, says Mark Williams, emeritus professor of clinical psychology at the University of Oxford, U.K. He’s an expert in the psychological effects of meditation, and co-author of a 2011 book called Mindfulness that explains how training the mind to be more aware can reduce stress and anxiety in daily life. It became a surprise bestseller, with testimonials from celebrities such as Ruby Wax and Goldie Hawn.

“Most of us are preoccupied moment by moment, we’re not actually aware of where we are or what we’re doing,” he tells me. “We’re usually planning the future, or re-running something that has happened.” When you’re doing the dishes, for example, you might be thinking about the cup of tea you’re going to have. When you’re drinking the tea, you’re planning your trip to the supermarket. When you’re driving to the supermarket, you’re thinking about what you’re going to buy.

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.

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.

This is an extract from Jo Marchant's Cure published by Crown