What are the step-by-step benefits of meditating? How does one’s live ‘change for the better’ after consistent practice?
I’m finding it difficult to associate scientific findings on how the brain changes to impact on day-to-day activities. How does meditating make a person ‘happier’?
In: Biology
There is a dispute as to whether meditation has any benefits over just taking some time away from others to relax, it is even possible that people who meditate can become more depressed than others. Like many things in life there isn’t an easy one size fits all solution and you should take a balanced approach on feeling happier and sorting your life out.
It slows our mind down and allows us to process everything more calmly and rationally which in turn allows us to channel our emotional energy better.
When I have a messy room, I walk in there sort of stand in the middle and before I start doing anything, I make a list of what I need to do to make the room “clean.” This helps me feel less overwhelmed and prioritize where to start.
Meditation is just like that, except the messy room is your mind. Things won’t seem as scary, and you will know what to focus on to make you most happy.
I meditate at a Buddhist temple as well, and with REALLY intense meditation sessions I can get so deep I can sort of “see” my mind, as I see myself in a mirror. Those can be profound moments. using my previous analogy, akin to finding $20 in your messy room or an object you thought lost. You gain some insight or perspective that you can walk away with.
First of all, the kind of happiness that people usually mean when they say that traditional meditation makes them happy isn’t really a joyful or euphoric kind of happiness. Meditation can definitely lead to joy and euphoria, but “happiness” in the context of traditional vipassana, zen, or loving-kindness meditation usually means something more along the lines of “at peace with my experience, whatever my emotion or specific state of mind”.
Traditional meditation can increase people’s self-reported sense of well-being (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3679190/), but the precise changes in the brain that allow this to happen are still being studied. Meditation changes the activity in certain brain areas, the patterns of connections between certain brain areas, and even the structure of brain cells in some ways. Here’s a review paper about this (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27429096/), and another that is more about brain imaging (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4109098/).
The short oversimplified version is that meditation decreases activity in a group of brain systems collectively known as the default mode network (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network). This network is usually very active when our mind is preoccupied with stressful thoughts about the future or ruminating about past experiences. If you quiet down this part of the brain, you can feel more at peace with your present experience (whether that experience is joy, sadness, pain, etc.). And interestingly, traditional meditation has different effects on the brain than sham meditation in which people are told to practice “meditating” according to techniques that are not actually traditional meditation (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4649004/).
I’m going to speak from personal experience, as someone who meditates daily and has for 7 years.
Before I started, I was anxious a lot of the time. Typical computer nerdy, introvert, overthinker, mind racing, absent minded, distracted, etc. Never ADHD, but just have a mind that revs at a much higher RPM than it needs to.
Meditation, for me, is quiet contemplation. I sit for 25 mins every morning, before coffee, close my eyes, no guided voice tracks or noise (unless I’m in public, like a plane/bus). My mind goes where it wants. If I become aware of my thoughts, I’ll bring it back to the black, but most of the time I’m not aware of how far my mind has traveled. It’s almost like I can watch my mind sort through itself. This is like condensed problem solving time, or reminiscing, or just purely zoning out. The longer I’ve done it, the less I have on my mental back burner. If something bothers people, it tends to just be there, in the back of their mind, eating up a little bit of mental energy all day long. Meditating allows time for my mind to focus in and work through things. It gives my mind 25 mins a day to clean up from yesterday, last week, last year, childhood. I almost never have lingering thoughts in this fashion any more, and feel significantly more confident and at ease in approaching stressful situations or the unknown.
I feel more at peace and calm after my meditation than I do after I wake up. If I were to rate my mental arousal levels, 1 being perfectly serene, and 10 being panic attack. I’d say I wake up at a 3 out of 10. So my baseline is a 3, and as your day goes on, it slowly ratchets up. Every little thing that happens, goes wrong, confuses you, plus fatigue, mental exhaustion, etc as your day goes on, your faculties are diminishing and arousal levels are rising. Hence why we have bad days that seem to get worse, and feel a need to wind down at the end of a day. When I meditate, it drops me down 1 or 2 points. So I wake at a 3, meditate shortly after, and now I’m at a 2 or even a 1. So then by the end of the day, instead of ending it at like a 6 or a 7, I’m at a 4 or a 5. So my day to day, my mind is just calmer, it doesn’t amp up as high, the anxious and restless thoughts are down.
Giving myself this daily 25 mins means I’ve literally been in a meditative state for over 50k minutes. That’s a LOT of time for my mind to process and work things out. Cumulatively, I’ve worked through almost all my issues or problems, at least as far as I can within the limits of my mind and not the outside world. This peace of mind provides huge amounts of calmness, clarity, patience, understanding, empathy, desire for growth. Meditation does not make me happy. Meditation alleviates all the things that get in the way of being able to find and appreciate happiness.
I’m not sure about meditation writ large, but personally I’ve always related meditation with quiet introspection. We have so many things going on in our lives, especially now, that we rarely have time to just sit in isolation and consider. Think about your life, think about who you are, think about what you want to do. Taking the time to refocus with yourself should make all paths in your life a little clearer. Happiness itself is more difficult to find, but I think meditating can at least help you get to a better vantage point.
It doesnt. It’s a bad strategy to try to control the masses. Only works for very gullible and low iq people
Here’s one thread of reasoning for the role of meditation in human happiness.
Note that this is philosophical/ethical (specifically, I’m calquing off of Thanissaro Bhikku’s books on Buddhist meditation) rather than scientific as such. But I’m taking this tack because it’s an explanation of what meditation is for within a particular framework. From this point of view, it’s not especially surprisingly that meditation exercises *done with no longer-term aim in mind* have only mild observable effects. (Just like randomly doing exercises probably makes you a bit fitter, but may have no consistent effect on your marathon times or your likelihood to win a boxing match.)
* Most of us are not very good at controlling our attention, letting it whip back and forth according to whatever comes up, as if it’s a muscle we do not have voluntary control over. Paying attention to what you WANT to pay attention to, at any given moment, is a skill. This skill can be practiced the same way any skill can be.
* Human pain/stress/disappointment/dissatisfaction comes from many sources. Physical pain and sickness is one kind, loss (of loved ones, health, etc.) is another. But quite a lot of human pain comes from paying too much attention to complex fabrications, often cultural, that we’ve built up over millennia of millions of people responding unskillfully to pain. Thinking about what other people are thinking of you. Jealous scenarios about what your lover might have been up to last night. Wondering whether you’ve lived up to your parent’s expectations. Replaying that stupid thing you said in 11th grade. Worrying about the inevitable decline of your bodily health. Picturing the life you might have led with the one that got away. In our modern world we spend increasingly little time in physical pain, but we still spend a LOT of time in our own minds — as a proportion of human suffering, these things just keep getting bigger!
* Experiencing these kinds of pain/stress/disappointment/dissatisfaction are *voluntary,* insofar as you invented them and pay attention to them, and fabricating and attending are actions under your potential voluntary control. Most people have undergone no specific training about responding to pain — in fact, most of what you see growing up is people responding *poorly* to pain/stress/disappointment/dissatisfaction, especially in ways that attempt to transfer their own pain onto other people. Most people you see are like junior firefighters handling a firehose that’s way too big for them, getting themselves and others unnecessarily wet. (They’re hard to not notice, because they’re getting everyone wet!)
* Meditation is an exercise about controlling your attention, and also training your discernment of your own mental states and habits. One goal for training your attention and discernment is to recognize when you’re causing unnecessary pain to yourself and others by your concentration on experiences and narratives that are not to the benefit of anybody. You can go further (like learning how to dismantle “real” physical pain) but if the question is “Why should I, who does not plan to be a monk, learn to meditate?”, not-hurting-yourself-and-others-with-your-out-of-control-firehose-of-pain is a great baseline to aim for.
Well, that ended up being a wall of text, but I wanted to communicate a point-of-view in which there’s not a particularly close causal connection between any given act of meditation and a feeling of happiness. Rather, it’s an psychological/ethical framework in which an appreciable fraction of human suffering is due to treating attention/fabrication/reaction as involuntary and untrainable. Meditation is part of the prescription for that.
Meditation initially starts off with two very simple goals:
1) Focus your thoughts on one single thing – as best as you can
2) Try to observe yourself thinking those thoughts
So what happens?
With enough persistence, from 1), your mind learns to focus better, no matter the amount of chaos surrounding you.
Obviously that’s a big deal!
From 2), your mind develops a newish analytical layer: Whatever you are thinking about, a part gets activated that observes and analyzes these thoughts like a 3rd party would.
And in time, you understand the root cause of those thoughts.
This makes a very coherent progression: Act of Focusing, Leading to limited thoughts, Leading to easier observation of those thoughts, Leading to understanding the genesis of those thoughts, Leading to understanding the specific thoughts that govern you.
It gives you a very clear view of stuff that you overthink / avoid.
This ends up leading to a natural increase in dispassion, and a reduction in the amount of shame our fears make us feel.
Net result is that we feel less unhappy – NOT more happy.
In fact a very happy person might very well start feeling more grounded and less effervescent after meditating! It’s obvious if you think about it.
What increases is your degree of REAL stoicism. Since most people in the world ate unhappy, it gets interpreted as increase in happiness.
The simple most effective answer is that it does three things.
1. It increases your attention span and ability to focus.
2. It teaches you how to control your own thoughts
3. It teaches you how to observe your thoughts and moods rather than having those control you.
For example say you’re waiting to see a really hot movie on opening night and someone cuts in line at the last second, and because of this you miss out by exactly 1 seat.
Someone adopt in meditation would notice the spark of anger and observe saying to themselves “boy am I pissed” then calmly go about possibly addressing it with the management staff.
Someone NOT adept would get angry and more than likely shout how that’s not fair, possibly yell at the usher how he let it happen and he’s not doing his job and demand a fix or storm out in a huff if a fix isn’t possible
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