Meditation: A Tool to Survive an Attention Economy

Today's world is full to the brim with distractions and devices pleading for your attention at all times. Ever since the technological revolution that shaped our now fast-paced society, finding tranquility can feel impossible. Moments of peace are vital to mental health and effective rest. A potent practice, known as meditation, has addressed this need around the world for centuries. Meditation can provide stress relief and a variety of benefits to your psychological well-being. These benefits include more than just relaxation as research has discovered a plethora of actual neurological changes with routine meditation. An attention economy can leave an impact on our brain, and meditation can be helpful in rewiring our brains back to health.

Neurological Reset

Where the chaos of modern life can influence our brains into unhealthy habits, meditation can create positive change known as neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is your brain's ability to develop new pathways and neural connections throughout your lifetime. Neuroplasticity allows meditation to create real changes to your cognitive functioning. Several studies have used imaging techniques, such as an MRI, to identify structural changes in the brain as a result of regular meditation. These structural changes specifically occurred in regions of the brain that involve self-awareness, attention, and emotional regulation.

In addition to changing structure, studies have identified changes in brain thickness due to regular meditation. One region of the brain found to be thicker (which is a good thing) after meditation is the prefrontal cortex. You may have heard of this part of this part, as it is the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, goal-planning, and impulse control.

Additionally, regular meditation has been connected with increased density in the hippocampus and the amygdala. The hippocampus is a "grey matter" part of the brain that is responsible for learning and memory. The amygdala responsible for processing fear, memory, rewards, and is connected to many other parts of the brain involving social communication and aggression. Meditation can help thicken the amygdala and hippocampus, providing several benefits to emotional and cognitive functioning. The brain itself will adapt and rewire in response to meditation, but what does its immediate effect FEEL like?

Coping & Stress Reduction

The mind and body are inherently connected. Chronic stress to the mind means chronic stress to the body. Today's frantic world provides plenty of stressors to manage, and meditation can provide a calming sensation. Meditation is an exercise that elicits a relaxation response in the brain, which then reduces stress in the body. When meditation activates the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), you will likely see a decrease in the physical sensations of stress such as muscle tension, heart rate, and blood pressure. Meditation allows you to calm your mind, thus calming your body.

A calming effect comes through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, which manages the body's response to stress. The HPA axis is involved in the production of "stress hormones" like cortisol and adrenaline, which are great for fleeing a wild animal, but not for taking a test or meeting friends for dinner. Meditation can affect the HPA axis and decrease the production of cortisol and adrenaline, which would decrease or eliminate the damaging effects of chronic stress. Regular meditation not only provides relaxation from daily stressors, but can create a constant buffer against the effects of stressful events.

Controlling Attention

In American society, we have become an attention economy. This means that whoever holds our attention can sell us products. Consequently, methods of reaching the consumer have creeped into every space of our day. As a result, we find ourselves distracted and disconnected at home, at work, and even in bed. This is detrimental to our mental health and contributes to conditions such as anxiety and depression. To address this effect and sustain ourselves, we must control our attention and ground ourselves in the current moment.

Grounding yourself means connecting to your current environment and focusing your attention on one task at a time. Meditation can allow you to sustain this focus and increase your attentional control. Specifically, mindfulness meditations can provide a firm foundation for staying concentrated throughout the day. If practiced on a regular basis, mindfulness meditations can positively affect the brain's attention centers, thus improving your focus and ability to control your attention.

This improvement in focus comes from regular meditations' effect on the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Meditation can contribute to a neurological mechanism known as "sustained attention" which allows you to focus on a task or situation for longer periods of time before becoming distracted. The ACC is responsible for attention allocation, impulse control, and decision-making while the DLPFC is responsible for attention, memory, and time planning. Meditation can strengthen the networks in these areas of the brain, resulting in better control of your attention in a world of distractions.

Managing Emotions

Emotions are difficult to master, but managing them is crucial to daily functioning. In addition to physically calming down and honing our attention, meditation can benefit our health by increasing emotional resilience. This means that meditation can help you become comfortable with emotions and what to do with them. Looking our emotions in the face is not always pleasant, but necessary, and meditation allows you to do just that. To develop an accepting approach towards your emotions with greater respect for yourself and greater awareness of your existence.

Coming to peace with your emotions can lead to healthy neurological changes. Meditation studies have found that regular meditation impacts the brain's emotional processing centers. The amygdala was shown to be less reactive to emotional stimuli and also more strongly connected to prefrontal areas, which are also involved in decision making, impulse control, and emotion regulation. By reducing internal reactivity to emotional stimuli, and strengthening connections between emotions and good judgment, meditation can create a rewiring of the brain that promotes greater emotional composure and a greater ability to cope with stressors.

Practice Makes Mindfulness

Meditation is not easy. In fact, there are many situations in which a deep dive into meditation may actually be counterproductive. It's best to approach meditation when you are ready. Meditation utilizes neuroplasticity to increase your ability to cope with stress, to control your attention, and manage your emotions. In the age of technology and attention economies, it's crucial to protect the health of your body and your brain. If you can incorporate meditation into your daily life, there's a chance you could experience a profoundly deep feeling of peace, understanding, and balance.

Thank You for Reading!

Additional Materials

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4471247/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7359050/

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3916