'I wonder as I wander.' For some people, it's more a case of, 'I wander as I wonder.' For others -- far too many, in fact -- it's simply, 'I wander as I wander.'
A new study from the University of Waterloo set
out to see whether a short bout of mindfulness training might help focus the
minds of people who are clinically anxious.
‘Our results indicate that mindfulness training
may have protective effects on mind wandering for anxious individuals,’ said
study author Mengran Xu, pictured right, in a statement. ‘We also found that
meditation practice appears to help anxious people to shift their attention
from their own internal worries to the present-moment external world, which
enables better focus on a task at hand.’
Previous studies have found that mindfulness
meditation can quell the mind’s tendency to wander, by quieting a region of the
brain known as the default mode network (DMN)—the part of the brain
that’s ‘on’ when our minds are just wandering about. Other studies have shown its
physical effects on the brain over time, not the least of which is its
connection to greater volume in areas like the hippocampus, which in part
governs emotion regulation (and is smaller in depressed people) and reduced
volume in the amygdala, which plays a central role in stress and fear. And
a study last month found that the two classic forms of meditation, focused
attention and open monitoring, have the capacity to reduce the number of ‘intrusive’
thoughts people had when they were asked to conjure up a personal fear.
Study: Xu M, Purdon C, Seli P and Smilek D. ‘Mindfulness
and mind wandering: The protective effects of brief meditation in anxious
individuals.’ Consciousness
and Cognition. Volume 51,
May 2017, pp 157-165.
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