Meditation: mental exercise can change the brain in just two minutes

You're not alone: Many people who sit down to meditate feel like their mind starts to wander within seconds. They can't relax and immediately want to give up.

But research suggests that if you can persist for just a few minutes, your brain can begin to change in significant ways - and these changes can peak after just about seven minutes of meditation.

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"We observed that this spike lasts up to 15 minutes," said Dr. Balachundhar Subramaniam, professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, who co-led the study published earlier this year in the journal Mindfulness.

Meditation, often described as a mind-body integration practice, involves giving your brain a break from the constant noise. There are different types of meditation; The new study focused on a type called breath watching, a focused attention meditation, which can mean remaining in a calm state and focusing on your breathing, repeating a prayer or mantra, or simply sitting silently and letting thoughts pass without trying to reason about them.

Meditation has become increasingly popular in the United States, with an estimated 1 in 5 adults - approximately 60.5 million people - reporting that they have practiced meditation in 2021.

A growing body of research shows that meditation can help reduce anxiety, manage stress, relieve pain and improve sleep quality, among other health benefits. The new study suggests that changes in brain waves may play a hidden role in generating these benefits, and just a few minutes can begin to calm your mind.

What happens in a brain during meditation?
The study included 103 adults who were asked to meditate while their brain activity was monitored using an electroencephalogram or EEG, a test that measures electrical patterns in the brain through sensors placed on the scalp.

Participants had varying levels of meditation experience, from beginners to advanced practitioners, and were instructed to focus on their breathing during practice. EEG results showed that significant changes in brain waves emerged in just a few minutes of meditation.

The devices detected increases in brain waves associated with relaxation and concentration - theta, theta-alpha, alpha and beta-1 waves - while recording decreases in delta and gamma-1 waves, suggesting less drowsiness and less daydreaming. The data showed no changes in beta-2 brainwave activity.

"You may have heard that meditation 'increases gamma waves,' a type of accelerated brain rhythm often associated with a higher state of consciousness. Our study found something that appears to be the opposite: some gamma activity actually decreased as people continued meditating," said Subramaniam.

"This is not the contradiction it seems. The famous studies that found increased gamma activity looked at very experienced meditators, used different practices, and measured the brain in different ways than we did," he said. "We studied something quieter: people sitting with their eyes closed, simply watching their breathing, with nothing to look at and no task to react to. In this calmer environment, a small drop in rapid brain activity probably reflects the mind calming down - less wandering, less distractions - as attention stabilizes in the first few minutes."

Overall, these changes in the study participants' brains suggest that their minds were entering calmer, more attentive states within minutes.

"When there is co-activation of theta, alpha and theta-alpha waves, there is more attention focused on yourself. It's almost like a flashlight inside you," said Subramaniam. In addition to internalized attention, increased brain waves are associated with feelings of calm and creativity.

The activation of beta-1 waves can mean that "you are more conscious and more awake," he said, describing this state as "relaxed alertness" in which a person may feel more focused. Decreased delta and gamma-1 brain waves may also be associated with "relaxed alertness."

The researchers also found that, compared to beginning meditators, more advanced people showed even greater increases in theta and theta-alpha brain waves and greater decreases in delta and gamma-1 brain waves.

This finding suggests that, like any skill, the potential effects of meditation can deepen with practice.

Subramaniam said he often hears two main objections from people who are hesitant to try meditation: They don't have time or they can't stop their mind from wandering.

But the new study suggests that "around the seventh minute, if you sit in silence, breathing observation will happen automatically, the way it should be. This is a very simple way to get into the state that everyone craves," said Subramaniam, who was also involved in the recent launch of the free guided meditation app Miracle of Mind, developed by an international team of volunteers from the Isha Foundation.

"If you are a beginner and starting out for the first time, doing a guided meditation is the best way to start. Just follow the instructions," he said. "When you do it for a period of time, say four to six weeks, it becomes a habit."

'The brain is reallocating resources'
Ultimately, the new study not only reveals that meditation may be associated with changes in brain waves, it also highlights when these changes begin and how they develop over time, said Dr. Ignacio Saez, director of the Human Neurophysiology Laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

"I believe meditation changes brain waves because it changes what the brain is doing," Saez, who was not involved in the new study, said in an email. "When someone moves from a mental state of ordinary daydreaming to a deliberate practice like mindfulness of breathing or loving-kindness, the brain reallocates resources to attention, self-monitoring, emotional regulation, and sometimes memory-related processes. These are changes in the state of the brain and should leave an electrical signature."

In a study published last year, Saez and his colleagues used surgical EEG recordings to identify that meditation can lead to changes in brain waves in the amygdala and hippocampus, important brain regions involved in emotional regulation and memory.

"So for me, the common message is not that meditation produces a fixed pattern of brain waves, but rather that it reorganizes activity in a broader brain network," he wrote. "There is probably no universal 'meditation wave'."

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A 'window' into the mind
The new research sheds light on what happens in the brain during a single meditation session - and it's no surprise that changes appear within minutes, said Alexander Duda, a research associate at the University of Wollongong who has studied how mindfulness meditation can impact brain activity, but who was not involved in the new study.

"It makes sense that neurophysiological changes, and other physiological changes, can emerge within minutes," Duda said in an email. But he added that more research is needed to help explain what these changes might mean for health outcomes.

There is evidence linking changes associated with meditation with cardiovascular measures, for example, "but current evidence is still limited and developing, and any single neurophysiological change is unlikely to fully explain a specific health outcome on its own," he said.

Saez also said he would be careful not to treat a change in brain waves as a health outcome in and of itself.

"These EEG changes are best understood as indicators that the meditator has entered a different functional state," Saez said.

"In the new study, the pattern is interpreted as a kind of relaxed alertness, and the findings about deeper brain structures in my work suggest that regions involved in emotion and memory also participate in this change," he said. "That's significant, but it's not the same as proving an improvement in blood pressure, mood or brain structure from just one brief session."

He added that these EEG changes could serve as "a window into understanding how meditation may be working in affecting brain activity" rather than being an isolated health biomarker.

Source: CNN