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MEDITATION 1 MINDFULNESS MEDITATION: THE SCIENCE, IMPROVEMENTS, AND EFFECTS A Student May 4, 2020 California State University, Dominguez Hills HEA 201-01 Professor Criss K

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MEDITATION 1 MINDFULNESS MEDITATION: THE SCIENCE, IMPROVEMENTS, AND EFFECTS A Student May 4, 2020 California State University, Dominguez Hills HEA 201-01 Professor Criss K. Moreno MEDITATION 2 Introduction Everyone deals with the stresses of life on a day-to-day basis. These stresses can give rise to many emotions and thoughts in our mind. Some thoughts are happy thoughts, some are sad, some are a mixture of many different types of emotions. It certainly can become overwhelming, and the first thought we usually have when confronted with these emotions is to instinctively act upon them. These habitual reactions are done so much without a thought, but since the emotions are clouding over our head, the actions to our emotions can sometimes be detrimental. We can easily oversee proper actions that we may regret in hindsight. An example of this is if we are mad at someone, we can become so angry that we yell at them. But what if that someone were to be a child? We can easily oversee the wise course of actions when the buffer between the stimulus and the reaction is nonexistent. We become the thought and emotion that pervades our psyche. Mindfulness meditation simply is the conduit to that buffer between the stimulus and the reaction. With meditation, we are able to be in touch with that buffer: Awareness. We learn to respond wisely to what is happening, so we do not simply react blindly to the stimuli of life. When we are aware of the changes that occur in our body when emotions arise or when stress elevates, we can learn how to deal with the constant influx of MEDITATION 3 ever-changing emotions that we feel. What we get out of meditation is up to us to decide. One of the more difficult part of meditation is how simple it is. All it takes is approximately 10 minutes out of our day, to simply sit and be present in the moment. There is a saying out there that we are always time traveling. We either ruminate on the past or think ahead into the future. We often forget of being in the moment, as only this moment is real. MEDITATION 4 Article Review We begin with the first article, “The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation”, and how meditation is growing in the scientific community. Mindfulness meditation is often defined “as non-judgmental attention to present-moment experiences,” and is a part of a family of meditation and awareness practices, such as mantra meditation, yoga, tai chi, and chi gong. Due to its purpose of health benefiting through lowering stress levels, it has gained traction in the neuroscience community, thus launching a new branch of studies in research. However, though studies have been around for almost two decades, mindfulness meditation studies face statistical challenges in producing data; bias for positively correlated outcomes ? people who usually conduct these studies are avid meditators themselves ?interpretations based on fallacies, and also the type of studies being conducted. Regardless, studies now have been showing promising data of meditation studies through consideration of these factors. The evidence in studies emerging shows that mindfulness meditation “might cause neuroplastic changes in the structure and function in brain regions” that help to regulate attention, emotional regulation, and self-awareness. For attention, neuroplasticity, MEDITATION 5 or the brain’s ability to reorganize itself through new neural connections, is favored when meditating, due to the connection of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), a region of the brain that “enables executive attention and control” with the frontoinsular cortex, a region involved in self-awareness. In emotional regulation, the studies show that essentially, with strengthening the ability to control prefrontal cognitive mechanisms, it can downregulate amygdalic activity, meaning that one can control how they react emotionally through meditation so they cannot act impulsively through an emotional response. In self-awareness, the default mode network (DMN) of the brain, which shows high activity in mind-wandering, can lower activity through meditation, thus improving self-awareness. My journey with mindfulness meditation, just like its research, is still in its infancy. Ever since I was a child, I found journaling to be my only way of emotional release, of analyzing my experiences growing up and making sense of the world around me. Once I began meditating, things began to change. I felt different. My brain felt like it was healing itself. In reading, I was surprised to see that the authors included all of the methodological challenges of the research in this branch of healthcare before mentioning anything in regard MEDITATION 6 to neuroscience. The scientific community is a beast to be reckoned with in the face of research papers and the evidence they hold, all in the search to expand or debunk widely known hypotheses. The scientific branch of neuroscience has now begun its work to learn more about this ancient Buddhist practice. I have always enjoyed the exploration of the psyche, in a way of scientific anatomical and physiological as well as spirituality and awareness. The fact that meditation, a century-old practice of spiritual awareness through meditation is being brought forth into the present under the discretion of the scientific community, is astounding to me. What struck me about the neuroscience of mindfulness meditation was how it favored neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize itself through new neural connections. The fact that the brain, already ever-complex, can reorganize itself in and of itself is a miracle. Additionally, the brain is able to connect cortices in different regions within itself to favor the activity of attention, emotional regulation, and selfawareness, due to a simple 10-minutenon-judgmental practice, blows my mind. Though I am not the most well versed in neuroscience, and I only have a generalized idea of the parts of the brain and its functions, I learned to appreciate the impact of meditation not only in our spiritual journeys but in the brain’s journey of growth too. MEDITATION 7 Meditation is a note-worthy practice, and I am here to advocate for it. Meditation, though neuroscience gives promise in the scientific community in its existence, offers improvements in not only the brain’s neuroplasticity, but also how that affects the way we live. Addiction to drugs is often the end product of rumination, or negative feelings due to the reactions we receive of the reality we perceive. When in the moment, in full non-judgmental awareness, for even 10 minutes a day, it offers a huge impact in the way we live our lives. This next article, “Mindfulness Meditation Improves Emotion Regulation and Reduces Drug Abuse,” talks of how mindfulness meditation affects our brains and how this can help how we regulate the emotions we perceive in order to be aware, and thus cultivating that buffer, and plugging into how those emotions can lead to addiction or obsessive behaviors. Every person experiences emotion. It is very normal for emotion to pass through the brain’s neural connections within its cortices. As people grow and develop, the brain learns to manage the flow of emotions through emotion regulation, that is, strategies that “can influence which emotions arise and when, how long they occur, and how these emotions are experienced and expressed”. Emotion regulation makes use of different strategies, and these strategies involve “shared and distinct neural networks” MEDITATION 8 within the brain. The bilateral prefrontal regions of the brain, such as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) along with the adjacent medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) have been found to be the chief primary regions involved in cognitive control and emotion regulation. Like any skill, there must be a type of training. For the skills and strategies of emotion, training allows a healthier flow of emotion and a more controlled response to the emotional surge. In this, many studies point to behavioral training such as mindfulness meditation, or the nonjudgmental attention to present-moment experiences. The focus of mindfulness meditation within this article is in one of its forms: integrative body-mind training or IBMT. With better practice in emotional regulation, things such as emotional dysregulation can be reduced. The systematic practice of IBMT involves the “training of attention and self-control with an attitude of acceptance and openness to internal and external experiences”. In lack of practice such as IBMT in emotion, the brain is unable to properly regulate emotional response, which can lead to emotional dysregulation and negative emotion, which, when interacted with impulsivity, can doctor an increase in impulsive behavior, such as increased drug abuse. With the practice of meditation in IBMT, the awareness of negative emotion can lower emotional dysregulation, and control abusive behaviors in substance use. MEDITATION 9 I have heard of addiction’s connection with the regions in the brain that correlate with the reward system and dopamine. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that substance abuse can actually correlate with the parts of the brain that deal with emotion regulation. I never made this connection before, regarding drug abuse to negative emotion paired with emotional dysfunction. Substance abuse is something quite personal to me. Coming into college, I found myself experimenting more with psychoactive substances with a watchful eye and open heart to the effects on the psyche. This experimentation once even led me to take a substantial 250μg dose of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, while my entire family was home. I remember sitting in the bathroom as the drug was slowly metabolizing into my system, and in the midst of the nauseating process, I opened up a guided meditation and meditated for about 10 minutes come-up. The experience of meditating on such a potent psychedelic helped me to truly see the ways of interacting with my family members, not as relatives, but as souls, thus leading me to really change the way I interacted with people and experienced the flow of emotion I felt with any social stimuli. I learned to see my inner worth as well as the nuances of interaction that I never experienced before. On trips prior I found myself quite easily susceptible to negative emotion, which can lead to emotional dysregulation, MEDITATION 10 but the small act of meditation really flattened the huge wave of anxiety that usually comes within the thought loops of the 8hour trip. Reading this article further piqued my interest in meditation and just how powerful it can be. If a 10 minute guided meditation can ease the strong emotional surge and thought loops within a potent psychedelic trip, I can only imagine what constant and trained meditation can do to the average person on a daily basis. The sciences of meditation on neural networks are quite a treasure to learn about, and my experience of it only reigns it true. Meditation has been studied in groups of people, especially young adults, who are in a state in their life where they can experience a lot of stress. Students, especially those who are studying to be in the medical field, experience coursework that can be very stressful and overwhelming. Studies for mindfulness meditation often include students studying to be doctors and nurses. This last article, “Effects of Mindfulness Meditation on Mindfulness, Mental Well-Being, and Perceived Stress” talks of a study on pharmacy students, who have not been getting much attention than the students studying to be doctors and nurses. For students, especially those within the health professional field, there has been an upward trend in mental health issues in MEDITATION 11 high levels such as stress, depression, suicidal ideation, anxiety, addiction, and eating disorders. This is because there is a lack of mental health advocacy for students in such a heavy curriculum, such as pharmacy students, in which this article focuses their study on. Aside from using techniques such as exercise to cope with stress, a rising technique to help students is mindfulness meditation. Meditation “does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself.” While there are studies out there depicting that medical and nursing students, there is not a lot of studies for pharmacy students, which face different aspects of the medical field than doctors and nurses. This study involves the use of an app that has risen into popularity through giving meditation a more widespread availability through mobile phones, called Headspace™. In this article, a study involving ninety-two pharmacy students from their first to their third professional year at the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville School of Pharmacy, in which they were taken through an orientation training session of the app and an idea of mindfulness meditation. The students were then asked to meditate for at least 10 minutes a day for four weeks with the Headspace app, no matter when. The results, which were recorded via a streamline of baseline surveys, showed promising results. The idea of the MEDITATION 12 project was to encourage students to inculcate mindfulness meditation into their everyday routines, and shows that students no matter how heavy their curriculum, are able to manage their stress. With something as simple as using an app on your phone for at least10 minutes a day in mindfulness meditation, it shows promise for the future. Reading this article was very interesting. It was certainly eye-opening to learn about other health professional students. Though I am not a pharmacy student, I can imagine that the curriculum and even the simple mental weight of knowing that a simple mistake in giving a patient a certain dose of a certain drug can potentially cost their life, is stress-inducing. I think it was good to focus a study on just pharmacy students and not just healthcare profession students in general because it gives pharmaceutical students a platform in the scientific community to advocate for their mental health, because their job is about helping the physical health of others. I myself actually have heard of HeadspaceTM and have used it sparingly throughout my senior year of high school. I find it super easy and simple to use, and it has projected my interest in meditation for quite some time. Meditation itself, I believe, is a skill to be practiced and sometimes it is extremely hard to remind yourself and guide yourself when it is so easy to get mixed up in thought. The accessibility of the Headspace app is MEDITATION 13 something really important, as everyone has their phone on them at all times. I like how the study focuses on this app because it helps give the app some exposure and shows that anyone can benefit from having a simple ten minute mindfulness meditation at any point of their day, even people as stressed as aspiring pharmacists. The article does a good job to really make sure that the students have the freedom to use the app in their own way, as the app has a huge library of different meditations throughout different aspects of their day, there is even a option of meditation for when you wake up in the middle of the night and cannot sleep afterwards. Reading this article is inspiring me to go back into the app to use as a crutch, as this quarantine time has really affected me when I meditate. I believe guided meditation through an app will help me structure my day around meditation. MEDITATION 14 Conclusion To conclude, meditation is a fairly new concept to the scientific field, but there has been promise in how it affects the brain, how it improves emotional regulation and how that can help down the line. To be mindful in every moment is to be aware and present in the current moment. Once we learn how to respond to situations, instead of blindly reacting due to our emotions, we can live life through a different scope. I always find it extraordinary that a simple 10 minute practice can physically change the mapwork of our brain’s neural network. Emotions and how we react to those emotions is the route of how we are as people, how we define our personalities and values and morals. We do not need to be non-judgmental blobs to the world, we just need to be aware of our feelings. Many people, especially myself, tend to merge the duality of emotion and rationale. We know these feelings take hold, but we tend to suppress these emotions, as they seem illogical. I am an advocate of the validity of emotions. Meditation offers a safe space for feeling the emotions, as there is only one way to move forward, and that is through what we are feeling. We are creatures of habit, and I believe that good habits can be cultivated. Meditation can change the world and bring a kinder scope to how reality is perceived. MEDITATION 15 References Tang, Y., Tang, R., & Posner, M. (2016). Mindfulness meditation improves emotion regulation and reduces drug abuse. Drug and Alcohol dependence, 163 (Suppl 1), S13–S18. Tang, Y., Hölzel, B., & Posner, M. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation: Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 16(4), 213–225. Zollars, I., Poirier, T., & Pailden, J. (2019). Effects of mindfulness meditation on mindfulness, mental well-being, and perceived stress. Currents in Pharmacy Teaching & Learning,11(10), 1022–1028. Mini Literature Review Outline A. Title page B. Introduction a. Write a full page or more describing your topic. Be specific and use real world examples. The goal is to explain your topic to someone who might not know anything about it. C. Insert Article Review #1 a. Before you insert the next review, write 1-2 paragraphs, minimum, comparing and contrasting these two articles. D. Insert Article Review #2 a. Before you insert the next review, write 1-2 paragraphs, minimum, comparing and contrasting these two articles. E. Insert Article Review #3 a. Write 1-2 paragraphs, minimum, comparing and contrasting this article to the other two articles. F. Conclusion a. Write a full page or more, discussion your thought on your topic, including: i. Real-life examples ii. Predictions iii. How you might do things differently (if applicable) G. Reference Page