BY: Daniel Goleman, Ph.D. & Richard Davidson, Ph.D.
Listen or Download Podcast Version
4 Thoughts
1. Altered Traits and the Real Goal of Meditation
“Historically, meditation was not meant to improve our health, relax us, or enhance work success. Although these are the kinds of appeal that has made meditation ubiquitous today, over the centuries such benefits were incidental, unnoted side effects. The true contemplative goal has always been altered traits.”
And what are altered traits? As the name suggests, they’re new characteristics you develop that persist even when you’re not meditating: “Altered traits shape how we behave in our daily lives, not just during or immediately after we meditate.” They include things like a calmer mind, better emotional regulation, and greater resilience to life’s stressors.
So essentially, the goal of meditation is to fundamentally change who we are for the better. As they say, to “reach toward our better nature.”
Importantly, however, these altered traits result from fundamental changes within our bodies, which we’ll discuss throughout the 411.
But keep in mind that all these changes are incidental. What we’re really after is being a better person, and meditation provides a means of getting there.
***
P.S. I view all breathing exercises, from slow breathing to alternate nostril breathing, from Wim Hof to Holotropic breathing, as subsets of meditation, just like loving-kindness or vipassana. Breathing exercises do have a more health-based motivation. But, ultimately, we’re focusing on the breath for an extended amount of time, just like we might focus on loving-kindness for an extended period.
2. The “State-by-Trait” Effect: Cautionary and Inspirational
“In contemplative science, an “altered state” refers to changes that occur only during meditation. An altered trait indicates that the practice of meditation transformed the brain and biology so that meditation-induced changes are seen before beginning to meditate.
So a “state-by-trait” effect refers to temporary state changes that are seen only in those who display enduring altered traits—the long-term meditators and the yogis.”
This book had so much goodness on contemplative science—this quote was only a minor section. But it conveys two important lessons, so I felt it was worth including in the 411.
The first is cautionary. As this passage states, they discovered that long-term meditators could reach states during meditation that only occur because they practice so much.
They practice a lot --> They alter their traits --> And this allows them to achieve profoundly altered states (like extreme bliss, compassion, or equanimity).
This is cautionary because teachers and people who write books are more likely-than-not very experienced. So, when they describe their experiences, we may feel like we’re doing something wrong if we don’t achieve those states. Or that they’re just lying to sound cool.
But, it may actually be that they have altered their brains and bodies so much that they can access states not physiologically open to us yet: “Their remarkable meditation skills bespeak what’s technically known as a “state by trait interaction,” suggesting the brain changes that underlie the trait also give rise to special abilities that activate during meditative states.”
Although cautionary, this is also very inspirational. These findings mean that, as we continue practicing regularly, these states will eventually become accessible to us. There’s nothing inherently special about long-term meditators (breathers, yogis, etc.). They just do it a lot. Those same blissed-out experiences will be available to us—we just have to practice 🙏
3. Physical Health Effects: Lower Inflammation & Breathing Rates
“Yet mindfulness training—even as short as three days—produces a short-term decrease in pro-inflammatory cytokines, the molecules responsible for inflammation. And the more you practice, the lower the level becomes of these pro-inflammatory cytokines. This seems to become a trait effect with extensive practice, with imaging studies finding in meditators at rest lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines.”
As we learned in Thought #1, meditation was never intended to treat or cure illnesses. But it turns out that it does have some powerful effects on our bodies and minds, one of which is decreasing inflammation.
And since inflammation negatively affects basically everything, this seems like a pretty nice unintended side-effect to have.
Another positive health effect of meditation is that it lowers our resting breathing rate:
“But consider what Richie’s lab found when they looked at long-term meditators (9,000 average lifetime hours of practice). Comparing each to a nonmeditator of the same age and sex, the meditators were breathing an average 1.6 breaths more slowly. And this was while they were just sitting still, waiting for a cognitive test to start.
Over the course of a single day that difference in breath rate translates to more than 2,000 extra breaths for the nonmeditators—and more than 800,000 extra breaths over the course of a year. These extra breaths are physiologically taxing, and can exact a health toll as time goes on.
As practice continues and breathing becomes progressively slower, the body adjusts its physiological set point for its respiratory rate accordingly. That’s a good thing. While chronic rapid breathing signifies ongoing anxiety, a slower breath rate indicates reduced autonomic activity, better mood, and salutary health.”
That’s amazing (and a perfect description of the power of breathing less) 👏
Together, we see that regular meditation can lower inflammation and reduce our resting breathing rate, which will have positive downstream effects on virtually any health condition.
4. The Biggest Benefits are Psychological
“The sounder studies, we found, focus on lessening our psychological distress rather than on curing medical syndromes or looking for underlying biological mechanisms. So, when it comes to a better quality of life for those with chronic diseases, yes to meditation. Such palliative care gets ignored too often in medicine, but it matters enormously to patients.”
This was a major conclusion of the book: meditation can help some physical illnesses (see previous thought), but the primary benefit is psychological relief. Crucially though, this psychological relief stems from state and trait changes in the brain’s circuitry.
But from a practical perspective, these brain changes add up to things like better quality of life, better emotional health, and better resilience.
In my opinion, this is more critical than physical health in some cases. The authors address this wonderfully when discussing the viewpoints of doctors/researchers vs. patients:
“While doctors may want to see hard data showing medical improvements, patients just want to feel better, especially if there’s little to be done to relieve their clinical condition. From a patient’s viewpoint, then, mindfulness offers a path to relief—even as medical research tells doctors the evidence is not clear when it comes to reversing the biological cause of the pain.”
So, meditation may not cure you of anything, but it can help you feel better, which may be enough for you to continue doing it 👏
***
P.S. To get a little nerdier, here are some of the brain changes that occur with meditation: “The amygdala, a key node in the brain’s stress circuitry, shows dampened activity from a mere thirty or so hours of MBSR practice. Other mindfulness training shows a similar benefit, and there are hints in the research that these changes are traitlike: they appear not simply during the explicit instruction to perceive the stressful stimuli mindfully but even in the “baseline” state, with reductions in amygdala activation as great as 50 percent. … A three-month meditation retreat brought indicators of better emotional regulation, and long-term practice was associated with greater functional connectivity between the prefrontal areas that manage emotion and the areas of the amygdala that react to stress, resulting in less reactivity.”
1 Life-Changing Idea
All Paths Are the Same
“If someone was following a given inner path, Neem Karoli always encouraged it. From his perspective the main point was that you do your practice—not try to find the “very best.”
Whenever Neem Karoli was asked about which path was best, his answer was “Sub ek!”—Hindi for ‘They are all one.” Everyone has different preferences, needs, and the like. Just choose one and plunge in.’”
Amen to that 🙏
And although that just sounds awesome, it also has some sound logic to back it up:
“In that view contemplative paths are more or less the same, a doorway beyond ordinary experience. At a practical level, all forms of meditation share a common core of mind training—e.g., learning to let go of the myriad distractions that flow through the mind and to focus on one object of attention or stance of awareness.”
Thus, I believe these wisdom nuggets are life-changing. We don’t have to find “the best” breathing practice, or yoga practice, or meditation technique. We just have to find the one that resonates with us now (accepting it will change with time) and plunge in. They are all simply a doorway beyond ordinary experience.
1 Stack of Memorable Quotes
“Yet mindfulness, part of an ancient meditation tradition, was not intended to be such a cure; this method was only recently adapted as a balm for our modern forms of angst. The original aim, embraced in some circles to this day, focuses on a deep exploration of the mind toward a profound alteration of our very being.”
“As we see it, the most compelling impacts of meditation are not better health or sharper business performance but, rather, a further reach toward our better nature.”
“Meditation is a catch-all word for myriad varieties of contemplative practice, just as sports refers to a wide range of athletic activities. For both sports and meditation, the end results vary depending on what you actually do.”
““Each of you is perfect the way you are,” Zen master Suzuki Roshi told his students, adding, “and you can use a little improvement”—neatly reconciling acceptance with growth.”
“When these strands of change are twined together, there are two major ways anyone benefits from contemplative effort: having a healthy body and a healthy mind.”
“These various mind training methods drive the brain in different ways. During compassion practice, the amygdala is turned up in volume, while in focused attention on something like the breath, the amygdala is turned down. Meditators are learning how to change their relationship to their emotions with different practices.”
“Sharing another person’s feelings of distress need not be a downer. As Dr. Aaron Beck, who designed that depression test, has said, when you focus on someone else’s suffering, you forget your own troubles.”
“A universal goal in meditation of every kind comes down to sustaining attention in a chosen way or to a given target, such as the breath.”
“Mingyur had run smack into a paradox of today’s research on consciousness, the mind, and meditative training: those who do the research on meditation are too often in the dark about what they are actually studying.”
“This highlights a weakness in what otherwise might seem quite impressive findings on the yogis: these data points are but glimpses of the altered traits that intensive, prolonged meditation produces. We do not want to reduce this quality of being to what we happen to be able to measure.”