Mind Fitness: How Meditation Boosts Your Focus, Resilience, and Brain | Daniel Goleman | Big Think

Altered states refers to a mode of consciousness or awareness that takes us out of our ordinary everyday sense of the world, sense of ourselves. We can enter altered states when we get intensely focused on something. Deep concentration will bring you into an altered state. Sometimes people like to talk about how athletes get “into the zone” or they “get into flow.” Those are everyday altered states, but they come from being intensely focused on some activity or in the moment itself.

And of course, altered states can come from drugs or from being in an unusual physiological state. A fever can bring on an altered state. And, of course, the ‘60s and ‘70s saw a huge upsurge of people interested in exploring altered states through psychedelics. So, altered states are temporary conditions, and when whatever it was that brought on the special state of awareness leaves, then the state fades.

So, if you get into a flow state rock climbing, when you come down from the mountain, it’s gone—or whatever may have caused it: your temperature might have gone up and put you into maybe not a pleasant altered state, but still an altered state. The temperature goes down, and it’s gone. Altered traits, on the other hand, are lasting changes or transformations of being. They come classically through having cultivated an altered state through meditation, which then has a consequence for how you are day-to-day—and that’s different than how you were before you tried the meditation.

And what we find in our research, as we say in the book Altered Traits, is that the more you meditate, the more lifetime hours you put into it, the stronger the lasting traits become. When we surveyed more than 6,000 peer-reviewed articles published to date on meditation, we used very strict rigorous methodological standards and whittled them down to about 60. So, maybe one percent of all those articles were really well done. And they document very strongly that altered traits are a lasting consequence of regular meditation, and it’s not that it’s the altered states that’s the point.

If you look at the classic traditions from which meditation comes to us in the West, all of them talk about the quality of being, the person you’ve become. And we see it in the data in many ways. We see it in cognitive changes, we see it in behavioral changes, and most importantly, we see it in neurological changes. The neuroscience of meditation is really getting stronger and stronger. It’s pretty spectacular, and it shows that brain function and perhaps even structure in the long-term meditators becomes different and becomes different in ways that are actually predicted in classic meditation texts.

The good news is that there’s a dose response relationship in meditation. Apparently, from what we can tell, the longer you do it, the more benefits you get. So, for example, right from the beginning, there are intentional benefits, there are stress benefits, and you’re more resilient under stress. But we see this even more strikingly in people who have been longer-term meditators, people who have done meditation daily for, say, several years.

There you see, in terms of attention, things that don’t show up with the beginner so much. You see that, for example, they’re more present. There’s a strict test of this in cognitive science called the intentional blink. The intentional blink means you get lost in one thought and you don’t notice what’s happening the next moment. And this happens, of course, to all of us ordinarily, but longer-term meditators seem to have this less. It means they’re more present to the moment. Longer-term meditators are able to better focus in the midst of distractions.

This is kind of common sense because meditation, in essence, is training in attention. The basic move in meditation is you’re focusing on one thing or on a particular intentional stance. The mind-wandering circuitry, which is well-known in neuroscience, kicks in. People’s minds wander on average 50 percent of the time, research at Harvard tells us. So, at some point when you’re trying to do your meditation, your mind will wander. We’re wired that way.

The key is: do you notice that it wanders? Once you notice your mind has wandered off and you bring it back, you’re strengthening the circuitry for focus and for attention. And just like going to the gym and working out for years and years, doing reps, you get bigger muscles and more strength and fitness. The same thing happens in the mind. The mind is a mental gym, and meditation is a basic workout.

So, if you’re a long-term meditator, you get more benefits than people who are just starting out. It’s just common sense, and we see it in the scientific findings. So, longer-term meditators are better able to focus on that one thing and not be distracted even when there’s a hubbub around them; they’re better able to concentrate; they’re better able to be present to what’s happening.

So, the attentional benefits just get stronger and stronger, and even more importantly, they become traits. We see them not when a person is meditating but months after or just in their everyday life when they come into a lab without meditating. We see that the attentional benefits still last. The same thing is true of stress. In long-term meditators, the benefits for handling stress get stronger and stronger as time goes on.

Of course, we see some signs of this in people right from the get-go, beginners in meditation, but the longer you’ve been a meditator, the more, for example, you’re able to snap back from an upset. And this is really the sign of resilience. Resilience is measured scientifically by how long it takes you to get back to what we call your baseline, that pleasant mood you’re in before that thing flipped you out.

And the shorter that is, the more resilient you are. We see this as a lasting trait in long-term meditators; they are able to bounce back from stress. Also, we see that their amygdala, that trigger point for the stress reaction, is less reactive; they’re calmer in the face of stress. So, the stress benefits get stronger and stronger and become traits in long-term meditators.