Rewire Your OCD Brain by Catherine M. Pittman

Author:Catherine M. Pittman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Published: 2021-04-16T17:51:40+00:00

Meditation Practices

Meditation is another way of achieving relaxation. Meditation is the process of focusing attention, perhaps on the breath, perhaps on a specific object or thought. Various types of meditation—including mindfulness, an approach that is growing in popularity—have been shown to have effects on the amygdala (Goldin and Gross 2010). Studies show that certain meditative practices, including mindful attention to breath (Doll et al. 2016) and awareness-based compassion meditation (Leung et al. 2018), reduce activation in the amygdala. Mindfulness has been shown not only to affect the amygdala, but also to have measurable effects in the cortex (Davidson and Begley 2012; Taren et al. 2013). Because meditation affects the cortex as well as the amygdala, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of mindfulness in particular in chapter 11 as well as in the bonus chapter “The Healthy Use of Worry,” available at http://www .newharbinger.com/47186. Here we’ll discuss breath-focused meditation because it is a very effective method of calming the amygdala (Doll et al. 2016).

You may already be interested or experienced in meditation, and if so, we strongly encourage you to continue this pursuit. Research has shown that engaging in meditation regularly can reduce a variety of stress-related difficulties, including high blood pressure, anxiety, panic, and insomnia (Walsh and Shapiro 2006). In the amygdala, which is the focus of this chapter, meditation has been shown to have direct and immediate calming effects, even for beginning meditators (Taylor et al. 2011). Both short- and long-term effects occur in meditation. During meditation, the activation in your body shifts from a sympathetic dominant to a parasympathetic dominant state (Jerath et al. 2006), meaning that the FFF response gets shut off. Researchers have also found that, after learning meditation strategies, when people encountered images that produced negative emotions, their amygdala activation was reduced (Doll et al. 2016; Leung et al. 2018). Additionally, mindfulness has been shown to be associated with lasting changes in the connections between the amygdala and other parts of the brain (Taren et al. 2013), which is thought to help provide calming information to the amygdala. Many people find that incorporating regular meditation into their morning routine decreases their overall anxiety for the day. Meditation has been shown to be a beneficial treatment for those with OCD, not only by reducing anxiety that results from amygdala activation, but also by decreasing OCD symptoms, including intrusive and obsessive thoughts (Rupp et al. 2019). After mindfulness training, the connectivity is reduced in the frontal lobe circuitry that is thought to promote obsessive thinking, and increased in areas that promote present moment awareness (Yang et al. 2016). These findings should encourage you to see whether meditation can be of benefit to you.

For centuries, many meditative practices have focused on the breath, with the goal of concentrating on the experience of breathing or modifying breathing in some way. One meditative practice that people with OCD have found particularly helpful is attention to the breath, especially a technique known as the three-minute breathing space (Hertenstein et al. 2012).

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