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Researchers Reveal How Mindfulness Training Affects Health

Over the past decade, there have been many encouraging findings suggesting that mindfulness training can improve a broad range of mental and physical health problems. Yet, exactly how mindfulness positively impacts health is not clear.

Carnegie Mellon University’s J. David Creswell — whose cutting-edge work has shown how mindfulness meditation reduces loneliness in older adults and alleviates stress — and his graduate student Emily K. Lindsay have developed a model suggesting that mindfulness influences health
via stress reduction pathways. Their work, published in “Current
Directions in Psychological Science,” describes the biological pathways
linking mindfulness training with reduced stress and stress-related
disease outcomes.

“If mindfulness training is improving people’s health, how does it
get under the skin to affect all kinds of outcomes?” asked Creswell,
associate professor of psychology in CMU’s Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. “We offer one of the first evidence-based biological accounts of mindfulness training, stress reduction and health.”

Creswell and Lindsay highlight a body of work that depicts the
biological mechanisms of mindfulness training’s stress reduction
effects. When an individual experiences stress, activity in the
prefrontal cortex — responsible for conscious thinking and planning —
decreases, while activity in the amygdala, hypothalamus and anterior
cingulate cortex — regions that quickly activate the body’s stress
response — increases. Studies have suggested that mindfulness reverses
these patterns during stress; it increases prefrontal activity, which
can regulate and turn down the biological stress response.

Excessive activation of the biological stress response increases the
risk of diseases impacted by stress (like depression, HIV and heart
disease). By reducing individuals’ experiences of stress, mindfulness
may help regulate the physical stress response and ultimately reduce the
risk and severity of stress-related diseases.  

Creswell believes by understanding how mindfulness training affects
different diseases and disorders, researchers will be able to develop
better interventions, know when certain treatments will work most
effectively and identify people likely to benefit from mindfulness
training.