Mindfulness Meditation counteracts Chronic Stress

Stress is bad for us. How many times have you heard that one? There are numerous studies out there about how your brain changes with stress. The HPA-axis is a driver for our stress levels, and has been shown to be responsible for increasing glucocorticoids such as cortisol. The amygdala is a structure in the brain responsible for sending signals of stress, fear, or other emotions to the hypothalamus and other parts of the brain. Under chronic stress, the amygdala structurally changes to have more connections to the HPA-axis and also increases in size. This study wanted to look at how mindfulness meditation affects stress response. They had two groups, one that was assigned a 3-day mindfulness meditation training, and the other a 3-day relaxation training without a mindfulness component. None of their subjects had any previous experience with mindfulness meditation. They found that the mindfulness meditation group had reduced amygdala sizes compared to the relaxation group, as well as lower glucocorticoid levels in hair follicles, immediately after the experiment, and also at a four month follow-up. Something still being heavily researched is how mindfulness meditation can cause structural changes in the brain, thus far all being the exact opposite of the structural changes caused by chronic stress. It still isn’t understood why or how mindfulness meditation causes these things, but study after study has shown that mindfulness meditation reverses many negative changes in the brain caused my stress.

References
Taren, A. A., et al. (2014). Mindfulness meditation training alters stress-related amygdala resting
state functional connectivity: A randomized controlled trial. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10(12), 1758–1768.