Driven to Distraction - Meditation (A Counterinfluence)

Pop quiz: What trending wellness behavior has been associated with improvements in measures of depression, anxiety, perceived quality of life, physical sensory pain, and a slew of other broadly distributed medical symptoms? Last time, I discussed the “arms race” for your attention, with its effects on attention and impulsivity front and center. Today, let’s pick up where we left off, in particular with the answer to the question posed above: Mindfulness meditation (Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Wallach, 2004). Following some brief statistics on meditation practice in the United States, we’ll jump into the manner in which meditation affects an important area of cognition. Then, we’ll briefly discuss what’s happening with attention during meditation. Finally, we’ll wrap up with a few points about what this all means in terms of meditation’s potential role as a counterinfluence to our rapidly evolving technological environment.

Meditation is Trending in the United States

According to the Center for Disease Control, the practice of meditation in the United States increased from 4.1% in 2012 to 14.3%in 2017 – an increase of over three-fold (CDC, 2018). While the CDC’s study did not collect information on what drove the increase in meditation, its authors have posited the availability of meditation smartphone apps as a potential factor (LaVito, 2018). As mentioned in the preceding post of this series and echoing the CDC’s statistics, Apple named self-care its hottest new app trend of 2018, a category that subsumes mindfulness and meditation-oriented apps. Chief among this category and probable drivers of these statistical trends are two popular meditation apps: Calm, founded in 2012, and Headspace, founded in 2010.

Mindfulness Meditation & Inhibition

It’s not surprising that as concern around phenomena like impulsivity and their relationship to modern technology build, research into potential counterinfluences has become more widespread. While meditation has been studied and shown to exert effects in a variety of contexts that range from pain management to cancer treatment, most examinations of its effects on cognition — that is, thinking and perception — revolve around executive functions. Executive functions, broadly speaking, are more recently evolved or especially “human” cognitive processes that give rise to goal-directed behaviors. Think: Planning, organization, and execution of tasks. Of special relevance to my last post is the fact that executive functions are what underlie goal-oriented attention and guard against impulsivity. Executive function has been broken down into three subcategories: working memory (i.e., how much information can you hold in short-term memory and process at once?), attentional shifting (i.e., how efficiently can you shift between tasks and/or stimuli) and inhibition (i.e., how well are you able to suppress irrelevant information — whether that be external stimuli or random thoughts — or impulsive behaviors).

As it turns out, the literature indicates that mindfulness meditation preferentially benefits inhibition when it comes to executive function (mindfulness meditation is the most researched style, generally speaking; Gallant, 2016). This makes sense given that a core aspect of meditation is “inhibiting” thoughts and stimuli from taking over our awareness and behavior. For instance, imagine that you are working on a presentation and a notification appears on your desktop notifying you of comments and other engagements with one of your recent tweets. Do you click on it? If you do, how long do you spend engaging with Twitter (or Facebook, or Snapchat, or an email, or a text, or a webpage…) before you return to your task? In very broad strokes: The better your brain is at inhibition, the less likely you are to tumble down the rabbit hole. You can think of meditation like lifting weights when it comes to inhibition: The more time we spend meditating, the stronger the inhibition “muscle” gets.

What’s Happening with Attention During Meditation?

Essentially, mindfulness meditation involves nonjudgmental attention to the present moment. What that means at a high level is a state of mind wherein we avoid value judgments of what we experience (e.g., “good” or “bad” sensations) as well as getting sucked away from what is happening right now and into streams of thought (e.g., my back feels tight … I should see the doctor… my daughter has a doctor’s appointment today… I hope she gets into a good college...and on and on). This is often more easily achieved by choosing a neutral object of focus which is not, in and of itself, stimulating or “attention-grabbing,” such as the breath, an area of the body, or a point on the ground. A key point to remember: The more innately stimulating — and hence “attention-grabbing” — the object of our attention, the “less” we are meditating. When we focus on something inherently stimulating, like social information or most video games, the object of our attention is doing the “work” rather than the brain areas that underlie inhibition. What I mean by this is that it takes less effort to focus on something in which we are inherently interested or excited by — that is, on something that causes arousal. And, for the most part in most circumstances, when we expend less effort we make less progress. Think of more stimulating objects of focus like lighter weights: It may be easier to succeed in the task — to stay focused or move the weight — but it results in less improvement.

With all that said about where we place our focus, the practice of picking something can be useful because it can be easier to prevent thoughts or things in our environment from hijacking awareness when we are given something on which to rest our attention. It avoids the phenomenon wherein when we try to think of nothing, we wind up thinking about everything. Essentially, by activating the selective attention “muscle”, our brains increase the attentional/perceptual salience of the object of our focus — the breath for example — and in so doing hopefully have an easier time inhibiting everything else. When distraction does occur or the mind has wandered into thought, a meditator simply acknowledges this and returns their attention to the present moment and/or the object of focus. Over time, the repetition of this process of reigning the mind in from distraction appears to enhance activity in brain areas that underlie the ability to resist impulsivity or block out distraction — both environmental (e.g., ambient noises) and internal (e.g., irrelevant trains of thought).

Our Technological Environment: Meditation as a Counterinfluence

Clearly, given its relationship to inhibition, distraction, and impulsivity, meditation is particularly pertinent when considered in the context of my last post and media multitasking — that is, simultaneous interaction with multiple information channels in a fast-evolving digital environment. Given that media multitasking is associated with higher levels of impulsivity as well as cognitive deficits that often revolve around executive function, it would seem logical for us to also engage in behaviors that enhance executive function. Many argue, as mentioned above, that meditation can serve such a purpose. This likely at least in part explains the surge in its practice as the “arms race” for attention outlined in the last installment of this series has developed and its consequences have manifested in our daily experience (e.g., an increasing difficulty to resist checking your phone in response to a notification) as well as the media. But there is another dynamic at play that may help to explain increasing rates of meditation, and it has to do with the medium in which it is now often practiced. In the next installment, I’ll discuss what I believe it is about meditation apps that has enabled them to spur on such a dramatic increase in meditation rates. Hint: It has to do with the availability and breadth of content, the constant presence of a guiding voice, and arousal. So, with that said, until next time! Also: If you enjoyed reading, don't forget to subscribe to the blog below!

References

CDC. (2018, November 8). Use of Yoga and Meditation Becoming More Popular in U.S. Retrieved March 12, 2020, from https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2018/201811_Yoga_Meditation.htm

Gallant, S. N. (2016). Mindfulness meditation practice and executive functioning: Breaking down the benefit. Consciousness and Cognition, 40, 116–130. doi: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053810016300058

Grossman, P., Niemann, L., Schmidt, S., & Walach, H. (2004). Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 57(1), 35–43. doi: 10.1016/s0022-3999(03)00573-7

LaVito, A. (2018, November 8). More Americans are meditating than ever before, as mindfulness goes mainstream. Retrieved March 12, 2020, from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/07/meditation-use-rises-as-apps-such-as-headspace-calm-become-popular.html