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Page 6 of 6
Rosenkranz
recently received a grant to investigate the efficacy of mindfulness
training as an intervention for asthma. Stress will be induced in the
subjects via a psychological stressor commonly used in stress studies,
so the researchers can see the patterns of brain activity occurring when
the subjects with asthma experience stress. Tests measuring changes in
the cells in the subjects’ lungs and other markers related to the
experience of asthma symptoms will be conducted before and after MBSR
training to see how the subjects’ relationship to the psychological
stressor changes and how those changes affect physiology relevant to
asthma. Using the resulting data, they’ll be able to associate the
changes in brain activity with the changes in inflammation in the body.
“That
way,” Rosenkranz says, “we can start to identify the mechanisms through
which something like MBSR practice might affect physiological processes
associated with disease.”
If
you study a phenomenon in people who have a particular disease, it’s
also helpful to study people who don’t have it. In that way, researchers
can determine that what they observe is not something happening only in
the physiology of those with the disease. In a stress-response study
with healthy individuals Rosenkranz’s team put capsaicin, the active
ingredient in chili peppers, on subjects’ skin. It causes the release of
inflammatory molecules from nerve endings in the skin, which causes a
“flare response.” They exposed this group of subjects to a standard
stressor, as above, and measured the intensity of the flare response
afterward. They did this both before and after MBSR, to see if MBSR
buffers the effects of that stressor on the inflammatory response in the
skin. Naturally, medical research proceeds cautiously and slowly. As
results of this ongoing research become known in coming years, it may
lead to breakthrough interventions using meditative practices for a
variety of disease conditions where stress may be a key factor.
Emma
Seppala had been passionately educating herself about veterans for a
long time before joining CIHM. Reading about the suicides and other
aftereffects of the trauma they had endured in Iraq and Afghanistan
motivated her to want to help them. After arriving at CIHM, she received
a grant from the Disabled Veterans of America to implement programs.
Seppala started doing yoga and meditative breathing with the veterans,
and found it helped them. Davidson encouraged her to start a pilot
study. As a result, the center offers free programs to local veterans
and is developing a research agenda to evaluate the effects of these
types of programs for those returning from war zones.
“One
of the main issues for researchers,” she says, “is not really knowing
the population they’re studying. It also makes it hard to recruit
subjects because you’re spending all of your time in the lab and very
little time around regular people, so to speak.”
For
the pilot, Seppala recruited a group of ten vets in the active group
and ten in the control. She tried some meditation with them, but she
quickly found that “when you ask vets suffering from post-traumatic
stress to sit down and meditate, after not too long, they find it
difficult to sit there and do nothing. They’re too antsy, too jumpy, and
have too many recurring memories for this to be comfortable. They’re
much more comfortable doing something active that relaxes them and
subsequently allows them to deal with recurring memories with more ease.
With post-traumatic stress, your mind is saying one thing—for example,
‘there’s no danger to me in this coffee shop’—but your body is saying
another—such as ‘I’m freaked out. If I hear the bang of a coffee cup, I
might just run the hell out of here.’”
But
when Seppala worked with breathing, it helped the vets relax into their
bodies. The main “intervention” she uses with the vets is Sudarshan
Kriya, a type of yogic breathing traditionally used for purification.
“It’s rhythmic breathing,” she says, “that just settles you into a
really deep state of relaxation.”
Typically,
vets with post-traumatic stress experience recurring traumatic
memories, and sleeplessness is a big problem; they’re usually treated
with medication or exposure therapy (simply speaking, exposing a
traumatized person to what they fear, but in a safe environment), but
often not very successfully. Medication has side effects and exposure
therapy is very trying for many vets. Sleep deprivation aggravates the
trauma. Davidson and Seppala want to test the effectiveness of using
techniques that do not involve medication. That yogic breathing works so
well for the vets encourages Davidson that he is on the right track
with his contention that meditative practices are not one size fits all.
Some practices are ill-suited to some people in some circumstances,
while others may be perfectly suited to them.
Seppala
is hypothesizing that there is phenomenon known as “memory
reconsolidation.” Trauma sufferers have strong emotional relationships
with the memories that emerge in their minds, but if the memories can be
“reconsolidated,” their relationship to them changes. “I believe the
breathing puts them into such a deep state of relaxation that when the
trauma emerges, they create a new relationship with the memory,” she
says.
One
vet had been assigned to do interrogations using extreme measures,
torture essentially. Stateside, he never slept. After some days of doing
the Sudarshan Kriya program, he reported that he fell asleep on the
couch watching television, a normal experience for many but a
breakthrough for him. “I remember everything that happened over there,
but I realize that’s not me anymore,” he told Seppala. That’s the past. I
don’t have the same emotional connection to it.”
What
challenge could be more compelling for the human mind today than the
survival of our planet? CIHM has a project in the design stages that
would study how meditative practices might alter the way individuals
make decisions about how we use resources, and therefore alter the
collective effect we have on our environment. Donal MacCoon, the
scientist developing the project, told me about the Happy Planet Index, a
measurement of sustainability developed by the New Economics Foundation
that is expressed as a fraction. Illustrating the index on a
whiteboard, MacCoon explained that the numerator is a measurement of
wellbeing in a society that represents tangibles such as longevity and
lack of illness and intangibles such as contentment. The denominator
represents how much of the earth’s resources a society is using to reach
its level of well-being or happiness. Developing precise numbers to
represent these values is challenging, but one thing we know for sure is
that in North America, we have great well-being by objective measures,
but it comes at the cost of an enormous amount of resources.
What
MacCoon wants to know is whether meditative practices could help us
achieve higher levels of well-being— both tangible and intangible—at a
lower cost to the planet. One way to approach this would be to follow
people’s buying habits and see whether they were altered by meditative
practice, since the consumption habits of individuals add up to the
consumption habits of a society. “How else will we improve this deadly
number except by finding ways to be healthier and more content while
using less?” MacCoon asks. “Technological advancements will probably not
suffice to sustain us. Emotional dysregulation is one of the reasons we
overconsume in our pursuit of happiness and also one reason it is hard
to change the way we live. Since meditative practice has been shown to
reduce emotional reactivity and makes us more aware of the larger
effects we have on the world around us, perhaps meditation can help us
maximize sustainable well-being.
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