Hello everyone and welcome back to my channel.
This video is the first of a two-part series on how to rewire your brain with mindfulness
meditation.
In today's video we will explore how mindfulness meditation affects the brain and how it can
help us with anxiety.
In next week's video I will share with you a mindfulness meditation technique to help
you reduce your anxiety but you will also be able to use this technique to heal and
transform other challenges in your life.
If you are interested in mindfulness and meditation, consider subscribing to my channel.
Every week, I post a new video on these topics and I show you how you can apply these tools
in your daily life you know.
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Anxiety is a very common experience that we all have on a daily basis.
We experience anxiety when we pay bills or when we have a job interview or a presentation
to give.
In most cases anxiety is normal, it's fine and is healthy but in some cases anxiety can
become overwhelming and in that case it can become a disorder that can prevent us from
enjoying life or even functioning at all.
I remember myself when I was a student being so anxious about the homeworks and the exams
that I had panic attack where I could barely breathe in my bed.
So today's video is about understanding anxiety, why we feel so easily anxious and where does
it come from and also how mindfulness meditation can help rewire the neural networks in our
brain to help us reduce anxiety.
Hi my name is Olivier and I am a mindfulness meditation teacher.
I have taught mindfulness meditation to hundred's of working professionals which has helped
them to not only reduce the stress but also perform better at work, have healthier relationships
and overall feeling happier.
And now, I am sharing all this content with you in the hope that you will benefit from
it.
So, to understand why we are so prone to anxiety, we have to look at the evolution of the human
species.
A few million years ago, our ancestors lived in a far more dengerous environment than the
one that we live in today.
In order for them to survive and pass on their genes, they had to pay greatter attention
to the possible threats around them.
They had to pay more attention to the possible dangers rather than the rewards because if
they were to miss a meal one day, they could still have a meal the day after but if they
were to be attacked by a rival group or by a predator, then their chances to have second
meal was far less.
So this conditioning of paying more attention to the negatives rather than the positive
is known as the negativity bias and has been passed down to us through evolution.
An example of the negativity values in our world today is for example: you are giving
a presentation to ten people.
Nine of them look generally interested in what you're saying and engaged but one person
on the side has his arms cross and look completely disinterested in what you are saying.
Where is your attention going to be?
Is it going to be on the nine people or is it going to be on this one person.
Most likely, your attention is going to be focused on this one person and you're going
to wonder why is this person behaving like this: am I saying something wrong?
Am I not interesting in my presentation?
So this is an example of the negativity bias.
It is an unconscious bias that makes us pay more attention to the negatives rather than
the positives.
The negativity bias in itself is very useful.
It has helped our ancestors to survive and has helped us as well to survive.
But today, the environment in which we live in for most of us is not as dangerous but
the negativity bias is still operating in the background of our consciousness.
So it is important to be mindful of it so that we don't let it color our experience
with negativity.
So how can mindfulness help us decondition this natural mechanism that we inherited from
our ancestors?
Now that we understand where our anxiety comes from, how does mindfulness meditation help
us rewire our brain to fight our anxiety?
Over the past 20 years, neuroscientists across the world from world renown medical schools
such as Harvard or Stanford or University of Wisconsin-Madison, have made a key discovery
which is called neuroplasticity and what that means is that our brain is just like any other
muscles that we have.
If we exercise it, if we train it, we can grow or reduce the size of certain areas of
the brain.
So let me illustrate how neuroplasticity works.
Say you are learning a new song and a new instrument.
Probably at the beginning, you will have to look at a note and then look at how you place
your fingers on the instrument to play it and you'll have to do this note by note by
note.
But after a few days or a few weeks, you will be able to play the song without looking at
the sheet of music.
It means that every time you looked at a note and you played it, you started to establish
a neural connection and as you played day after day after day, you began to create more
neural connection so that at the end, you could access all this information without
looking at the sheet of music but just by remembering it.
Mindfulness meditation can also be seen as a brain training.
Neuroscientists have found that mindfulness meditation affects different parts of the
brain.
One of them is the prefrontal cortex located right behind the forehead, right here.
The prefrontal cortex is responsible for our ability to think, to reason, to plan and to
focus.
Another area of the brain affected by mindfulness meditation is the amygdala, the alarm-bell
of our brain.
The amygdala is responsible for our response in face of a threat to either fight it or
run away from.
It it is also responsible for our anxiety, for worries and our fears.
So researchers have found that mindfulness meditation densifies the neural network in
the prefrontal cortex but also reduces the size of the amygdala and what that means is
that it enhances our ability to think and to focus but also lowers our triggers to react.
From a practice point of view, it also makes sense how mindfulness meditation can help
us reduce our anxiety.
When we practice mindful breathing and if you are new to it you can check out my playlist
in the description below, our intention is to stay connected with the breath and every
time we have a thought and we notice it we just let go and come back to the breath.
You can see that this is a training of our brain of our attention to stay connected to
the present moment and to not let our mind run in the future and ruminate on our worries
and fuel our anxiety.
By practicing mindful breathing, we are strengthening our brain and our ability to stay connected
and focused on the present moment.
So if you struggle with anxiety and enjoy the content of this video please leave a like
below and type in the comment the world 'BREATHE' to let me know that you found this content
helpful.
Be sure to also listen to my guided meditations that you can download for free by subscribing
to my newsletter at peaceful-breathing.com/meditations.
Mindfulness meditation is not only paying attention to our breathing, it is a practice
to transform the difficulties in our life to live more free.
Next week, I will share with you a meditation technique that you can apply to anxiety but
also that you can apply to other difficulties in your life.
As always, thank you so much for watching and I will see you soon.