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- Greetings. Will Mobley here,
for the Institute for Empathy and Compassion.
And happy to be providing some new information
available to you and to the UCSD community
but more to the community at large.
We're collaborating with the Center for Mindfulness
to provide online resources,
exercises that we will hope will help with anxiety,
with stress, with loneliness.
We think these exercises should benefit you.
We'd delighted to have you share them with other people.
This online resource is free
and available 24 hours a day really through recordings,
as well as through live exercises.
And I'm here together with Dr. Fadel Zeidan,
who's Assistant Professor
of the Department of Anesthesiology
and is Associate Director for the Center for Mindfulness,
to provide us with an overview of the exercises
and what we think that you will achieve
by having engaged in them.
So Fadel thank you for being with me
and please say a little bit about yourself
and then let's talk about these exercises,
and perhaps how they work at a brain level.
- Sure. Thank you so much Dr. Mobley.
I'm delighted to be working with you
and our growing team on how contemplative
and self regulatory practices
can impact our well being, our general health,
especially in light of this ongoing pandemic,
in this time of uncertainty that we're all experiencing.
I'm a neuroscientist, a cognitive neuroscientist
that uses multiple techniques and methodologies
to better appreciate how practices
like mindfulness meditation
and compassion based meditation impact our health
but also how the brain
and our basic physiology can inform these processes.
We're really trying to understand
how these practices impact our well being, if at all.
And we've done some work where we were able
to identify what brain regions that are associated
with practicing meditation, how they reduce stress,
and how they impact anxiety and depression.
And I'm going to be delighted to be presenting
some preliminary data on how
these practices inform the brain and behavior.
Mindfulness meditation, as many of you may know
is a practice where an individual focuses
their attention on a body part,
generally speaking, it's the breath.
And the individual is trained
to focus on the changing sensations of their breathing.
And not if but when their mind gets distracted
the individual is taught
to acknowledge distracting thoughts, feelings, emotions
for whatever they are, and to simply let them go
without judging themselves and the distraction
by bringing the attention back to the breath.
This is a practice that's been...
It's quite remarkable,
it's over 4500 years old, and we are now only starting
to see how profound these practices can be,
and improving our well being in a self regulatory
non-pharmaceutical fashion.
So we are listening to our community, to our campus
and there is an overwhelming amount of anxiety
and stress and even loneliness that we are experiencing
in light of this Covid-19 pandemic
and our current lockdown to deal with social isolation
to stop this contagion.
So, as a part of the primary missions
and objectives of the Center for Mindfulness
in the Institute for Empathy and Compassion,
we're particularly interested in how a variety
of contemplative practices impact behavior
and the neurophysiology that supports and mediates
and facilitates improvements in well being and health.
And we have some overwhelming evidence demonstrating
that mindfulness and compassion based meditation
can directly improve stress, anxiety and loneliness,
even after just 20 minutes of practice.
So, I'm gonna share with you some slides
that kinda provides some of this preliminary work,
preliminary evidence
of how these techniques improve well being.
This is work that we've published a while ago,
almost 10 years ago that shows
that just 20 minutes of meditation practice
can significantly reduce perceived stress, tension,
depression, confusion, make you less tired,
as well as improve your total mood.
120 minute meditation practice
can on average reduce anxiety, state anxiety by 22%.
This is a study we published in 2014,
where we recruited 14 subjects
and after just 120 minute practice,
you could see the change.
This is the percent change in state anxiety,
you could see the change in state anxiety
so you don't need to be a monk
to reap the benefits of these practices.
And we also scan these people's brains
with a technique called
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
This is where we could take a snapshot
of individuals' brain activation and deactivation.
And these are the first images of a meditating brain
and we were the first to show
how meditation reduces anxiety.
So when someone is stressed out and or anxious,
there's an inability of a part of the brain
that controls thoughts and emotions to work.
So brain regions in the front,
the prefrontal cortex over here,
and the anterior cingulate cortex, they're deactivated.
And generally speaking, they're deactivated
because they reflect an inability to govern
or control thoughts, worries, anxieties.
Another brain region that's highly activated
during anxious anxiety and stress is this brain region
called the posterior cingulate cortex.
And this is a brain region associated
with mind wandering, self referential thought processes,
the thoughts in our heads.
What we found was just after
a very brief meditation training,
meditation significantly reduced anxiety
and that anxiety relief was associated
with greater activation in these exact brain regions.
Higher activation in the anterior cingulate cortex
and the prefrontal cortex predicted reductions in anxiety,
and greater deactivation of this region,
the posterior cingulate cortex
also predicted reductions in anxiety.
So we have, and there's lots more evidence out there
showing that meditation works in this way
even if you're not an expert in the techniques.
So moving along, I'm gonna show you
a slide demonstrating work from other groups
that have explicitly looked at stress in folks
who are unemployed, looking for a job,
which may be similar to the situation
we're experiencing today here during
this Covid-19 pandemic.
What we see is that the same brain region
that I showed you, the anterior cingulate cortex,
right here, greater connectivity here,
with a brain region called the amygdala,
which lives right here
is associated with greater stress.
The anterior cingulate cortex processes conflict
and ongoing states.
And the amygdala is a super old brain region
that's associated with processing fear,
negative emotions and emotions in general.
And the greater the connectivity
between the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala,
the greater the stress.
And this group led by David Cresswell
at Carnegie Mellon found some findings
that are synonymous with what we found as well.
And that mindfulness meditation reduces stress
by de-coupling this connectivity.
That the emotional centers of the brain start
to reduce their activation,
they become less hyperactive,
and that's generally controlled
by these more prefrontal brain regions,
kinda we call them the CEO of the brain.
And this was directly facilitated
by mindfulness meditation practice,
when compared even to relaxation techniques.
Further, the same group just published some work last year,
that found that mindfulness meditation
as well as compassion based practices
can significantly reduce the feelings of loneliness.
Even though they're not around people,
even though they're not participating in group settings
the practice itself helps lower feelings of loneliness
and increases feelings and social connectedness.
So what we're finding out now more than ever
is that simply self regulating your feelings
by just sitting for a few minutes a day
can dramatically improve the way that you feel.
And I'm proud to be a part of our respective centers
where we're now offering free guided practices
to help us cope and deal with the ongoing pandemic.
- Fadel, thank you very much.
So what I'm hearing then, is that there isn't,
it isn't just that there are thousands of years
of experience, human experience.
That that experience is now backed up by both subjective
and objective measures of brain function,
and that the exercises that do exist
are really quite helpful.
- That's exactly right Dr. Mobley.
- Very encouraging and,
and just to summarize a little bit more,
you know, this is the kind of thinking
that really led us to create
the Institute for Empathy and Compassion.
And it's the kind of thinking that really forged
this collaboration with the Center for Mindfulness.
With the idea that, in general,
we wanna help people deal with anxiety, stress, loneliness,
especially now and that we can do this in two ways.
In one way, we can simply provide these exercises
that we know help people.
But also we can study them.
And as we study them and their neuro biological basis,
the goal is to really refine and tune these exercises,
so they can become even more helpful.
And ultimately for us, to understand our emotional selves,
how we relate to the world,
and how it is that we can keep ourselves healthy,
but also help those around us, our colleagues, our friends
but even total strangers.
So I'm really pleased that we're working together on this
and I really thank you for your insights.
- I'm delighted to be a part of this project
and our ongoing projects as we try
to best find self-regulatory ways to feel better.
- And we're working together also for the people listening
to the video, we're working now toward
providing additional exercises and also for creating a study
to really measure objectively as possible
the impact of these exercises on your well being.
And so we'd love to have your feedback
and we'd love to have you participate
and what we hope to bring soon to the website
is a chance to volunteer in a study of efficacy.
On that same website, we will list a couple of
the videos that helped us introduce the institute,
the new institute to the UCSD campus
and we'd be delighted for you to share any of these
with your colleagues, your friends, your family members.
We want to serve you.
We wanna serve those that you love and you care for
and who care for you, and we think
this is one way to do that.
So, thank you for listening.
Thanks Fadel for being here,
and for being my colleague
and please do take advantage of our online resources.
Thank you very much.
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