Most of our unhappiness comes from mind’s annoying chatter on obsessions, worries, drifting from this stress to that stress, and our compulsive and exhausting attempt to anticipate the future. Most folk attempt to get the mind to shut up, calm down, and chill out through a range of tools, including eating, smoking and meditation.
Last year, a Harvard study confirmed a clear connection between mind wandering and unhappiness and found that if you’re awake, your mind is wandering half the time, and in a less happy state. When your mind is wandering, it’s not generally on the sweet things in your life.
Another study found that mind wandering activates a "default mode network (DMN)", which is not active when we’re focused on high-level processing, but when we’re drifting about in “self-referential” thoughts, flitting from one worry to the next.
Meditation increases one’s happiness, as has been shown for millenia. That is now being shown extensively in the lab. One type, mindfulness meditation focuses on quieting the mind by acknowledging non-judgmentally and then relinquishing unhappy, stress-inducing thoughts.
New research by Judson Brewer, MD, PhD and his group at Yale University found that experienced meditators (10,000 hrs+) have markedly decreased activity in the DMN and less mind wandering. Meditators have less activity in these regions governing thoughts about the self. Brewer says in experienced meditators these “‘me’ centers of the brain are being deactivated.”
They also found that when the “me” centers were being activated, experienced meditators also activated areas important in self-monitoring and cognitive control, indicating they are on constant lookout for “me” thoughts or mind-wandering; when their minds do wander, they bring them back to the present moment. Meditators not only did this during meditation, but even when not being told to do anything in particular. Experienced meditators have apparently formed a new type of default mode, one that is more present-centered and less “me”-centered, no matter what they are doing.
“This is really cool,” Brewer says.” As far as we know, nobody has seen this type of connectivity pattern before.”
Research in neurotheology (neurology of religion), confirm this. Andy Newberg, MD at the University of Pennsylvania found that in meditating monks and in praying nuns, areas of the brain important in concentration and attention were activated, while areas that govern how a person relates to the external world were deactivated, suggesting that folk who practice meditation or prayer, focus less on the self as a distinct entity from the external world, and more on connection between the two.
What about cigarettes, food, or alcohol, as a method for finding pleasure and calming the mind?
Brewer, who is involved in addiction work, uses the example of smoking to illustrate why addiction fuels negative thoughts rather than abates them. In addition to the pleasurable associations, smoking creates a negative feedback loop where you link stress and craving with smoking. Whenever you experience negative emotion, craving returns and intensifies over time, so that you are even less happy than before. A cigarette may quiet the mind temporarily but between cigarettes things get difficult, because craving creeps in, as well as unhappiness, self-referential thoughts, or everyday worries.
Substituting a carrot stick or other behavior for your actual craving (or other form of unhappiness) is a typical method of treatment, but it doesn’t often work, says Brewer, because the feedback loop is still there. Addressing the process itself with other methods (like meditation), which allow you to ride out the craving/unhappiness by attending to it and accepting it, and then letting it go, has been more successful, because it actually breaks the cycle rather than masks it.
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