Putting your feelings into words and using mindful meditation together is a powerful way to regulate your emotions in a positive way.
Why is putting our feelings into words beneficial? A brain imaging study by UCLA psychologists, which appears in the journal Psychological Science, may give us the answer. Verbalizing our negative feelings makes excessive or persistent sadness, anger and pain less intense. In another study, these same researchers provide neural evidence for why “mindfulness” – defined as the ability to live in the present moment, without distraction – provides positive benefits as well.
In the experiments, when the participants saw a photograph of an angry or fearful face, they experienced “increased activity in a region of the brain called the amygdala, which serves as an alarm to activate a cascade of biological systems to protect the body in times of danger (i.e., the fight or flight response).” The researchers saw a robust amygdala response even when they showed such emotional photographs to the subjects subliminally.
According to Matthew D. Lieberman, UCLA associate professor of psychology, seeing an angry face and simply calling it an angry face changes our brain response.
When you attach the word ‘angry,’ you see a decreased response in the amygdala.
His study showed that while the amygdala was less active when an individual labeled the feeling, another region of the brain was more active: the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. (Science Daily)
This region has been associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences. This area of the brain is also known for inhibiting behavior and processing emotions.
What we’re suggesting is when you start thinking in words about your emotions –labeling emotions — that might be part of what the right ventrolateral region is responsible for. (Lieberman)
Buddhist Teachings and Neuroscience
Mindfulness meditation, which originates in Buddhist practice, is now very popular in the west. Mindfulness meditation is an activity during which one pays attention to his or her present emotions, thoughts and body sensations, such as breathing, without passing judgment or reacting. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the earliest researchers and promoters of mindfulness mediation describes the process as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”
David Creswell, a research scientist with the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, says:
One way to practice mindfulness meditation and pay attention to present-moment experiences is to label your emotions by saying, for example, ‘I’m feeling angry right now’ or ‘I’m feeling a lot of stress right now’ or ‘this is joy’ or whatever the emotion is.
He undertook a study to examine the effects of mindfulness meditation on the brain and emotions and published his results in Psychosomatic Medicine, a leadhttps://education.humanity-upgrade.com/neuro-emotional-repatterninging international medical journal for health psychology research. (Science Daily)
Previous research has shown mindfulness meditation is effective in reducing a variety of chronic pain conditions, skin disease, stress-related health conditions and a variety of other ailments. Creswell and his UCLA colleagues concluded that when individuals label emotions, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex was activated, which seems to turn down activity in the amygdala.
Cresswell and colleagues then compared participants’ responses on the mindfulness questionnaire with the results of the labeling study. “We found the more mindful you are, the more activation you have in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the less activation you have in the amygdala,” Creswell said. “We also saw activation in widespread centers of the prefrontal cortex for people who are high in mindfulness and an increased capacity to turn down the amygdala.”
‘We found the more mindful you are, the more activation you have in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and the less activation you have in the amygdala,’ Creswell said. ‘We also saw activation in widespread centers of the prefrontal cortex for people who are high in mindfulness.’ This suggests people who are more mindful bring all sorts of prefrontal resources to turn down the amygdala. These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, he says, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health. (Science Daily)
Creswell says,
Now, for the first time since those teachings, we have shown there is actually a neurological reason for doing mindfulness meditation. Our findings are consistent with what mindfulness meditation teachers have taught for thousands of years.
In a study at Dr. Michelle Craske’s lab at UCLA, the researchers recruited participants who had a spider phobia. The participants in the study were assigned to one of four experimental conditions that differed in their instructions for what to do with the anxiety:
- Label the anxiety felt about the spider.
- Think differently of the spider so that it feels less threatening (reappraisal).
- Distract from the anxiety elicited by the spider, 4) no specific instruction (control condition).
Participants then came back for a second session so that the investigators could test the long-term effects of their emotional manipulation.
The researchers found that participants who had been assigned to labeling their emotions had lower physiological reactivity to the spiders, as indexed by fewer skin conductance responses. In addition, the authors found that within the affect labeling condition, participants who verbalized a larger number of fear and anxiety words had even fewer skin conductance responses! These findings suggest that having greater emotional clarity about one’s fear can help reduce the physiological manifestation of this emotion.
Mindful Noticing and Labeling
In mindfulness, noticing and labeling is helpful.
According to Marie Bloomfield:
The objective is to stand back, to observe our ‘mental activity’ by using our attention to track ‘the mental event’ [thoughts] moment by moment, becoming interested in our thinking as well as feelings and sensations. We step back, we notice as an observer, without taking ownership of the content of our mind.
Instead of being lost in thought, ruminating over past or future events, we wake up being present to what is here in the moment. We simply observe what is in our mind, noticing the wording of the thought(s), the intensity of the feeling(s), the location in our body of the sensation(s) without engaging with it. …
The aim here is to examine our habitual thought patterns, to take a step back, to get some perspective. In this way, we can break the cycle of rumination. It is simple and a great practice for the beginner as well as the advanced practitioner. …
The noticing and labeling practices assist in gaining clarity as to “what is” in the present moment. It helps us to gain some insight into our relationship with ourselves, with our experiences, with others and with our environment. Usually, when we have ‘a thought’, we engage with it automatically, fusing with it. As we know, some thoughts can be very sticky, making it difficult to step back. With mindfulness, we practice gently pulling away from thoughts, again and again, pausing, observing, creating more and more space between the ‘mental event’ and the response.
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