Can meditation change your brain? - Body Awareness

Last week we discussed how new improvements in neuroimaging technology is allowing us to ‘see’ see how meditation is actually changing our brains.

From this research, scientists have proposed that meditation works through several mechanisms. We discussed the first mechanism, attention regulation, last week.

This week, we will examine the second way in which mindfulness is proposed to change our brain…by increasing our body awareness.

What is body awareness?

Well, again, it is exactly what it sounds like. It is our ability to notice small bodily sensations within us.

When practicing mindfulness, we often focus on an internal experience, such as our breathing, so it would make sense that this increases our ability to notice our internal sensations.

Neuroimaging studies have found that 8 weeks of mindfulness led to an increase in size of part of the brain associated with increased body awareness and the experience of oneself within the body [i].

So, I can feel my bodily sensations better, so what? What use is that?

Well, internal awareness is important for our ability empathise and regulate our own emotions [ii]. 

Meditation helps improve our ability to empathise

In terms of empathy, it is very difficult to understand how others are feeling if we aren’t able to understand how we are feeling, ourselves.

In fact, neuroscientists research has found that there are common brain regions associated with both internal body sensations and empathic responses. The same parts of the brain help us understand how we feel also help us respond to how others feel [ii].

Mediations helps improve our ability to regulate our emotions

In terms of emotion regulation, when we are more aware of how we are feeling inside, we are more aware of our emotions and being more aware of our emotions allows us to regulate them more effectively. But, we will look at emotion regulation more next week [ii].

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[i] Hölzel, B.K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S.M., Gard, T., & Lazar, S.W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research, 191, 36–43.

[ii] Hölzel, B. K., Lazar, S. W., Gard, T., Schuman-Olivier, Z., Vago, D. R., & Ott, U. (2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural perspective. Perspectives on psychological science, 6(6), 537-559.