The Stress & Immune Response in Meditation
Welcome back to our weekly blog on mindfulness, health and wellbeing. Our current series is examining the ‘mechanisms of mindfulness’ — how might mindfulness produce some of the effects it claims it has? What does the scientific evidence tell us? Last week we learnt about how meditating, through focussing on the rhythm of the breath, may influence the parasympathetic nervous system, which may help to ‘slow’ things down in the body and produce some of the effects that it does. This week, we will cover how this mechanism may impact on what is known as the ‘stress response’. So let’s begin!
The Stress & Immune Response
finding your ‘hero’s journey’
‘Stress’ is a common word, and is regularly associated with mindfulness — it’s common to hear that mindfulness is about being calm, relaxed, positive and less stressed. This is true to some degree, but what we have hoped to show across our blogs is that mindfulness is also so much more than just these things, and can include confronting anger, fear, sadness, and other challenging emotions and relationships — a ‘hero’s journey’ — both within yourself and within other people.
the symptoms of stress
In saying that, ‘stress’ is also a scientific term. The ‘stress response’ is the way that the chemicals, hormones and neurotransmitters in our body respond to external stress, in part due to how the sympathetic nervous system is activated, and then how this affects the body over both the short and long term. We already mentioned that this can include our blood pressure and heart rate increasing, our breathing increasing, muscles tensing, our mouth drying up, and a need to go to the toilet. However, there can also be a myriad of other changes in our body which, over time, can cause potentially harmful changes. This type of stress response in our body, over the long term, has been likened to chronic inflammation, which is where the chemicals begin to breakdown and affect the body in harmful ways.
mindfulness mechanism for coping with stress
Interestingly, mindfulness meditation has been found to help and improve a number of medical conditions which are associated with chronic inflammation or pain. Studies have shown a reduced level of medical symptoms, sensory pain and physical impairment in conditions such as chronic pain, cancer and fibromyalgia, as well as increasing the rate of healing in conditions such as psoriasis.
how the mechanism works on your body
Scientists have also investigated why this might be. They have found mindfulness practices may increase the amount of immune cells present in the body, which may correlate with changes in the brain that are also occurring as a result of meditation. Studies have also found an increase in the amount of antibodies produced by these immune cells. Other studies have found that meditation can change the way that genes are expressed, which is something we will talk about more in further blogs. This in turn can influence specific immune and inflammatory cells and how they work.
pinpointing the possibility for change
Is there one underlying mechanism for how meditation changes our body? Perhaps it all comes back to the breath. Through the attention control and improvement of self regulation, and ‘fine tuning’ our body’s internal rhythms, like our brainwaves, brain structure, and our parasympathetic nervous system, this in turn influences the types of immune cells created and the types of chemicals released.
That’s all for this week’s blog — tune in next week when we will cover more about the mechanisms of mindfulness, with a particular focus on changes to the brain. And don’t forget to join us in the StudyStream library every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 19:30BST for live and free mindfulness sessions with expert teachers.
You can check out links to some of the articles mentioned below:
