Medical News Today reports a study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology called Effect of compassion meditation on neuroendocrine, innate immune and behavioral responses to psychosocial stress.
Compassion meditation, as you may recall, involves cultivating an attitude of compassion and love towards others while in a meditative frame of mind. I wrote about it previously in my post Getting on with other people. Other kinds of meditation have been extensively studied for their physiological effects, but this study set out to discover whether compassion meditation also affected the ability to deal with stress and the activity of the immune system. (Immune system function is known to be affected by stress.)
In their introduction (not available for free on the web), the authors discuss their reasons for looking at compassion meditation. Advanced practitioners produce EEG patterns otherwise associated with positive emotion and improved immune function, and even brief practice appears to affect activity in areas of the brain relevant to stress. The increased “self-compassion” which compassion meditation can generate has been linked to “reductions in perceived stress, burnout, depression, and anxiety as well as increases in life satisfaction”, and also to reduced responses to stress in the laboratory.
The form of compassion meditation used in the study was the Tibetan Buddhist lojong practice. This has two parts: firstly, challenging one’s own mental categories and emotions which naturally tend to see people as “friend, enemy or stranger” through deliberate cognitive reassessment, and secondly practicing the development of empathy and love for an expanding circle of people outward from the self. Usually (and in this study) concentration and mindfulness techniques are taught first in order to develop the attention and awareness necessary to practice compassion meditation.
photo credit: h.koppdelaney
The participants were university students in good mental health, and they were assigned to either 6 weeks of compassion meditation training (including a 50-minute class twice a week incorporating about 20 minutes of practice, and a CD for home practice), or a health discussion group as the control condition. The health discussion group had about the same time requirement as the meditation training and also included a home activity (a 2-3 page self-improvement paper based on what was discussed in class). The meditation group recorded the number of sessions of meditation they practiced at home. A total of 61 people completed the study, 33 in the meditation group.
A standardized stress test (the Trier social stress test), which reliably causes measurable effects on physiological measures related to immune function, was used with the participants at the end of the study. The results were assessed by blood tests and the Profile of Mood States (POMS) assessment tool.
Although there was not an overall significant difference between the groups on the tests, there was a correlation between the number of sessions of meditation practice and some test scores. Participants who meditated more often had lower POMS scores and lower amounts of plasma IL-6, a reliable chemical indicator of immune response to stress, but their levels of cortisol, another key stress chemical, did not appear to be affected.
It seems that compassion meditation, like other meditative practices, if practiced regularly can have an effect on our response to stress. The researchers are now planning a longer-term follow-up study with cancer patients.
Meditation and hypnotherapy are very similar in terms of the brain states they produce, so studies like this which link mental practice with physical and behavioural outcomes are always of interest to me. Evidence is increasing all the time that what you do with your mind influences your body in measurable ways.
Technorati Tags: meditation, compassion, mind-body, stress, immune system, hypnotherapy
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