The Science behind my all-time fave Mindfulness practices
“Woo-woo: unconventional beliefs regarded as having little or no scientific basis, especially those relating to spirituality, mysticism, or alternative medicine.”
since when is mindfulness woo-woo!?
One of my goals for this quarter is to create a space for myself - a place to relax for my “mindful morning” - and I am having so much fun creating + sharing it! But during the process, a LOT of what I was sharing was called “woo-woo+ + that REALLY surprised me…
Since when is mindfulness considered woo-woo? For me, these tools have become practical techniques for staying more present in my day-to-day life, especially in our age of technology + social media. But I get it…
This is part of my newly-completed self-care space for my morning mindfulness practice My new strand of mala beads are at the bottom of the image. I know - I’m insanely color coordinate!
This is part of my newly-completed self-care space for my morning mindfulness practice My new strand of mala beads are at the bottom of the image. I know - I’m insanely color coordinate!
I’m not woo-woo. I’m a scientist to my core. My practical + rational brain has ALWAYS been something that I just can't turn off! And even for me, all these "mindfulness" things used to feel too damn woo, touchy-feely, spiritual + overboard!
But, then, I started trying these techniques out. I looked at them from a practical perspective more than a spiritual + woo-woo one and I was surprised by how much I great to love them. They became one of the biggest things I started sharing…
Meditation, on a practical level, gave me one of the only times in my day when I didn’t have to be productive +I could just relax and disconnect…
Journaling, on a practical level, gave me a window inside my own head + made me more self-aware…
The mala beads on my meditation cushion, on a practical level, gave me something to busy my hands + help me focus while I meditate…
But there’s also more to these practices than that practicality! Because of that, I wanted to share some of my favorite practices that truly are based in science! This is for all my right-brained peeps out there. Because mindfulness in and of itself is something that is so damn beneficial for your life! Whether you consider yourself to be a “meditation person” or not, these are practices that tremendously benefit your life in terms of…
Emotional Health
Presence
Self-care
So, what I’m going to explore in this post is the science behind these practices + the practical perspective on why they’re such easy + practical to integrate into your daily life! But, fefore we get into them, I want to say something really quickly about scientific research…
When reading science + listening to scientists you need to know one very important thing. Scientists rarely make absolute statements. They rarely say “this causes this…this cures that…this decreases/increases this symptom,” etc. There is a reason for that. The long + short of it is until we can shrink ourselves down like Ant Man, go inside a cell (or into the quantum realm), we have no way of knowing what truly is or is not happening on a cellular and molecular level.
Scientists realize this! Scientists understand that the best we can do is conjecture, hypothesize, design the best possible experiment we can and control for as many possible scenarios and variables as possible. That’s it!
Anytime you hear someone say “This has been proven…” or anything to that effect, you should be skeptical AF! Raise that eyebrow because the hard and fast truth of it is that we know for certain very very little about life! We have hypotheses about a GREAT DEAL, but we can’t make specific, cause-and-effect, absolute claims a good chunk of the time. Again - think Ant Man!
And that’s how I’m going to be talking about these practices in this article. Hell, that’s exactly why this article is called “the science behind”…and NOT “the proof behind…” because, honestly, very little in the biological, chemical, and physical world has been proven!
So, with that being said, let’s get into my fave practical mindfulness practices…
Essential Oils
Damn right, I’m starting with essential oils because there’s actually an insane amout of scientific research and links found between essential oils and various aspects of health! Some of these include…
Citrus oil, which has been associated with decreases in anxiety, increases in mood and in calming women…
Chamomile extract, which show to reduce symptoms of Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and chamomile tea, which has been associated with decreases in symptoms of depression in postpartum women…
Lavender, which has been associated with reduced agitation in elderly dementia patients when inhaled, and, when applied in as an oil, has been shown to decrease pain during the insertion of dialysis needles…
Peppermint oil, which has also been used to treat migraines…
Fennel, which was shown to relieve symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome…
Ginger and turmeric oils, which have been used to successfully treat rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis…
Hell - did you know I’ve actually written a full article about essential oils (here)?!
One of the big ways that I use essential oils is for relaxation and that’s definitely a place where I wondered: is there actually science behind this? Clary sage has been linked to relaxation in a 2013 study, which I will admit is small and these results should be taken with a grain of salt. In a 2017 study, lavender oils, as well, was linked to reduced anxiety, but those results have limitations as well. These are perhaps the biggest two oils that I love for relaxation and stress relief, but check out this article for some of the other oils that have been linked to anxiety relief.
So, I’ll leave you with same suggestions for essential oils that I made in my previous article…
Stick to topical or inhalational essential oils. The data on the safety of ingestion is the flimsiest, by far.
Avoid long-term use. There just isn’t enough evidence yet to know if long-term use of some of the more exotic essential oils is safe…
Make sure you’re using high-quality essential oils. Oils can definitely be impure or contaminated, so buy from a reputable source….
Use an appropriate dose. Less is definitely more with essential oils! Seriously, never use undiluted essential oils on your skin. Ever.
Journaling
It’s not necessarily woo-woo, but journaling sometimes gets roped in with all of those other hippy-dippy practices. But I actually think it’s insanely practical.
Journaling, often referred to as disclosure in scientific research, does have some benefits, though admittedly some are much more of a stretch than others.
As stated in this article, “University of Texas at Austin psychologist and researcher James Pennebaker contends that regular journaling strengthens immune cells, called T-lymphocytes. Other research indicates that journaling decreases the symptoms of asthma and rheumatoid arthritis.” Now, that’s some mind-blowing data!
I actually found the original articles, and they do make claims that expressive writing about traumatic events was linked to higher antibody levels and lower circulating immune cells, which they seem to associate with better health. Now, I would like to state that I wasn’t able to access anything beyond the article summary, called an abstract. This is a problem because I’m not able to review the legitimacy of the experimental esign. Another review article by the same author mentioned this immune function-related benefits, but I really can’t say if this is legit. I just don’t have enough information about the experiment design. In my brain, it’s quit a stretch! What I was able to find was research from Pennebaker linking journaling about emotionally traumatic events to decreases in blood pressure.
Another study I found was this meta-analysis. Meta-analyses are studies that take the data from multiple studies, combining the results and assessing them statistically. Interestingly, in this analysis, they found that journaling improved health, but that those improvements were more significant in physical health vs. psychological, which, to me, is very unexpected. Now, studies like this have their limitations and an experiment where participants are randomized and variables like age, sex, pre-existing conditions, etc. are controlled for between the treated and untreated groups would be better. Still, these associations are very intriguing.
One thing that I found very interesting was that in multiple studies, therapeutic or expressive writing about traumatic events was often linked to negative outcomes in the short-term, but beneficial outcomes + health improvements in the long-term. Not suprising, right?! It’s usually not overly pleasant to relive a traumatic experience, even if it is on the pages of your journal! But, over time, that negativity dissipates in favor of positive + beneficial improvements from the perspective of relaxation and relieved trauma!
I know you might be thinking: “This is all well and good, but this is just another thing to add to my to-do list! Why else should I make the time?”
It’s also important to consider journaling’s benefits from a practical practice, your journal can basically be like your lab notebook where you clarity your thoughts + feelings around things, where you can know yourself better through tracking patterns, trends, changes in your mood, and your growth over time. I even use my journal to write out letters to people that I disagree with or that I’m frustrated by. It helps me get a handle on my emotions + clearly articulate my feelings before having a conversation. Journaling allows you to collect emotional data + that’s the practical power of it…
Here is some additional information about journaling here: therapeutic journaling, “Emotional + physical benefits of expressive writing…”,
So, in conclusion, I really think the relaxation benefits, such as decreased blood pressure are the best reasons to journal, as well as the practical reasons. Honestly, just journal for improved self-awareness…
Meditation
This is one that I’ve always wondered about - is meditation actually scientifically backed? Long-story short?! Yes!
In looking into this, I really wanted to make sure I was getting the recent articles + evidence. Like, let’s avoid the things on transcendental meditation websites + articles from the 1950s. I wanted to know the links we’ve found recently! Like…in the last DECADE! So, let’s get into what I found…
The first article I found dug into the neurological and cardiovascular responses to meditation - ie. your brain and heart! They used wireless sensors, which (full-transparency) I know little about in terms of the accuracy of that technology, and linked these sensors up to both experienced and novice meditators. Their goal was to determine the variations between individuals when it came to their brain activity (EEG), blood pressure, heart rate and heart rate variability. Admittedly, the number in this study were kind of low (only 20 participants per group), but they did find significant changes in artierial blood pressure and significant, measurable changes in brain activity, even in new meditators.
One article from 2017 that I’m super excited about was one that looked into whether or not meditation could impact grey matter loss in neurodegenerative diseases. Grey matter is the part of the brain that contains your neurons and is important for muscle control, your senses, memory, emotions and much more. This was a systematic review, meaning that this article looked at the data from 13 previously published studies. The really interesting thing was that every single study they considered showed significant increases in grey matter in the groups that meditated. They don’t know how this works yet or if it something that can be controlled in a way that specifically targets the parts of the brain that are impacted by neurodegeneration, but it’s an exciting finding nonetheless!
Another study looked at the association between meditation and introspection (ie. basically the ability to observe yourself on a physical or emotional level). Basically, the had participants do body scans and compared their awareness of physical sensations with the amount of brain activity within the primary sematosensory cortex, which is the part of our brain that processes our sense of touch. What they found was a correlation between the amount of meditation a person has down and the accuracy of their introspection, which is pretty interesting. I think the association here says a lot about how meditation can enhance introspection, but this study is small (only 8 experienced meditators and I think 30 overall), and it’s not clear to me if they were actually assessing the brain activity of their meditators or merely making a comparison to previously published data. So, take this observation with a grain of salt.
Some other interesting associations that have been made when it comes to meditaiton are:
Mindfulness meditation can increase sensitivity to time and the perceived length of time. They primarily saw this in the experienced meditators, but they also showed that these more experienced meditators were less anxious than novice meditators. The researchers hypothesized that the practice of mindfulness meditation “developed individual’s abilities in devoting more attention resources”, meaning that they were more able to focus on the information they were focusing on, which is super interesting. This is the only study I’ve seen on this, but I liked what I saw in terms of the set-up of the experiment. Read more here >>
Mindfulness may affect larger networks within the brain. I really love it when studies do brain imaging or look at changes in the actual brain structure when meditating. There are a number of studies that have done this - 21 that I know of - but they’ve all used different methods, looked at different types of mindfulness or meditation techniques, etc. Short version - they’re very different studies! So, as a result, these studies collectively have shown that meditation can affect the cerebral cortex, white/grey matter, brain stem, and cerebellum. This likely means that meditation does not have a specific affect on one part of the brain, but likely is affecting some larger network in the brain. Read more here >>
Long-term meditation has been shown to affect alertness, while short-term meditation is more associated with focus and executive functioning. There is some conflicting evidence in regards to these outcomes and I plan to look more into this later on.
Mindfulness meditation is associated with a number of benefits in regard to emotional regulation. These include things like improvements in processing emotions, decreased reactivity from a physical level to negative emotions, returning to your so-called “emotional baseline” more quickly, and lowered intensity and frequency of negative emotions. Read more here >>
From the practical perspective, meditation is one of the only parts of the day where I have permission to not think, not do, not produce, + not create! I talk about this a lot in the podcast I did on practical mindfulness tips here. One of the favorite things I said about meditation (below) is how insanely practical it is!
“[Journaling + meditation] go hand-in-hand. Meditation usually raises the questions or those immediate thoughts once you get to the point where that intuitive voice starts pushing thorugh, and then journaling is where I work it out. It’s SO practical. These are not woo-woo practices. They’re so practical if you have any desire to better understand yourself + what you want in your life. [Journaling + meditation} are stupid practical to help you do that...”
Again - it’s insanely practical! And that’s what both of the last two tools - meditation and journaling, specifically - are all about for me!
In conclusion, I think the best data in the regards to the benefits of meditation is that around decreased blood pressure and brain activity. The other grey matter and introspection are interesting and I definitely am excited to learn more about them, but ultimately, the studies are kind of lacking and definitely require more research.
For a greater review, that I really enjoyed, check out this article. You can rent it and read it for $8 and I actually think it’s a really great description of good meditation studies vs. bad and things to think about if you ever do any research of your own on this topic. Honestly, there’s so much science to go through on this one that I’m just gonna have to do a whole article about meditation alone. Keep your eyes peeled!
Earthing (or grounding)
This is probably the thing that I do that is the most woo-woo…but I’m telling you about it anyway because I’ve had so much fun digging into the research behind this tool.
Right off the bat, I will say, there are people in the scientific community that say that this is complete and utter bullshit. I’m going off of the papers that I’ve read. So, if you’re someone that does believe this is bullshit and you’ve got some science to send my way that proves that, by all means, drop it in the comments and I’ll ammend this article if it convinces me…
But, in the meantime, I’m going be what I’ve read and what I’ve felt in terms of benefits from this practice…
Now, I found this practice reading Shawn Stephenson’s book “Sleep Smarter”. I started doing this as a sleeping hack because I was getting such shitty sleep. And I really felt a benefit. I did feel like it had improved my sleep but I wanted to learn more about if this was legit or some sort of placebo effect. So, I did a little bit of digging and this is what I found.
Firstly, what is earthing/grounding? As stated by this article, earthing is: “direct physical contact with the vast supply of electrons on the surface of the Earth.”It involves walking barefoot outside or sitting, working, or sleeping indoors connected to conductive systems that transfer the Earth's electrons from the ground into the body.
Now, we don’t know the mechanism behind that for sure, but this review article puts into context our “most reasonable hypothesis”: that a direct connection with the earth allows for free electrons to flow from the earth to the body, helping us to better set our “biological clocks”. Additionally, our body produces what are called “free radicals” during normal immune and everyday function. The proposed mechanism here is that the free electrons from the earth neutralize these free radicals to help resolve chronic inflammation.
Some of the benefits of earthing that have been demonstrated in the science are…
Aligning circadian rhythms. In their study, females saw greater improvements than males. Their study also had subjects self-report other benefits they noticed during the study, including improved sleep, reduced pain, and lowered stress. All of these benefits were subjectively reported by the subjects, but my experience agrees with these findings. In this particular study, the number of subjects was quite small - 8 persons to be exact - and the patients slept on conductive mattress pads as opposed to earthing outside, and they were all persons that complained of sleep dysfunction, pain and stress. Admittedly, this study isn’t well-controlled.
Improved sleep. This study was super cool! It was actually pretty damn sizeable with 60 study participants and it was blinded. All participants thought they were experiencing grounding, but only half were grounded while the other half were actually not. The study ran for a month and the participants self-reported their results. At the end of the study, 85% of the test subjects reported improved time to falling asleep and 93% of the test subjects reported improved sleep quality vs. 13% and 13%, respectively, for control subjects. Admittedly, there’s probably some people who would dislike the idea of self-reporting when it came to sleep improvements, but, I don’t know…I think individuals have a pretty damn good idea about their time to sleep and their sleep quality…
Activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Firstly, the parasympathetic nervous system is called the rest and digest system (as opposed to the fight + flight response of the sympathetic nervous system). This system relaxes and slows down many high energy functions + processes. It’s like the chill-out side of your nervous system. I’m not gonna lie, I really loved reading about this study in this review (Original study here)!What I loved about this study is that they double-blinded their participants, which is important because it helps to mitigate the placebo affect. The number of participants is small (14 men and 14 women), but they measured their results both by grounding + not grounding the exact same sets of participants. They found instantaneous (and consistent) increases in blood oxygenation, respiratory rate, and skin conductant, which are linked to the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is so damn cool!
Decreases in pain, including delayed-onset muscle soreness (DOMS) from exercise. These findings stemmed from with a teeny pilot study of 8 total people (seriously - it was TEENY!), 4 of whom were grounded and 4 of whom weren’t,who were assessed before exercise and 24, 48, and 72 hours afterward. The researchers found that grounding affected the immune system (white blood cell counts, for ex.) and pain.
In conclusion, there’s legit data behind the benefits of earthing! The ones I’m most intrigued by are the relaxation benefits in activating the parasympathetic nervous system and the improved sleep. I’m still doing more research on circadian rhythms and pain! I’ll keep you updated with what I find!
To learn more, check out this review, which links to a number of studies…
things to remember…
These are my favorite strategies that are based in mindfulness and have scientific backing, which - in many cases - are still being fully flushed out. In the vast majority of these studies, there are limitations and biases to be considered! I’d actually be willing to be that most of the researchers that have investigated these practices have personally benefited from them. One of the reviews I read even said that is likely the case.
Additionally, on a scientific level, the sample sizes of most of these studies are very small. This is problematic because small sample sizes can mean less accurate mean values, the potential for outliers that could skew the data and there’s a larger margin of error. Additionally, many of the observations or claims that have been made haven’t been tested enough to be fully “accepted” by the academic and scientific community.
But should we wait until they’re “fully understood” before we try them? Absolutely not, in my opinion. Why?
Science moves slowly. I get that more than most people and it definitely takes some time for things to become accepted in the scientific community. For example, epigenetics, which essentially refers to biological changes as a result of environmental factors rather than our genes, was phenomenon that took a good 20-30 years to become widely accepted. Some of the same things might be happening here, and the more “new age-y” something is, the longer it’s going to take be accepted. To do research, scientists need funding and even if the public is curious about something, funding organizations might not be eager to fund it. So, keep that in mind…
Because it will never be “fully understood”. Remember Ant Man. Same thing here. Until we can shrink down like Ant Man and follow the free electron as it travels from Earth into our body, it ain’t gonna happen! Scientists know that. What we have to do is decide at which point we feel like there’s “enough” evidence for us to feel comfortable + confident that integrating these practices is worth it…
So, there we have it...
even if these are just “trends” now, I highly recommend these practices!
and, On that note...
I’m planning on sharingmore of the science
behind these + similar strategies!
STAY TUNED…
