HAVING spent his career exploring disorders of consciousness, Steven Laureys has started working with meditators to show the positive impact meditation can have on the brain.
Helen Thomson: What’s going on in our brains during the pandemic, and how can meditation help?
Steven Laureys: People have lost their jobs, they’re experiencing burnout, they’re thinking, “What impact is this having on my kids?” That kind of thinking can turn into catastrophising, which has a big impact on our mental health. People are also thinking about the past year, what they’ve lost.
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Our internal survival mechanism is in overdrive. The area responsible for all this anxiety, “the internal awareness network”, continues to be active even in some comatose patients, a bit like the humming of a fridge.
“I’m not a zen master, I’m a control freak. But you can meditate anywhere, even in a traffic jam”
During the pandemic, we’ve mostly heard from virologists – we haven’t talked enough about our mental health. Dealing with covid isn’t just about dealing with a virus, there’s so much more.
How do we deal with all that? One way is meditation, which is all about living in the moment, so it’s a timely exercise in regard to helping us cope with covid.
What makes you think it can help?
Meditation is not a surrogate for medical care. Always go to your doctor first. But in my hospital, we have people who have chronic pain, anxiety and depression– all these things have been made worse by covid – and we offer them meditation alongside drugs. When I prescribe meditation, my patients say, “I wish I hadn’t started this only after I had my tension headache, insomnia, burnout, I wish I’d known about it earlier”. So perhaps we need to think about using meditation for prevention rather than as a treatment for these conditions.
You say that meditation retunes the brain. What do you mean?
When someone runs, they build their leg muscles; when someone swims, they build their biceps. It’s the same with meditation, but you’re exercising your brain. When we scan the brains of long-time meditators, we see increased grey matter volume in the cingulate cortex, which is important for attention, and increases in the hippocampus, important for memory. There are changes in the insular cortex, vital for internal sensations, and the left prefrontal cortex, which helps us with emotional control.
Meditation can also boost the immune system. Could it help protect us from covid-19?
We’re just beginning to understand the power the mind has over the body, including its interaction with the immune system. It’s not because you meditate that you’ll protect yourself from covid – even the Dalai Lama has been vaccinated. However, chronic stress weakens our immune system. So having ways of dealing with stress is a good thing. It’s also been shown that your mental state can influence the efficacy of other vaccines, so meditation could be very important right now.
The pandemic has affected children too, could meditation help them?
We should definitely be teaching our kids about meditation. I think it’s very strange that we have schoolteachers emphasising knowledge, and gym teachers taking care of our physical health – why not have teachers for our mental well-being too? We’ve been ignoring it for so long.
I’ve been taught how to be a doctor, but I was never told how to take care of myself. Meditation isn’t going to change the things that are happening to you, but it does allow you to take control of how your body responds to these things. I’m convinced it will take increasing importance in our medical toolkit.
Has meditation helped you cope with the pandemic?
I’m not a zen master, I’m a control freak. I have five kids, a lot of flaws, a job in a hospital and at a university, my wife works – it’s a challenge. You just do what you can. I’m not like the monks I’ve worked with. My wife says it’s easy to be zen when you’re not married, no kids, no job.
But I tell my patients, you can meditate anywhere, even in a traffic jam. You breathe, and you take control of your “monkey mind”. You try to bring your thoughts and emotions back to your present time.
When you become an observer of your thoughts and acknowledge your emotions, your heart rate goes down, your blood pressure goes down, stress hormones like cortisol go down. It can all help you deal with the challenges of covid. Studies show even informal meditation has great benefits.
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Steven Laureys is a neurologist at Liège University Hospital in Belgium. His book The No-Nonsense Meditation Book will be published in the UK this month
