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Episode 1 – What is Happiness?

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Meditation to help kids

Article from the Charlotte Observer

By Michael J. Slender

While meditation is regularly practiced by only a fraction of Americans, its popularity is growing, especially for children.

A survey by the National Institutes of Health reported a nearly 28 percent increase from 2007 to 2012 in children’s use of meditation. The data showed 927,000 or 1.6 percent of U.S. children meditated. The same survey reported 18 million or 8 percent of adults practiced meditation.

And though the numbers are small, more social service providers, educators, and parents are bringing the benefits of meditation to children.

A Charlotte mother of three and longtime meditation practitioner, Angela Gala, saw each of her children benefit from meditation.

“About two years ago I invited my oldest to meditate with me as he faced some challenges sleeping,” said Gala. “It wasn’t long before he would use the techniques we practiced when he unexpectedly awoke in the middle of the night to comfortably fall back asleep, something that was difficult before.”

She said each of her younger twins eventually meditated, gaining more self-control and focus.

Together with Ranjit Deora, founder of Charlotte Meditation, Gala established Youth Meditation, a nonprofit organization providing programming to children, parents and teachers on mindfulness practices and meditation instruction.

“Meditation is not a religion, philosophy or a lifestyle,” said Deora. “It is simply a relaxation technique combining breathing and mental focus exercises that connect you to the present.”

In 12 years of practice in Charlotte he’s worked with corporations such as Bank of America, AT&T and The Shaw Group.

Deora noted children often adapt to meditation techniques more easily than adults. “They have a greater innocence and fewer activities of life,” said Deora. “They take to it naturally.”

Gala and Deora worked pro bono with 120 children last summer in summer camp classes offered at A Child’s Place, a local organization that works to ease the impact of homelessness on children.

“Our kids face a number of difficult situations that impact their behavior and self-esteem,” said Katrina Griggs, 31, program manager at A Child’s Place. “Meditation gave the children a healthier way to express their feelings and provide techniques and positive outlets to relieve their stress.”

Gala explained the program began with laughter yoga, in which participants force themselves to laugh until it becomes genuine. “Through breathing exercises we teach them to relax, focus and calm anger or frustration they may be experiencing,” she said.

Gala knew she was reaching the children when one child reflected on a situation at home. The child’s mother was upset and raising her voice in anger. “She told me she showed her mother the breathing techniques she learned in our class and performed them together with her mom, completely defusing the situation. They both ended up laughing about it.”

At Charlotte Country Day School, mindfulness meditation classes are part of the overall approach to wellness that the school is committed to for teachers and staff. The school began offering Charlotte Meditation-led classes as part of its wellness programming beginning in the fall of 2014.

“When our teachers and staff are at their best, they can provide our children their best,” said Natalie Pruette, director of communications. “Happy and healthy employees translate to happy and healthy children.”

Workplace Mindfulness Can Cut On-The-Job Stress

By Janice Wood

Reposted from www.psychcentral.com

hospital-med-big-ss-225x300Members of a surgical intensive care unit at the medical center were randomly assigned to either a stress-reduction intervention or a control group.

The eight-week mindfulness-based interventions included mindfulness, gentle stretching, yoga, meditation, and music in the workplace.

Psychological and biological markers of stress were measured one week before and one week after the intervention to see if these coping strategies would help reduce stress and burnout among employees, researchers said.

Results of the study, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, showed that levels of salivary [alpha]-amylase, an index of sympathetic activation of the nervous system — also known as the fight or flight response — were significantly decreased in the intervention group.

The control group showed no changes. Psychological components of stress and burnout were measured using well-established self-report questionnaires.

“Our study shows that this type of mindfulness-based intervention in the workplace could decrease stress levels and the risk of burnout,” said Maryanna Klatt, Ph.D., an associate clinical professor in the department of family medicine.

“What’s stressful about the work environment is never going to change. But what we were interested in changing was the nursing personnel’s reaction to those stresses.

“We measured salivary alpha amylase, which is a biomarker of the sympathetic nervous system activation, and that was reduced by 40 percent in the intervention group.”

Klatt, who is a trained mindfulness and certified yoga instructor, developed and led the mindfulness-based intervention for 32 employees. At baseline, the employees scored the level of stress of their work at 7.15 on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the most stressful.

The levels of work stress did not change between the first and second set of assessments, but their reaction to the work stress did change, the researchers noted.

When stress is part of the work environment, it is often difficult to control and can negatively affect employees’ health and ability to function, said lead author Anne-Marie Duchemin, M.D., an associate professor adjunct in the department of psychiatry and behavioral health.

She noted that people who are subjected to chronic stress will often exhibit symptoms of irritability, nervousness, and feeling overwhelmed, as well as have difficulty concentrating or remembering. They also often have changes in appetite, sleep, heart rate, and blood pressure, she said.

“Although work-related stress often cannot be eliminated, effective coping strategies may help decrease its harmful effects,” she said. “The changes in the levels of salivary alpha-amylase suggest that the reactivity to stress was decreased after the eight-week group intervention.”

Source: Ohio State University

Forever young: Meditation might slow the age-related loss of gray matter in the brain

Posted on Science Daily.

Date: February 5, 2015
Source: University of California – Los Angeles
Summary: Building on their earlier work that suggested people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain’s white matter, a new study found that meditation appeared to help preserve the brain’s gray matter, the tissue that contains neurons.

Since 1970, life expectancy around the world has risen dramatically, with people living more than 10 years longer. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that starting when people are in their mid-to-late-20s, the brain begins to wither — its volume and weight begin to decrease. As this occurs, the brain can begin to lose some of its functional abilities.

So although people might be living longer, the years they gain often come with increased risks for mental illness and neurodegenerative disease. Fortunately, a new study shows meditation could be one way to minimize those risks.

Building on their earlier work that suggested people who meditate have less age-related atrophy in the brain’s white matter, a new study by UCLA researchers found that meditation appeared to help preserve the brain’s gray matter, the tissue that contains neurons.

The scientists looked specifically at the association between age and gray matter. They compared 50 people who had mediated for years and 50 who didn’t. People in both groups showed a loss of gray matter as they aged. But the researchers found among those who meditated, the volume of gray matter did not decline as much as it did among those who didn’t.

The article appears in the current online edition of the journal Frontiers in Psychology.

Dr. Florian Kurth, a co-author of the study and postdoctoral fellow at the UCLA Brain Mapping Center, said the researchers were surprised by the magnitude of the difference.

“We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating,” he said. “Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain.”

As baby boomers have aged and the elderly population has grown, the incidence of cognitive decline and dementia has increased substantially as the brain ages.

“In that light, it seems essential that longer life expectancies do not come at the cost of a reduced quality of life,” said Dr. Eileen Luders, first author and assistant professor of neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “While much research has focused on identifying factors that increase the risk of mental illness and neurodegenerative decline, relatively less attention has been turned to approaches aimed at enhancing cerebral health.”

Each group in the study was made up of 28 men and 22 women ranging in age from 24 to 77. Those who meditated had been doing so for four to 46 years, with an average of 20 years.

The participants’ brains were scanned using high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging. Although the researchers found a negative correlation between gray matter and age in both groups of people — suggesting a loss of brain tissue with increasing age — they also found that large parts of the gray matter in the brains of those who meditated seemed to be better preserved, Kurth said.

The researchers cautioned that they cannot draw a direct, causal connection between meditation and preserving gray matter in the brain. Too many other factors may come into play, including lifestyle choices, personality traits, and genetic brain differences.

“Still, our results are promising,” Luders said. “Hopefully they will stimulate other studies exploring the potential of meditation to better preserve our aging brains and minds. Accumulating scientific evidence that meditation has brain-altering capabilities might ultimately allow for an effective translation from research to practice, not only in the framework of healthy aging but also pathological aging.”

 

Story Source:

The above story is based on materials provided by University of California – Los Angeles. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:

  1. Eileen Luders, Nicolas Cherbuin, Florian Kurth. Forever Young(er): potential age-defying effects of long-term meditation on gray matter atrophy. Frontiers in Psychology, 2015; 5 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01551

The Benefits of a Lunch Hour Walk

Posted in the New York Times Wellness Blog – www.well.blog.nytimes

By

 
Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

To combat afternoon slumps in enthusiasm and focus, take a walk during the lunch hour.

A new study finds that even gentle lunchtime strolls can perceptibly — and immediately — buoy people’s moods and ability to handle stress at work.

It is not news, of course, that walking is healthy and that people who walk or otherwise exercise regularly tend to be more calm, alert and happy than people who are inactive.

But many past studies of the effects of walking and other exercise on mood have focused on somewhat long-term, gradual outcomes, looking at how weeks or months of exercise change people emotionally.

Fewer studies have examined more-abrupt, day-to-day and even hour-by-hour changes in people’s moods, depending on whether they exercise, and even fewer have focused on these effects while people are at work, even though most of us spend a majority of our waking hours in an office.

So, for the new study, which was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports this month, researchers at the University of Birmingham and other universities began by recruiting sedentary office workers at the university.

Potential volunteers were told that they would need to be available to walk for 30 minutes during their usual lunch hour three times a week.

Most of the resulting 56 volunteers were middle-aged women. It can be difficult to attract men to join walking programs, said Cecilie Thogersen-Ntoumani, the study’s lead author and now a professor of exercise science at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. Walking may not strike some men as strenuous enough to bother with, she said. But she and her colleagues did attract four sedentary middle-aged men to the experiment.

The volunteers completed a series of baseline health and fitness and mood tests at the outset of the experiment, revealing that they all were out of shape but otherwise generally healthy physically and emotionally.

Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani and her colleagues then randomly divided the volunteers into two groups, one of which was to begin a simple, 10-week walking program right away, while the other group would wait and start their walking program 10 weeks later, serving, in the meantime, as a control group.

To allow them to assess people’s moods, the scientists helped their volunteers to set up a specialized app on their phones that included a list of questions about their emotions. The questions were designed to measure the volunteers’ feelings, at that moment, about stress, tension, enthusiasm, workload, motivation, physical fatigue and other issues related to how they were feeling about life and work at that immediate time.

A common problem with studies of the effect of exercise on mood, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said, is that they rely on recall. People are asked to remember hours or days after the fact how exercise made them feel. Given how fleeting and mysterious our emotions can be, recalled responses are notoriously unreliable, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said.

Instead, she and her colleagues wanted in-the-moment assessments from people of how they felt before and after exercise. The phone app questions provided that experience, she said, in a relatively convenient form.

Then the first group began walking. Each volunteer was allowed to walk during one of several lunchtime sessions, all of them organized by a group leader and self-paced. Slower walkers could go together, with faster ones striding ahead. There was no formal prescribed distance or intensity for the walks. The only parameter was that they last for 30 minutes, which the volunteers had said would still allow them time to eat lunch.

The groups met and walked three times a week.

Each workday morning and afternoon during the first 10 weeks, the volunteers in both groups answered questions on their phones about their moods at that particular moment.

After 10 weeks, the second group began their walking program. The first group was allowed to continue walking or not as they chose. (Many did keep up their lunchtime walks.)

Then the scientists compared all of the responses, both between groups and within each individual person. In other words, they checked to see whether the group that had walked answered questions differently in the afternoon than the group that had not, and also whether individual volunteers answered questions differently on the afternoons when they had walked compared with when they had not.

The responses, as it turned out, were substantially different when people had walked. On the afternoons after a lunchtime stroll, walkers said they felt considerably more enthusiastic, less tense, and generally more relaxed and able to cope than on afternoons when they hadn’t walked and even compared with their own moods from a morning before a walk.

Although the authors did not directly measure workplace productivity in their study, “there is now quite strong research evidence that feeling more positive and enthusiastic at work is very important to productivity,” Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said. “So we would expect that people who walked at lunchtime would be more productive.”

As a pleasant, additional outcome, all of the volunteers showed gains in their aerobic fitness and other measures of health at the completion of their 10 weeks of walking.

But, tellingly, many said that they anticipated being unable to continue walking after the experiment ended and a few (not counted in the final tally of volunteers) had had to drop out midway through the program. The primary impediment to their walking, Dr. Thogersen-Ntoumani said, had been “that they were expected by management to work through lunch,” suggesting that management might wish to acquaint themselves with the latest science.