14 DAY TRIAL // Meditation is like training for your brain. It has been proven to increase sensory speed. And now, a new research has shown that if you name your emotions, you can handle them. Putting negative emotions into words seems to calm down the brain's emotion nuclei, explaining the main goal of the meditation: to "let go" your negative emotions.
This is no longer a mystery for psychologists: talking about your feelings helps you control them, but the mechanism was not known. The UCLA team led by psychologist Matthew Lieberman investigated the brain function in 30 people employing the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technique, which scans the brain showing which nuclei are active or not at a given moment. The volunteers had to look at pictures of male or female faces with different emotional expressions.
Some images had a choice of words pointing to the emotion, like "angry" or "fearful", or two possible names for the represented people, a male name and a female one. The volunteers had to choose the most appropriate emotion or gender-appropriate name matching the face.
When the subjects had to label the negative expression, the activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region, linked to thinking in words about emotional experiences, turned more intense, whereas activity in the amygdala, an important brain nucleus involved in emotional processing, was shut down.
When the participants had to choose the right names for the faces, the brain scans did not present any of these changes, pointing that only emotional labeling activates those areas.
"In the same way you hit the brake when you're driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses," said Lieberman.
During a second test, 27 of these volunteers fulfilled questionnaires to track down how "mindful" they are.
Meditation and other techniques are meant to increase people's ability to impede strong reactions to their emotions, thoughts and sensations. When volunteers following these techniques were compared with others who were less mindful, a big difference was found: the mindful individuals presented greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a higher calming effect in the amygdala when labeling their emotions.
"These findings may help explain the beneficial health effects of mindfulness meditation, and suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood and health," said co-author David Creswell, a UCLA psychologist.