In this video I describe meditation, focusing on two types of practices: focused awareness meditation and mindfulness meditation. Focused awareness involves maintaining fixed attention on a particular object, sound, or mantra, while mindfulness allows attention to move freely without allowing thoughts to become attached to any particular focus. Both types involve a state of relaxation that can produce physiological changes that Herbert Benson refers to as the “relaxation response”. Finally I provide a few tips for how to get started with meditation.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the channel to see future videos! Have questions or topics you’d like to see covered in a future video? Let me know by commenting or sending me an email!

Herbert Benson – The Relaxation Response: http://amzn.to/2qqIwCm

Jon Kabat-Zinn – Wherever You Go, There You Are: http://amzn.to/2qws68m

Check out my book, Master Introductory Psychology, an alternative to a traditional textbook: http://amzn.to/2eTqm5s

Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at meditation as a possible altered state of consciousness. Now in the previous video I talked about hypnosis as a possible altered state of consciousness and I mentioned that hypnosis and meditation are quite similar and this is because they both involve a state of relaxation, a calm state of mind. And the main difference between the two is that in hypnosis we have particular suggestions that a hypnotist provides to a hypnotized subject whereas in meditation we generally don’t have a focus on a particular suggestion.

Ok, we’re going to look at two main types of meditation in this video: focused awareness meditation and mindfulness meditation. So focused awareness meditation refers to a type of meditation which a person has a single focus of attention. This focus can vary; it might be a particular sight or a particular sound but the point of the meditative session is to remain focused on that single thing. So it’s common for people to focus on something like their breath. They simply focus on breathing in and breathing out and they try to keep their attention only on their breathing. Or they might focus on something like a candle flame or a particular sound like a particular bell that is rung at a regular interval. Or people might use a mantra. So meditative practice that uses a mantra would be a focused awareness type of meditation. So a mantra is just a word or a phrase that’s repeated over and over again and it might be repeated mentally or it may be chanted and you may even have a group of people who are all chanting it in unison. And so you might be familiar with some common mantras that are used such as an ohm, or Hari Krishna, or if you watch Curb Your Enthusiasm you might know Jaya.

But the point of a mantra is not about the particular word or its meaning, the focus is on tracking your awareness. So a mantra provides a way to track awareness; you can see “am I still paying attention to the thing I’m supposed to be paying attention to?”. And the same is true for focusing on breathing or focusing on a candle flame or focusing on a particular sound. All of these give you a way to track your awareness and then notice if you have any deviation from what you’re supposed to be paying attention to. So it’s essentially a way of keeping your attention focused on something and noticing when your attention is not on that thing. You suddenly realize that you haven’t been paying attention to your breath or you didn’t repeat the mantra or you were looking at something other than the candle flame and when you realize this, you now say “okay I bring my attention back and I try again to maintain this focus”. And this is expected to happen, you know, the point of this meditation is that it’s hard to do this and I’ll talk about that again at the end of the video.

Ok, so another type of meditation is mindfulness meditation. And so what mindfulness meditation does is it involves awareness of all the sights and sounds or thoughts and feelings around you. So rather than focusing on a single thing, it’s a bit more open to anything that might happen. You may suddenly notice the sound of birds chirping or you might have a certain thought that enters your mind and it’s okay to attend to it. So in mindfulness meditation you attend to any of the sights or sounds or feelings or thoughts that you have. Ok, so why is this any different from just sort of sitting calmly and listening to things or hearing things? Well the idea is that you attend to these things but you don’t react to them. So you try to separate your awareness from your emotional response. You try not to get attached to any of these things that you notice.

So while you attend to these things you avoid attachment to any particular thing, right? You try to keep yourself open to other things that might happen. So you hear birds chirping and rather than thinking about birds and you realize for the next five minutes you’ve been thinking about, you know, memories of particular birds or you’re trying to figure out what kind of bird it is based on the sound that you’re hearing. Rather than becoming attached to that idea, you simply allow it to pass you by. You hear the birds chirping and you know those are birds chirping and then you’re listening for something else. And then you notice you can hear your refrigerator humming or you hear the sound of a car driving down the street or something. The idea is you don’t become attached to any of these things that you’re noticing. You’re noticing them and that’s it.

And so this is similar to what I talked about in the video on hypnosis because I mentioned this dissociation theory of hypnosis that Ernest Hilgard proposed. And the idea that he proposed was that people were separating their awareness from their emotional response. In this particular case it was with pain, so people were aware of the pain that they’re experiencing from holding their hands in ice water, but they didn’t feel the pain as much. Their subjective experience of the pain was altered by being in a hypnotic session and this might be quite similar to what we think of with mindfulness meditation. So people are aware of these stimuli around them but they avoid attachment and they don’t have emotional responses to them. So we have the separation between awareness and reactivity to that. So when you catch yourself having a particular thought during the meditative session, let’s say you have some negative thought that comes to mind, rather than dwelling on it and ruminating and, you know thinking, all these things “I can’t believe I said this embarrassing thing yesterday”, you know, it suddenly comes to mind. “That is okay. That’s the thought that I’m having and I just let it, let it go”.

And this is sometimes an analogy that’s used to think about, you know, sitting under a waterfall and the water is just constantly flowing by and those are like all your thoughts are streaming past and sounds and sights are moving past you and you just let them go by. You don’t try to hold on to any of them. Alright so that’s the sort of focus of what you’re trying to accomplish in mindfulness meditation.

Now in both of these types of meditation, and there’s many other types as well, this state of relaxation is sometimes referred to as the relaxation response and this is by a researcher named Herbert Benson, who investigated the physiological effects of meditative practices and he proposed this relaxation response as the opposite to the fight-or-flight response. So I’ve mentioned in an earlier video the fight-or-flight response and this isn’t actually the best name for this because people don’t just fight or flee, there’s also a freeze response that was added later but didn’t really make it into the name. We still usually call it the fight-or-flight response and the idea of the fight-or-flight response is it’s preparation for threats. So, you know, we have some threat and this activates this process in our body that prepares us to deal with this threat. So it increases our heart rate and our stress hormones go up and other processes are decreased; things like digestion are reduced because you know digestion isn’t all that important if you’re being chased by a tiger.

Ok, so the idea of the relaxation response is that engaging in a meditative practice counteracts the negative effects of the fight-or-flight response and so it’s going to decrease things like your heart rate and your breathing and your blood pressure and levels of stress hormones, which we’ll go into a lot more detail in a unit on stress and health in the future. And it’s going to increase those things that would be reduced by the fight-or-flight response. So it’s going to help to increase processes relating to digestion and to immune function and so the idea here is that there would be real physiological benefits to practicing some type of meditation where you sit and you try to enter this relaxed state.

Ok, so how do you go about doing this? How do you begin practicing meditation? Well, I have a couple tips for you and the first is to avoid thinking of meditation as some sort of you know esoteric mystical experience. There are all sorts of rich cultural traditions and rituals associated with meditation and they’re certainly fascinating to learn about but you don’t need to learn about them in order to start meditating, right? And if you think of it as some sort of mystical experience that’s going to happen; your third eye is going to open or whatever you might be fairly disappointed with your first few sessions of meditation and that might tempt you to give up. So I think you shouldn’t think of it that way. Just think of it as just trying to relax. Just trying to calm yourself down. Just sitting quietly and allowing yourself some time to just sit and that’s really all there is to it, is you’re just sitting and relaxing.

Now I recommend sitting because if you lay down, you’ll probably fall asleep and, you know, that’s because if you’re laying down and you’re very relaxed it’s easier to fall asleep then if you’re sitting. So really all you need to do is sit comfortably and try to relax. Now you might choose to try focused awareness meditation or mindfulness meditation or some other type of practice but the other thing that I would recommend to you is to realize that it’s supposed to be hard. So I mentioned this with the focused awareness meditation. The point is that it’s hard to keep your attention focused on a single thing. I mean usually our mind is wandering and it’s sort of flitting around to all sorts of different ideas or sights or sounds and so it’s difficult to meditate and it’s supposed to be difficult. It’s supposed to be different from how you normally engage with the world.

So recognize that it’s okay that you have trouble with it, okay? Sometimes people will try meditation they’ll say “oh you know I got too distracted, I couldn’t, you know, couldn’t keep my focus”. Well that’s a sign that you really should try practicing meditation more. You want to try to learn “how do I overcome that distraction?”. So the point here is it’s supposed to be hard, even experienced meditators find, you know, sometimes it’s just hard to keep your mind focused on something. Or you find yourself getting attached to particular thoughts that you have. That’s normal, that’s okay and that’s what you’re trying to learn how to avoid.

So distraction is inevitable. It’s going to happen if you sit down to meditate, you know, it’s going to happen to you? And the point is you’re learning how to deal with that. You’re learning how to sort of brush it aside. You’re learning how to say “okay this negative thought came to mind and I started ruminating a bit and I caught myself” right? The point is you’re catching yourself. And say “okay maybe next time I’ll be a little better at catching myself sooner” you know? And eventually you get better and better at that and so later when you have some negative thought comes to mind you’re able to sort of let it go more quickly because you’ve practiced that, right?

So it’s supposed to be hard, there’s supposed to be distraction. That’s kind of the point and that doesn’t mean that you’re bad at meditating or that it’s, you know, it’s not for you or something. Ok, so if you’re interested in some other tips on meditating one book that I highly recommend, it was very helpful for me it’s called “Wherever you go, there you are” that’s by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He’s written a number of books on meditation and that’s one that I recommend and I’ll put a link in the video description where you can find out more about that book. I’ll also put a link in the video description to Herbert Benson’s “The Relaxation Response” which I also recommend that you check out if you’re interested in learning about some of the effects of meditation. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!