Mindfulness and Meditation for Beginners | UPMC HealthBeat Podcast

Mindfulness and Meditation for Beginners | UPMC HealthBeat Podcast

Carol Greco, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine shares the benefits of mindfulness and meditation.
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this podcast is for informational and educational purposes only it is not medical care or advice clinicians should rely on their own medical judgments when advising their patients patients in need of medical care should consult their personal care provider [Music] mindfulness and meditation chances are you're hearing a lot about them these days are they really the secret to a less stressful happier healthier life hi i'm tonya caruso welcome to this upmc healthbeat podcast and joining us right now is dr carol greco she is an associate professor of psychiatry at the university of pittsburgh school of medicine and a certified trainer in the mindfulness-based stress reduction program thank you so much for joining us thank you for having me here i have so many questions everyone on our crew has questions we've been talking about this a lot so i guess first when we think about health we normally think about physical health but mental health and our mindset can be just as important what do you want to say about the power of the mind oh so much and and actually i don't feel that we can really separate the mind from the body either you know and so our mind is really powerful our mind can actually influence our physical health in a negative direction or a positive direction so when you're really stressed and worried about something even if it's not dangerous that can have a effect on your blood pressure etc getting you into that fight or flight and so conversely mindfulness and meditation help to move us in a healthier positive direction where we let go of some of the kind of worry and flurry that is so often part of our or you know our daily life these days and just be fully present with uh with the mindset of it's okay and let me move forward with what's the best i can do so so that would be you know a mindful mind if that makes any sense so tell me about your journey how did you begin in mindfulness and meditation and and how long have you practiced these so it's been i think around wow it's been about 26 27 years now but i got started because i was a researcher at pitt and i was doing research studies on how people can help take care of their pain better without medicines and so i went to went to a conference at scientific conference and i met the developer of the mindfulness-based stress reduction program and i was so excited because i thought oh this is going to help my patients they would have pain and have stress and chronic illness and so he told me how to learn how to meditate who i could learn from here in pittsburgh and so when i came back i met those folks and i started meditating they helped me what i found out first was how helpful it was for me so so that was back in like 1994 and i began to practice meditation work with different teachers and it was actually about 10 years of my own practice before i felt like i had it inside me enough that i could really offer to patients and to the community uh to teach them how to meditate all right so let's talk first about mindfulness and then we'll move to meditation mindfulness is a form of meditation well it's a little tricky definitions are always tricky but i consider uh that mind mindfulness meditation is a kind of meditation there are many many kinds but mindfulness is actually a capacity that we all already have it's a kind of awareness that is here you know when we pay attention on purpose to what's actually happening in this moment to what's happening physically in our emotions in the context etc without as much judgment so being open to what's here this is mindfulness and we all have that capacity so meditation can actually cultivate that capacity and let it grow in the person and so meditation is a more of a method that is very helpful can be very helpful for health and also can cultivate this mindfulness mindful awareness so let's give an example to someone of of mindfulness and what would we say is the purpose of mindfulness is it just a grounding of someone or is it just something that happens i'm going to answer it in two or three different ways so on the one hand it can just happen so you open your door on a beautiful sunny morning and you're just there and you appreciate that you're just wow you know you're just right there you're not like thinking about your meeting you know so that's a moment of mindfulness so we all drop into maybe more times than we think so that's one aspect and you said what's the purpose my second answer is that on a large scale there isn't really any purpose other than to be fully present and be uh be with what's here and this can lead to greater enjoyment less stress it really can and so that's that's a second answer to you my third answer it comes more from when i teach these courses in mindfulness-based stress reduction what people often learn over this eight-week class is they they learn through these practices and through growing that mindfulness capacity that the things that used to stress them out they're a little less reactive to them it's like if you had buttons all over your body you know to for alarm and you have fewer buttons so they're more responsive to what's happening as opposed to reacting to the stressors and the things that come there right so sitting here if not all these cameras were here and i'm in front of you and we have things in front of you what would a moment of mindfulness be like do you need silence oh that's a great question and um what i'd like to say about that is that especially for the beginner silence is helpful it's very helpful because there's you know so much and and mind mindfulness and and meditation is really like coming in inward so silence can be helpful and on the other hand it's not needed so you could meditate in the midst of you know the emergency room waiting room you know you could just be present with the sounds maybe even sensing the emotions that you're having and and those of others and that's meditation too so let's move to meditation because it seems like it could be daunting so what what would you say is the most basic definition of meditation i'll just have to start off by saying this is just me as a person not as an expert in buddhism or religions or anything like that so to me the purpose is really coming home to kind of who we are at a basic level and developing us the ability to concentrate also is part of it so we meditate in order to bring our bring the wandering mind back gently and without judgment or blame as best we can and really feel what it is to be human to have this body to be living right now in general what do you want to say to people about expectations when they start to meditate and how you get started as a beginner what i'd like to say first is the most important rule which there aren't any rules really is to be kind to yourself and watch out for self-judgment because often people will say when they're beginning like i think i must be doing this wrong because x y and z because i don't always feel relaxed or because my mind wanders so the first thing is of course your mind's going to wander so be kind to yourself for beginners i would say there's a lot of really good apps but you could also work with a teacher you could take a class if you wanted to just being sure that your teacher is experienced and that you fit well with that person what is also helpful for most beginners is to choose some kind of an anchor for their attention and you were telling me that for you sound is a wonderful anchor it's like you just hear that sound and when you're filled with that sound and that's filling your brain in a sense then there's not a whole lot of room there's not a lot of geography for worrying and thinking about the next thing that you have to do you're just there so many people that i work with uh like to anchor their attention to breath sensations in the body so they're always changing so they're kind of interesting they can also focus on some body part or just the sensations in the body like the palms of the hands are usually a nice one because it's warm we've already said there are definitely health benefits and and your mind is important and that's important to overall health but what if i'm stressed out because i think i'm not doing this right yeah how long should what's the ideal what's an idea okay so i'm not sure there really is an ideal but it's interesting you ask that question because you know i'm a researcher and some of the research that i do is about meditation and in our studies we're starting to measure you know using an app or whatever how long are the people meditating you know and do the folks that actually do their home practice more do they have more benefits so what we're finding in that is that the folks that actually do practice and maybe meditate for a little longer have more health benefits in terms of whatever we're measuring in our research however very few of them actually meditate as long as we are asking them to so i think there's good evidence that a little longer is good however what's most important is what is what you're able to do so i think what i would like to say is 20 minutes is really great because at least for me it lets the little wild animals of the mind have a chance to like they run around for a bit and they're like okay you know that then then there's a little bit of settledness that happens however if what you have is 10 minutes you know you're still building your capacity to meditate and for mindfulness and whatever you can do and so it really is is it something accumulative like the more you do it the better you get at it it's really more uh how easeful is it to bring the mind to where we want it to be and to be present in our life so that we're actually can be happy even if maybe circumstances aren't what we would choose i've read mornings are best but you say what i personally like mornings because it's a nice way to set my day you know it's like okay yeah this is real however any time of the day is fine a person new to meditation they might try different times a day see what suits them you try in the afternoon that's great if you do it before bed that's great but you know see what works best for you in terms of fitting it into your schedule okay show us and tell me about what you brought so a bell or a chime is not really necessary for meditation at all but it's kind of nice you know it makes a nice sound and it's often a way to start and end a meditation session so what i'll do is i'll ring the bells and then i'll give just a little bit of guidance in a very brief meditation is that okay yes okay sure and then we'll close with with the bells again okay and usually you know when i'm teaching the class our meditations might last 20 30 minutes sometimes 45 but today we don't have that time two minutes 30 it's a 30-second meditation yeah sure okay [Laughter] so settling into your posture with a fairly straight back and if you'd like you can allow your eyes to close okay but it's okay to leave them open and beginning to gather your attention to some aspect of this moment's experience it might be the breath sensations that you can feel in your body breathing in breathing out not trying to manage or control your breathing in any way but simply noticing how different areas feel as the air comes in and touches and as the air leaves and the mind will wander and as best you can without judgment or blame just gently escorting the mind back to the body and to breath sensations or some other aspect of this moment taking a moment now a breath or two to just sense into how your body is feeling and maybe a moment or two to check in with your mental state however that might be [Music] okay that was amazing your soft voice can i can i bring you home to help me meditate every day you mentioned before you know there are teachers there are lots of apps out there as well are we each setting our own goal for meditation how do you know that you've had a successful meditation given your research is there any collective definition that you all have come by it's just successful good meditation is one that you do so so almost like letting go of judgment of yourself and your or even of the meditations so sometimes i'll meditate and at the end i'm like okay i think my mind was wandering about 80 percent of the time and i wasn't even aware of it so i might not feel as relaxed but but i still had what i would consider a fine meditation because i was able to notice that this was a time of a lot of maybe more agitation or the mind wandering so when we actually notice those things then we have a chance to make a choice about our behavior in our life so what we learn in a meditation is always useful and of course some meditation sessions are going to feel pleasant feel useful feel beneficial right and others maybe not so all right we've mentioned it a few times but let's tell folks about the mindfulness based stress reduction program and i know you're a certified trainer in that and what is it and and how does it work so it's an eight weeks long curriculum it's based upon of course ancient meditation practices but it's taught very very secular so there's no mention of the buddha or anything like that it's very much practical in our daily lives it's a group course now we're doing it online and we used to do it in person we meditate together they get guided just like i guided you then we debrief we have various topics like awareness of pleasant events awareness of unpleasant mindfulness and communication so various topics and also that a big part of it is that we're asking folks to practice at home and so we give them recordings that are in line with the curriculum as i mentioned i am a researcher and one of the beauties of that curriculum is that it's fairly standardized yet every teacher in every class is different so there's flexibility within it but it can be studied because it is at least fairly standardized so in many of the research programs mindfulness is actually showing lots of as we mentioned health benefits as well as benefits for anxiety and distress and the only way we can know that is by having a fairly standard class or course there is so much more attention to mindfulness than meditation these days do you feel like this will become a larger part of medical treatment in general where do you think most of your colleagues in the medical field are with this these days yeah well i don't know about most but i know significantly greater numbers of physicians and others in healthcare are paying attention and are interested and they're often suggesting mindfulness and meditation to patients and the american heart association has recommended the mbsr and other meditation programs if for those patients who are interested so that's great and also chronic pain it's very useful for chronic pain so there's been a statement a scientific statement about uh the usefulness of mindfulness-based stress reduction for chronic pain so then and that's one of the greatest causes of disability both of those two heart disease and pain so scientifically there's more recognition of that but i do want to say that not every person is going to be interested because as you know the setting aside the time to meditate and doing that kind of self-exploration it may not be for everybody some people might just they just give me a pill doc you know my hope is that everybody becomes interested and more and more people feel the benefits of mindfulness and meditation in their lives what else has research shown recently that you're most excited about when it comes to mindfulness and meditation well i'm excited about all of it but my one colleague has just published a paper and a study that we did with with pitt and cmu and the the focus was really on can does the immune system change or the cells of the immune system change uh when a person is engaged in meditation so we we did a study um of older adults with loneliness and it was a very nice study controlled with a an active control group if you know anything about what that means but the people that were in the meditation group their their cells had greater responsiveness in terms of the immune system so that's just paper just came out so that's pretty amazing right especially in this day when we're all concerned with you know immunity and our ability to fight off diseases well this is a fascinating topic what do you want to say to folks real quick your elevator pitch about what we should all be thinking about if we're going to try meditation i would say go for it with an attitude of openness and kindness to yourself you can try various apps but just be careful not to get too caught up in like am i doing this right be patient with yourself too and just enjoy you just enjoy and maybe consider taking a class if that would be okay for you well some great information doctor thank you so much for coming in and spending time with us today we appreciate it thank you i'm tonya caruso thank you for joining us this is upmc healthbeat you

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