The Science of Mindfulness
Mindfulness is like a driver’s manual for our body, teaching us how to use the gas and brake pedals of our nervous system to access our brain’s high road and all it’s resources as we navigate life.
The nervous system’s gas pedal and brake pedal
Within our nervous system, the sympathetic branch is the “gas pedal” and the parasympathetic branch is the “brake pedal.”
The gas pedal: Focus or Fight/Flight
The brake pedal: Attunement or Dissociation
The brain’s high road and low road
The high road: Pre-Frontal Cortex
Our pre-frontal cortex, the area just behind the forehead, is the most highly evolved part of our brain. This is the “high road” when it comes to brain processing. The PFC is the locus for:
The low road: Amygdala
The amygdala, deep in the center of the brain and down toward the brainstem, is one of the oldest and most primitive parts of our brain. This is the “low road” or the “quick and dirty road” when it comes to brain processing.
Even if we pack some genius relationship strategies into our PFC or give the hippocampus a major workout while preparing for a test, we may be biologically incapable of using any of that information in the midst of a heated argument or test anxiety.
Enter mindfulness
The nervous system’s gas pedal and brake pedal
Within our nervous system, the sympathetic branch is the “gas pedal” and the parasympathetic branch is the “brake pedal.”
The gas pedal: Focus or Fight/Flight
- Sympathetic arousal occurs on a continuum, from the low level activation of increased focus to the high level activation of fight or flight.
- When highly activated, we have a constellation of physical characteristics common to all animals. The physiology is the same whether we are in fight or flight mode: dilation of pupils, self-protective posture in the neck for recoiling or striking, muscle rigidity, digestive shutdown, increased heart rate and blood circulation.
- With trauma, sympathetic arousal can become chronic. Little things that wouldn’t normally activate someone can trigger an immediate sympathetic response in someone who has had trauma.
- With mindfulness, when this “gas pedal” energy comes up powerfully in the system, we have a container to manage it. And when the stressful event is over we are able to shift back down into relaxation and discharge that energy.
The brake pedal: Attunement or Dissociation
- Parasympathetic engagement includes physical characteristics such as a relaxed face, small pupils, cold and dry skin, deep respiration, slow heart rate, and active digestion.
- Parasympathetic activation occurs on a continuum as well, depending upon whether the ventral vagal or dorsal vagal system is engaged
- Within the PNS, it is the ventral vagal system that is responsible for the relaxed, open attunement we enjoy when we are well regulated. This ventral vagal system is one of the last systems evolutionarily to be installed in our neurobiology.
- The dorsal vagal system is responsible for the inward and dissociative “freeze” state, a stress response occurring either momentarily or chronically. This dorsal vagal system is the most ancient of systems, entered into by an animal just before succumbing to a predator.
- The fibers which transmit signals within the dorsal vagal system aren’t myelinated (an outer sheath that speeds up transmission), so information doesn’t flow to and from the environment very quickly. This explains why it can be hard to contact someone in this state—a little like trying to communicate in an echo chamber.
- With mindfulness, when this “brake pedal” has shifted us too far down into a state of underarousal, we are able to become present again to our experience and attentive to our surroundings. We can shift back up into attunement and focus.
The brain’s high road and low road
The high road: Pre-Frontal Cortex
Our pre-frontal cortex, the area just behind the forehead, is the most highly evolved part of our brain. This is the “high road” when it comes to brain processing. The PFC is the locus for:
- Attention
- Emotional regulation (calming down or coming up to neutral)
- Fear modulation (discerning how realistic our anxiety is and allowing the nervous system to shift back to neutral once we discern that we aren’t actually in danger)
- Intuition (receiving information from the visceral organs and peripheral nervous system via the vagus nerve and insula; working with the cingulate to weave these raw, primitive sensations generated in the more archaic parts of the brain into nuanced feelings, perceptions, and cognitions).
The low road: Amygdala
The amygdala, deep in the center of the brain and down toward the brainstem, is one of the oldest and most primitive parts of our brain. This is the “low road” or the “quick and dirty road” when it comes to brain processing.
- When this ancient survival hardware is activated by stress or a perceived threat, we are hard-wired to bypass higher level thinking and go into fight, flight, or freeze.
- The amygdala triggers the release of cortisol and other stress hormones that cause a cascade of physiological responses and body sensations.
- When the amygdala is activated, we physiologically cannot access the PFC or the hippocampus (which is responsible for memory storage and retrieval).
Even if we pack some genius relationship strategies into our PFC or give the hippocampus a major workout while preparing for a test, we may be biologically incapable of using any of that information in the midst of a heated argument or test anxiety.
Enter mindfulness
- When we are on the low road and experiencing fight or flight, we tend to either resist our strong emotions, or spin mentally on the storyline behind them. Ironically, both of these strategies keep our system cycling in fight or flight, flooded with the physiological components of strong emotions.
- We can stop the acceleration of the gas pedal by identifying and accepting—either by labeling them or reflecting on and allowing the physical sensations associated with them.
- We can engage the brake pedal by using sounds in our environment, our breath, or our body as an anchor for our attention. The parasympathetic nervous system comes online and we are able to downshift out of fight or flight into a more open and attuned state.
- The amygdala is deactivated, the rest of our brain opens up, and we gain access again to the PFC, hippocampus and other higher level areas of the brain.
- If we are in a state of under-arousal, this attuning to our present moment experience can up-regulate our system to a place of greater alertness and engagement.