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DECEMBER 23, 2021 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
Mindfulness is a No-Brainer By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
T
he biggest argument I get from people on the “homework” I give is the objection to sitting for ten minutes – ten minutes, my gosh, where will I get that amount of time from? – doing what is called “mindfulness.” After all, there are things that must be done. And done fast. For work, for the family, for oneself. “As it is,” they tell me, “I wolf down lunch or I have to skip it completely, and I’m way behind on sleep.” They also either catch up on sleep on Shabbos or – interestingly enough – they find Shabbos irritating because there is nothing “to do.” Hey, wait. Something’s going on here. This almost sounds like the makings of an addiction. What’s an addiction? It’s an unhealthy relationship with a behavior or substance, one that gobbles up all your time, energy, and thoughts. How is it possible to be so very, very busy during the week that you feel compelled to complain about it – or your family does – yet on Shabbos, when you have the chance to get a mental rest, you don’t like it? This is a sign of a terrible disconnect. The disconnect is between you and yourself. It’s as if you keep busy to get away from yourself. Then, on Shabbos, the very oppor-
tunity to repair that disruption is disturbing. Why would that be? The job that an addiction does for us is to distract us from pain. Generally, the pain is internal. It’s all about feelings we have about ourselves that are not kind, to say the least. Or to be blunt, in the words of a number of my clients, “I don’t like myself.” Mind you, there is no solid reason for this. These people are lovely, smart, kind people. The story of how they came to that place begins with messages from childhood that they latched onto for reasons that I’ve explained in previous articles. The reasons and the feelings go underground but they make their positions known just the same through addictions to their busy-ness, other addictions, anxiety, worry, and depression. This is an age-old problem with an age-old solution. That solution is called mindful meditation. Americans think that the practice of mindfulness originated in Tibet with Buddhist monks. However, in Esther Wein’s class some years ago, I learned that on his deathbed, when Avraham Avinu gives “gifts” to the sons from his pilegesh and sends them to the “East,” those gifts may very well be the mindfulness skills we are discussing here. Having heard about the praises
for meditation practice from a trickle of people back in 1974, Herbert Benson, medical doctor and scientist at Harvard, decided to see if the benefits could be measured. He noticed that heart attacks, strokes, and high blood pressure were more common than they had been five years or ten years earlier. He reasoned that this came from the added stress our society was under (welcome to 2021, Herb) because scientists knew at that time the mechanics of the sympathetic nervous system and how it reacts when people feel under siege. He decided to test all this, having a group of subjects practice what he called the “Relaxation Response” along with well-practiced yogis who also volunteered in his lab. He was fascinated by results that almost resembled the calmness of sleep except for several important differences: 1. The advanced practitioners (yogis) had brain alpha waves which were associated with feelings of wellbeing. These do not occur in sleep. 2. There was a rapid decrease in metabolism rate. In sleep, it takes 4 to 5 hours to drop oxygen consumption by about 8% while with meditation, it takes 3 minutes to drop oxygen consumption by 10 to 20 %. (Subsequent research shows that meditators then have a reversal in which more oxygen is delivered to the tissues and brain
than in the general population. In fact, a 2018 study on the PubMed site of the National Institutes of Health showed that this additional oxygen delivery from meditation was a useful adjuvant to medication in glaucoma patients, of all things). 3. There is no rapid eye movement in meditation, unlike sleep. Benson also found that there was a decrease in blood lactate in meditators. Lactate buildup in the blood is the result of metabolism, and when that process is not working as efficiently as possible, its accumulation can lead from muscle weakness to sepsis and death. What Benson also found is that the lower the lactate level, the lower the anxiety level that people experience. This has been corroborated by more recent studies. “But Dr. Deb,” someone recently insisted, “I am not stressed. I do not have panic attacks. I don’t have addictions and overwork is not one of them, although I am, thank G-d, successful in my business. So I’m not your guy! I don’t need mindfulness meditation.” Hold on there, friend. Mindfulness could not have been a “gift” of the East if all it was there for was to solve problems. Rather, it is a life enhancer. Here are some thoughts based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s 1992 book, “Wherever You Go, There You Are,” that intro-
