What Can a Buddhist Monk Teach Us About Panic and the Brain?

Lovingly borrowed from Christopher Bergland’s article in Psychology Today:

Social distancing and “shelter-in-place” mandates can make life during a pandemic seem monastic. Has COVID-19 and the subsequent “stay-at-home” advisories made you feel like a monk?

If so, this period of forced monasticism is a perfect time to make daily meditation a part of your routine. Also, if you have kids who are cooped up at home and suffering from cabin fever, teaching children how to meditate can have many short-term, as well as lifelong benefits.

What are some benefits of meditation? In addition to the immediate benefits of meditation, such as reducing stress, cultivating equanimity, and calming your nervous system, a new longitudinal MRI case study of a Buddhist monk suggests that daily meditation may slow down brain aging over time. The findings (Adluru et al., 2020) of this “BrainAGE and Regional Volumetric Analysis of a Buddhist Monk” were recently published in Neurocase.

A loss of gray matter brain volume accompanies typical aging. A few years ago, another BrainAGE study (Luders, Cherbuin & Gaser, 2016) found that by age 50, the brains of long-term meditation practitioners were, on average, 7.5 years younger than non-meditator controls.

“Altogether, these findings seem to suggest that meditation is beneficial for brain preservation, effectively protecting against age-related atrophy with a consistently slower rate of brain aging throughout life,” Eileen Luders of the UCLA Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience and her co-authors concluded.

For the most recently published (2020) BrainAGE case study on how meditation may slow brain aging, researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison spent 14 years observing a Buddhist monk from Tibet. During this same period, the researchers also conducted MRI brain scans on a control group of 105 age-matched adults who didn’t meditate regularly.

Who’s the monk? Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (a.k.a., YMR) is a 41-year-old Buddhist monk who’s lived a monastic life since he was a teenager and has practiced meditation along with “wandering retreats” throughout his life. Over the past 14 years, YMR had his brain scanned four times in an MRI.

As a child, YMR experienced crippling anxiety and panic attacks. Luckily, his father practiced Buddhist meditation and taught Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche specific ways to cope with his panic via meditation when he was 9 years old.

In 2018, YMR gave a public talk, “Meditation and Going Beyond Mindfulness: A Secular Perspective,” at the London School of Economics. During this talk, Rinpoche recounts how his father taught him a technique of welcoming (and quelling) panic during his meditation practice when he was a kid:

At first, when my panic came, I said, “Hello, panic. Get out! I’m meditating.” But, the panic would become stronger and louder. I was disappointed. I thought meditation was supposed to help my panic, but it didn’t help. So, I went back to my father and told him about my disappointing experience with meditation. My father said, “Don’t say ‘Get out!’ to panic. You must welcome the panic. During meditation, panic doesn’t have to become an obstacle. Panic is okay; no panic is okay.” I thought “Wow, interesting.” So then I changed my style of meditation a little bit. I began to say “welcome” to my panic.