What mindfulness does to the brain?

Practicing mindfulness directly impacts your cognitive processing, which is the way your brain thinks in a basic sense.  Through our life experiences, our brain becomes conditioned to think in a particular way.  This is referred to as brain mapping; the easiest way to think of this is like a road system.  The road less traveled will not be used, like a dirt path that is unmanaged and bumpy.  A paved and smooth road will be used most often and is typically the quickest route to take.  So, brain mapping is a similar concept where you will “pave” a road in your brain that will lead to an automatic thought if you engage in the same behavior repeatedly.  Your brain will automatically take this route to get to a destination quicker.  For example, if you find yourself stressed and you decide to eat a snack to help alleviate your stress and you do this same thing repeatedly, your brain has not paved a road where you associated snacking with stress relief. 

Where does mindfulness play into this?  Using mindfulness, you can train your brain to pave a new path with a healthier outcome.  Take, for example, the concept of deep breathing, which is a common mindfulness practice.  Through deep breathing, you can train your brain to slow down racing thoughts and thus help you feel more focused.  Another example is mindfulness; they say that you want to fully participate (in anything really) versus mindlessly doing an activity.  This type of practice helps train your brain to live in the moment instead of letting your mind wander to past/future thoughts.  Many concepts of mindfulness can be used to train your brain to think about life from a frame of lenses that are less harmful.  It would be recommended to take a training course or read a training manual to help with this process as it takes much time and effort to apply.  However, training your brain to think differently through the use of mindfulness can help reduce anxiety and depressive symptoms.  When looking at mindfulness to help you, something to consider is that it is more a way of life/living versus something you would do to “fix” a problem within yourself.  Meaning, applying mindfulness is a lifelong skill that will always have ways to enhance and improve your skills and thus how your brain functions.