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Meditation is one of the most scientifically-supported “mental tools” for improving your mental health, well-being, and overall happiness.

A new study published in the Journal of Cognitive, Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience has now added another piece of the puzzle for why meditation can be so beneficial for you.

Researchers conducted an experiment with 3 groups of people: experienced meditators, novice meditators, and non-meditators. They had all participants perform a task where they were trained to pair certain images with a reward.

Each image had a different probability of being a reward: some images had an 80% chance of success, while other images had a 20% chance of success. The goal of participants was to learn to choose the images with the highest probability of success.

The first finding was that meditators were more likely to learn by focusing on images with a high probability of success, while non-meditators were more likely to learn by choosing images with a low probability of success. This suggests non-meditators were more likely to learn from negative outcomes, while meditators were more likely to learn from positive outcomes.

This could be related to the idea that most individuals have a negativity bias, because our brains often dedicate more energy focusing on “what is going wrong” more than “what is going right,” so that we can find out how to fix a problem in our lives. Meditators seem to bypass this process, to some degree, by learning more from positive outcomes.

Interestingly, researchers connected participants to an EEG to measure electrical activity in the brain while individuals were performing the task. By doing this, they could measure how strongly participants reacted to both “positive” and “negative” feedback.

What they discovered was that all participants reacted the same to positive outcomes, but non-meditators reacted more strongly to negative outcomes than meditators. Experienced meditators showed the least amount of reaction to negative outcomes at a neurological level.

The lead author of the study, Paul Kntyl, had this to say about the results:

“Humans have been meditating for over 2000 years, but the neural mechanisms of this practice are still relatively unknown. These findings demonstrate that, on a deep level, meditators respond to feedback in a more even-handed way than non-meditators, which may help to explain some of the psychological benefits they experience from the practice.”

Of course, “negative feedback” in life is a part of living that can’t be avoided. And we should learn to pay attention to all feedback in life, both the “positive” and “negative,” to make better decisions and improve ourselves.

While we should be aware of the “negative feedback” we get in life, being less reactive to it can be healthy, because it allows us to take a step back and be more mindful of the best ways to respond to this feedback without acting impulsively.

This can apply to “negative feedback” in all areas of your life:

Negative feedback from family and friends

Negative feedback from bosses and coworkers

Negative feedback from teachers or students

Negative feedback when pursuing personal goals and ambitions

Negative feedback when dating or seeking a romantic partner

In any of these cases, overreacting to negative feedback will just amplify negative emotions like sadness, anger, shame, or frustration. It stresses you out and overwhelms you, and ultimately can make you act in unhealthy and destructive ways.

If you can listen to negative feedback, and not take it too personally or identify with it, then you can use that negative feedback to improve yourself rather than destroy yourself.

Meditation is a great exercise for learning how to limit your reactivity and impulsivity in general, so the results of the study should be intuitive to anyone who has practiced meditation in the past.

Meditation often teaches individuals that there is a space between what they think/feel and how they react to it. It gives you the ability to observe something, but not cling to it or let it hijack your mental state. This is often referred to as “detachment” or “equanimity.”

If you’re completely new to meditation, I recommend trying out my 100 Breaths Meditation exercise. It’s a very simple 10-15 minute exercise that is a great introduction to how meditation works.

Meditation is simple to understand, but hard to master. The key is taking the time to actually sit and do it. It can often feel like you’re not achieving anything, but when you start noticing how it changes your mental state it can have a spillover effect into almost every area of your life.



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