If your worst critic over the holidays isn’t your fitness tracker, it may be your relatives. You may only break bread with those wackos once a year—but the emotional repercussions from those brief moments can feel long-lasting.
You’re not alone. Nearly half of Americans experience family-induced stress over the holidays. And while your family’s particular brand of baggage may be frustrating, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that drawing attention to your feelings—mindfulness—can make them easier to manage, by reducing stress while increasing mood and productivity. Scientists are still trying to understand exactly how mindfulness works, but that hasn’t stopped it from growing to a billion-dollar business, with meditation-teaching apps like Headspace raising over $38 million in funding.
Mindfulness’ path from east to west began in the 1970s, when Jon Kabat-Zinn first separated the practice from its religious underpinnings: Buddhism. Scientists have since tried to apply the constructs of neuroscience to mindfulness. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson’s research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Buddhist monks identified neurological changes associated with meditation, suggesting that meditation could be learned, like calligraphy or Go. Others found that meditation offset some of the effects of age-related cortical thinning.
That research also started to suggest that mindfulness could have a direct impact on mental health. Yi-Yuang Tang, a neuroscientist at Texas Tech, found that meditation affected self-regulation including emotional regulation, attention control, and self-awareness, and psychiatrist Judson Brewer at Yale observed that the default mode network (the pathways that fire when the mind wanders to unhappy places) deactivated during meditation. The idea that mindfulness could change these areas of the brain at all is exciting for psychiatric research dealing with depression, ADHD, anxiety, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Of course, the problem with approaching mindfulness as therapy is that the inputs are a lot more variable than, say, an antidepressant pill. With over 18 million US adults meditating each year, the demand for experienced teachers has spiked rapidly—and plenty of ordinary people have failed to replicate Kabat-Zinn’s results. “It has become a big marketing tool to get a mindfulness certificate,” says Rezvan Ameli, a clinical psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health and the author of 25 Lessons In Mindfulness. “In older times it took decades to become a mindfulness teacher.”
But Americans are getting closer to standardizing mindfulness care just like any other therapy. In England, where healthcare is universal, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy can only be administered by physicians. Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit healthcare and health insurance providers, is experimenting with delivering care using mindfulness apps. “In-person classes require people to come to a building at a certain time,” says Andrew Bertagnolli, the director of Integrated Behavioral Health at Kaiser Permanente’s Care Management Institute. “We’re exploring alternative ways to get these concepts out that fit people’s lifestyles. But the tools have to be effective.” And it’s hard to build effective treatments when the precise neural biology of mindfulness remains unknown.
While scientists continue researching mindfulness, though, companies don’t have to wait for the medical establishment to catch up. They can just recruit their own, highly experienced mindfulness coach, like Chade-Meng Tan. Meng joined Google as an engineer in 2000—he was employee number 107—before launching “Search Inside Yourself,” a mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course for Google employees. Despite its launch nearly a decade ago, the course continues to fill up almost instantly, and it’s evolved into a New York Times bestselling book and institute by the same name.
In the video up top, Meng explores how self-love, loving-kindness, and awareness of mortality can combat the “my family is crazy”-ies. These exercises can be practiced in real-time because that semblance of calm you’ve worked so hard to cultivate can go out the window in the heat of a moment. “You think you’re enlightened?” Meng asks. “Go to a family reunion and see how enlightened you are.”
Chade-Meng Tang’s second book, Joy on Demand (HarperOne) was released in 2016.
