Just as a monkey, swinging through a forest wilderness, grabs a branch. Letting go of it, it grabs another branch. Letting go of that, it grabs another one. Letting go of that, it grabs another one. In the same way, what’s called ‘mind,’ ‘intellect,’ or ‘consciousness’ by day and by night arises as one thing and ceases as another.
From the Samyutta Nikaya 12.61.
Today’s lecture is on the problem of the mind continually wandering during meditation. It is an omnipresent and inescapable issue. Part of the solution to the problem, besides repeatedly returning the mind back into focus, is to deepen our understanding of the nature of attention. There is a famous quote about the mind being a drunken monkey and attributed to Buddha, but a little online investigation calls that into question. For this discussion, I am adopting the Buddhist idea of “mind monkeys” which is a related concept. Our mind monkeys are our emotions and the thoughts created by them.
The human mind is designed for elaborate thinking and thoughts flow through it incessantly. During waking consciousness, these thoughts might be likened to “voices in our heads” while prior to sleep they become automatic as we enter the twilight state, and after slipping into sleep, they take the form of flowing imagery. The mind runs 24/7, year in and year out until death do us part.
A large and yet common problem occurs when we are hijacked by unwanted thoughts or become locked into a looping repetition as found in ruminative thinking. These are the mind monkeys.
What seems to be an essential and inborn feature of thinking is how powerless we are to control it. The ancient Eastern spiritual masters were aware of this and hence the concept of our psychic experience being riven by an onslaught of marauding monkeys. The Western spiritual masters were also aware of this flaw in our psyches, but as they worked within a contemplative model rather than a meditative one. They advocated concentration on desired thoughts and images and avoidance of sinful ones. This is akin to mantra meditation or mandala concentration. In short, this defect in human cognition is termed mind wandering. It is defined as involuntarily thinking while engaged in a specific attention-focused task of any kind (Delorme & Brandmeyer, 2019).
Meditation is not about thinking although thoughts do occur within that state. Thinking during mediation has two sides: the thought, and the awareness of it being present. Meditation is about transcending thinking to realize that one’s thoughts are not necessarily an integral part of the self. One benefit of meditation is the pacification of the mind monkeys.
Attention, Emotions, and Self-Regulation
But what are these mind monkeys? One theory states that a thought possesses an emotional tone or content and the strength of the emotional intensity determines how much that thought will be processed. This is one possible explanation for why depressed persons cannot break out of their endless cycles of ruminative thinking. A strong, unresolved emotion creates a closed feedback loop; a classic example of unfinished business or the incomplete Gestalt as taught in Gestalt therapy.
Studies of meditation point to two distinct forms of attention: (1) focused awareness which maintains attention on a specific target and (2) open monitoring which is the observation and acceptance of a broad field of internal and external sensations. Interestingly, there are several forms of meditation based on these different types of attention. The training of attention in both of these meditative styles enhance the meditator’s sense of executive control which correlate to more positive mood and improved cognitive functioning (Ainsworth et al., 2013). Meditation slowly decreases the processing which takes place along the midline of the prefrontal cortex in favor of increasing neural activity in the limbic pathways of the thalamus, insula, and sensory processing areas. What this means is that meditation moves the mind away from the everyday cognitive processing of automatic thoughts and images to a non-cognitive state that broadly observes one’s immediate, internal experience (Farb, Anderson, & Segal, 2012).
Emotional regulation is defined as the strategies a person employs to increase, decrease, or maintain different aspects of an emotional response (Guendelman, Medeiros, & Rampes, 2017). Current studies show that the ability to control one’s emotions is improved by meditation as it strengthens the ability to focus on the present moment.
One possible way of crippling mind wandering is to acknowledge the persistent feelings behind it. As emotions are all holistic emotional body experiences, some bodywork or body meditation may be needed to resolve the unfinished quality of the disturbance. Gestalt therapy and other somatic clinical psychotherapy methods are useful in this regard as well as dance therapy, the Sedona Method, and Goenka Vipassana meditation of body scanning. Other meditative traditions suggest that thoughts be ignored such as in Zen meditation or Transcendental Meditation or briefly focused upon and then released.
So the key to quelling mind movements is a built-in feature in most meditation practices.
Closing Thoughts
The danger here is that based on what this model suggests that thoughts may be reinforced by too much engagement with them. But this may be a moot point depending on the emotions are focused upon during meditation. One recent study compared the effects of mindfulness meditation with an emotion-focused meditation (Twin Hearts Meditation) on 90 healthy subjects without any previous experience in meditation. Thirty practiced mindfulness with full attention on the observation of thoughts while 30 were assigned to the THM group and 30 served as a control group. After one session of meditation, all the participants completed an emotional regulation task judging emotionally charged pictures. The results showed that meditators had a stronger ability in suppressing negative emotional responses. These findings indicate that contemplation of positive emotions can improve emotion regulation ability even when performed by non-meditators and only once. This same effect was not found mindfulness meditation group (Valim, Marques, & Boggio, 2019).
Being in a mental state of neutrality or equanimity remains an essential need for holistic well-being and so the old ways, at least in this instance, remain the best: acknowledge, release, and re-focus.
And don’t forget to breathe.
Paul Shane, Ph.D.
Director, Academic Content
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References
Ainsworth, B., Eddershaw, R., Meron, D., Baldwin, D., & Ganer, M. (2013). The effect of focused attention and open monitoring meditation on attention network function in healthy volunteers. Psychiatry Research 210, p. 1226-1231.
Delorme, A. & Brandmeyer, T. (2019). When the meditating mind wanders. Current Opinion in Psychology 28, p. 133-137.
Farb, N., Anderson, A., & Segal, Z. (2012). The mindful brain and emotion regulation in mood disorders. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 57(2), p. 70-77.
Guendelman, S., Medeiros, S., & Rampes, H. (2017). Mindfulness and emotion regulation: Insights from neurobiological, psychological, and clinical studies. Frontiers in Psychology 8, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00220
Valim, C., Marques, L., & Boggio, P. (2019). A positive emotional-based meditation but not mindfulness-based meditation improves emotion regulation. Frontiers in Psychology, Vol 10, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00647