My wish for you is that you continue, continue to be who and how you are to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness. Continue to allow humor to lighten the burden of your tender heart. This quote from Maya Angelou starts off today's episode all about the loving kindness neurobiology you never knew you needed to know.
Welcome to the Modern Creative Woman podcast exploring the art and science of creativity. This is the podcast for women who want to elevate their creativity and start applying creative thinking in their everyday life. I'm your hostess and creativity expert, Dr. Amy Backos. The Modern Creative Woman is obsessed with helping you build your creativity through her conversations and creative insights. I'll share simple tricks and practices that can help you take the mystery out of the creative process and start each day feeling empowered, creative, and ready to take on whatever comes your way. Let's get started.
Welcome in, and thank you for joining me on this audio creativity journey.
Have you reserved your spot yet for the Vibrant Vision Workshop? If not, what are you waiting for? This is your opportunity to really focus on the way you think about things and become more clear about choices, decisions, and your future. I'll be teaching an exclusive art therapy activity that's all about bending time to explore your future, and giving you the confidence that you need to take some audacious action, or to take the steps you need to soothe yourself and live in a space that involves just more peace in your life. You'll have the chance to practice creative thinking. Make some expressive art. Do visualization. It's going to be so much fun. And remember, it's the anniversary party for the Modern Creative Woman podcast. So of course there will be some prizes for you when you attend live. There will be some incredible prize packages, a raffle for some of my favorite art supplies, some books, and a few more things that I'll leave to your imagination. If you are interested and I think you should be, I want you to know that there is space for you. You can join one of three times or come all three times. We've got three spots in June on the fourth and the sixth. It's free. It's fun, it's fabulous, just like you. And it comes with a few bonus activities. You get a workbook, you'll use part of it in the workshop, and then the rest will serve as a journal and a visual journal for you to reflect on what you learned during the workshop. You'll also get a bonus PDF collage Art material set, and that is something that you will also use in the workshop, and you will be amazed what you come up with. So you can find the link in the show notes. You can go to ModernCreativeWoman.com and sign up reserve your spot. I'm so excited for this and I will see you there.
So many of you responded to what I've been speaking about last time regarding loving kindness and the cellular changes that this kind of meditation can offer you. It's not only anti-aging anti disease, it really is this anti-anxiety piece that's so powerful. And I want to talk a little bit more about that cellular aging aspect of it. So you can think of this as a little bit of a neurobiology lecture. I've been searching for ways to heal myself, and I've found that kindness is the best way. That's from Lady Gaga. If you have lived your life in a way that you have struggled with being kind to yourself, maybe you're a woman who takes care of so many other people at work, at home, in your relationships that it's hard to take care of yourself, or there's some aspect of caring for others that gives you the feeling of not being quite good enough or being hard on yourself. A lot of women I work with have the sense that they have to be hard on themselves to be successful, and being hard on yourself to be successful is actually quite the opposite of what you really want to do. If you've considered how when you're kind to yourself, you can accomplish so much more than when you're unkind or judgmental. Let's jump into the neurobiology and we'll work our way back to self kindness. There's essentially three qualities of meditation that researchers have looked at. And Francine Shapiro has described these three areas.
And you might know Shapiro. She's the creator of the exposure therapy called eMDR Eye Movement and Desensitization and Reprocessing. As a researcher, she identified these three areas for meditation attitude, attention, and your intention. 1s So I want to compare and contrast mindfulness meditation and the loving kindness meditation. Loving kindness meditation includes quite a lot of mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation is what I talk about here in the podcast and what I teach in the modern creative woman. It is about awareness. Now in The Loving Kindness, you can hear more about that meditation in particular in episode 52. But a mindfulness meditation really ask you to focus your attention on the content of your consciousness, such as your breath movement, your thoughts, sounds. Whereas the loving kindness asks you to focus instead towards social targets. First yourself, then friends, family, your nation, the world, and then the whole cosmos. So between the mindfulness and the loving kindness, they both require an open and accepting attitude. It's really essential and significant research points to an increase in positive emotions, whichever one you engage in. So the attention is a similar process that each meditation is asking you to engage in. The intention is a little bit different now.
Mindfulness is a way that we practice observing moment to moment. Consciousness and experience were directing our attention to one category of experience, such as our breath. It's really about getting in touch with ourselves, and that kind of work is so necessary to give ourselves inner peace and calm. It's very powerful way of engaging what happens during mindfulness meditation in the brain. You might be curious to know it activates conflict monitoring, so it allows us to pay attention to conflict in our brain. I like this, I don't like that I should do this. I don't want to do that. It lets you notice that in a different way. It also focuses on selective attention and the ability to sustain your attention on something, focus on something, and then keep your attention on it through sustained attention. Mindfulness meditation also involves regions of the brain related to interception. And that essentially means that the senses that are providing you information about the internal state of your body, your breath, your heartbeat, if you're bouncing your knee.
Mindfulness also helps you pay attention in vigilance. Now, the thing we want to avoid is hypervigilance. That's what happens when people have a quick startle response. They've experienced traumas. They're they have high levels of anxiety. We want vigilance, not hypervigilance. And so mindfulness meditation gives us that sense of calming down and not being on high alert. It also, and this is great if you are worrying or upset and you keep thinking the same thoughts over and over again. Mindfulness meditation helps with disengaging our attention. This is absolutely required to have an open awareness. We have to stop paying attention to things that we don't want to focus on. In therapy, I talk about disengaging attention to all our thoughts, just holding them lightly, allowing them to be there. And we feel good when thoughts are just flowing. We're not attached to them, but sometimes we have our push buttons and someone will say something or we'll have a memory, and suddenly we're hypervigilant. We're focused on our attention, on one particular thought or memory. Mindfulness teaches us how to let that go and go back to the flow. To not stay fully, actively hypervigilant, only engaged with a particular thought or memory. Loving kindness, on the other hand, has a little bit different in focus regarding intention. So the intention of loving kindness is it aims to cultivate a warm hearted, positive emotions towards yourself and others. It's also, of course, focused on having an open mind. But this warm heartedness is the hallmark of a loving kindness meditation, so it's less about catching our attention or focusing our attention, and more about the social emotional processes in our brain. So in our brain, loving kindness activates these brain regions related to emotional processing our amygdala. It's especially important for positive emotions and social cognitions. Mental sizing is. What we call in the brain, what we're doing when we make sense of ourselves and others. So loving kindness helps us mentally wise or understand or bring meaning to our relationship with ourself and others. Another aspect that's important in loving kindness is empathy. It increases empathy.
So mindfulness and loving kindness both improve. Our mood makes it more positive we feel better. But you can choose which one you want to use by considering the differences. That mindfulness helps us with attention and disengaging our attention. It helps us with the sustaining, focused attention and also letting other aspects of our mind just keep moving. Loving kindness, remember, is all about social cognitions. It's about thinking in positive ways about yourself and others. This is very important when we're caregivers of others. We spend so much time wishing well for others, and we can really run that well for ourselves dry. If we're not being loving and kind towards ourselves, we have to fuel ourselves. You know all of this around self-care, sleep, nutrition, exercise where we fill our cup with enjoyable activities and get to be creative. The loving kindness is one more aspect of how we can take good care of ourselves. So now I want to jump into the biological markers meditation at the cellular level. It has an impact. And there's decades of research about this around mindfulness meditation.
And I want to speak specifically to the loving kindness meditation research. So let's jump back to high school biology and have a conversation about the telomeres. And it's a region of the repetitive DNA. It's like the little sequence at the very end of our chromosomes. It essentially is a cap that protects the chromosomes from becoming frayed or tangled. So you can picture this like the little plastic caps at the end of your shoelace. That's kind of what a telomere likes likes to hold things together. It keeps the lace from becoming tangled. Now each time a cell divides, the telomere becomes a little bit shorter, and eventually they become so short that the cell can no longer divide successfully. And then the cell dies. So some types of cells that divide a lot have an enzyme, telomerase, that helps the telomeres stay a little longer, but a lot of them don't. Now there's normal decline of our telomeres. Now consistent with what we know about our brain after birth in the first few years of life, are unused parts of our brain get pruned, right. The brain has to become efficient. It. Gives the family a chance to figure out what this child needs to know, and then it eliminates parts of the brain that are unnecessary for that child. So along those same lines, the telomeres show a rapid decline during childhood levels. And during midlife they start to kind of decline again. To rapid decline in childhood levels out and then as we age past midlife. They start to degrade again.
Now there's chronological age. So as we age, number of trips around the sun or biologically there are you know, stress and environment can cause kind of like biological aging. And that would cause a decrease of the telomeres as well. This profession was new to me. Precision nutrition. Precision nutrition is all about using the biology of what we know from the Human Genome Project to understand how we can use nutrition to feel better, kind of the epigenetic components of aging. And taking care of our body through nutrition. So it's biologically based. All this talk about telomeres, the shoestring with the little cap. Why do we care. It's really about health and lifespan. And when we can kind of buffer the shortening of our telomeres we have better health, less disease and longer lifespan. The rate of telomere shortening can be increased or decreased by things like lifestyle, including, you know, diet and activities, exercise, that kind of thing. The shorter the telomere…it's associated with increased diseases and even poor survival. But buffering the shortening of the telomeres, kind of working on preventing extreme loss can delay the onset of age associated diseases. And that is really exciting.
All of this scientific research has given us significant clues in how we can deal on a day to day basis to stay healthy. Let's get into a really interesting study about the loving kindness meditation and as I mentioned in the last podcast. This meditation slows biological aging. And so we already know that keeping the length of our telomeres helps us stay healthy and live longer. There's a 2019 study by Nguyen et al. And they looked at three groups. They had one group do mindfulness meditation and another group do loving kindness. And then the third group was a control group. They just listed their tasks. So nothing to do with meditation. And this was a 12 week study. It was randomized controlled study which is the highest level of rigor on a study. They were looking at beginner meditators so not gurus and yogis. And the age of the participants was between 35 and 67. They did a blood test of telomere length two weeks before and three weeks after this 12 week study. So they have pretty good range. And this was a study that was funded by the National Institute of Health. So that gives me a lot of confidence. It's gone through pretty rigorous checks for its accountability and reliability as a study. Now, the Loving Kindness Group at the end of the 12 weeks had statistically different telomere length from the control group. So in 12 weeks, they found that the meditators who did the loving kindness their telomere length had shortened somewhat, but it was significantly less. And when I say that, I mean statistically significant that they're very confident that it was because of the meditation and there was this difference between the control group and the loving kindness group. That was pretty profound. The daily practice of the loving kindness meditation really buffered against the telomere shortening.
And there's this bonus that I want to tell you about in their kind of follow up statistics, people's reported emotions about the loving kindness meditation or how they felt in the day didn't seem to matter. Their telomeres kept more length. It also didn't seem to matter the duration and frequency that they practice the loving kindness. So you can practice five minutes a day or 20 minutes a day. Five minutes is just as effective. Doesn't matter how long you practice the loving meditation or how you feel about it, it's gonna help you.
I started looking at later research, and I found one study that showed four weeks was not long enough to show this telomere benefit. Now, four weeks is long enough for you to feel better from the loving Kindness meditation. Certainly you will feel better, but it does take a few months to show the biological markers have changed in your body.
This research was so compelling to me. So I have begun a daily loving kindness meditation and I'm in week three if you would like to join me. It's just 12 weeks, few minutes a day, and I've been doing it at night before I go to sleep and in the morning before I get out of bed and I already experiencing a lot of positive emotions. It really does have the impact that the research says it does. So I'm aiming for 12 weeks and then it's hard to imagine discontinuing this really simple practice. I hope you will consider using this. And as a reminder, the meditation is focused on kindness for yourself, for other people you know, for everyone on earth, and then every living being in the whole cosmos. And you can make up your own version of it. One version is I am healthy, safe and strong. They are healthy, safe and strong. May all beings on the planet be healthy, safe and strong, and may all beings across time and space in the cosmos be healthy, safe and strong. And this wish of being that is really simple. It's profound and you can create your own as well. If you want to add a different bit of language besides healthy, safe and strong, you could be healthy, wealthy, and wise. Feel free to play with it in a way that suits you.
And I really want to invite you to teach it to your friends. Teach it to your kids. The world needs a lot of loving kindness right now, and I think this is a positive impact that we can have on ourselves and the world around us. I've had a lot of fun creating artwork, using the Loving Kindness meditation, and the idea of expanding and sharing in wider and wider circles is inspiration, I think to be making art for a long time to come. I would love to see your artwork if you're making Loving Kindness artwork.
I do hope to see you in the Vibrant Vision workshop. The link is in the show notes. Do join me. I think this will be a profound experience and a tool that you can use forever and ever. When you're faced with challenging situations or the wish to not make a decision or a struggle with when you do make decisions. Have a wonderful rest of your week.
Now that you know about how to use your creativity, what will you create? Want more? Subscribe to the Modern Creative Woman digital magazine. It's absolutely free and it comes out when some men and I know you can get a lot out of the podcast and the digital magazine. Yet when you're ready to take it to the next level and want you to know you have options inside the membership, and if you're interested in a private consultation, please feel free to book a call with me. Even if you just have some questions, go ahead and book a call. My contact is in the show notes and you can always message me on Instagram. Do come find me in the modern creative Woman on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest at Doctor Amy Backus. If you like what you're hearing on the Modern Creative Woman podcast, I want to give you the scoop on how you can support the podcast. You can be an ambassador and share the podcast link with three of your friends. You can be a community supporter by leaving a five star review. If you think it's worth the five stars, and you can become a Gold Star supporter for as little as $3 a month, all those links are in the show notes. Remember to grab your free copy of the 21 Day Gratitude Challenge. The link is in the show notes and you can find it at Modern Creative Women Comm. Have a wonderful week and I cannot wait to talk with you in the next episode.