How smiling can make you a better meditator
When your mind wanders, smile!
It all started with Aware, the meditation app. The guide instructed me, at the beginning of every session and with a very soothing voice, to “keep a half-smile”. Of course, I couldn’t keep it up throughout the whole session but whenever I remembered, I gently smiled. It felt good.
It has been proven that smiling activates a range of positive reactions in our bodies.
The main result of smiling is triggering the release of neurotransmitters (dopamine, endorphins and serotonin) that decrease stress, increase relaxation, lower the blood rate and blood pressure.
While endorphins act as a natural pain reliever, serotonin serves as a mood lifter or antidepressant.
And dopamine? Well, among other things, it tells the brain that whatever it just experienced is worth getting more of.
Smiling triggers positive reactions through the release of neurotransmitters, including dopamine — it tells the brain that whatever it just experienced is worth getting more of.
Meditation and mind-wandering
One of the main difficulties of meditation, particularly for beginners, is keeping sustained, focused attention on an object, such as the breath.
Mind-wandering is common and, before you realise it, you’re not paying attention to your breath — instead, you found yourself daydreaming about all sorts of things.
Sound familiar?
Just as common for the practitioner is more or less frustration when he realises his mind wandered once again. The obvious response would be to quickly and forcefully return to the object of attention, often with self-judgment.
The problem is that this creates a negative experience. And this is the opposite of what one wants.
Mind-wandering during meditation is common. Often, when the practitioner realises his mind has wandered again, he feels frustration, anger or self-judgement — a negative experience overall.
Dr John Yates, in his The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science masterpiece, calls the minor epiphany of realising that the mind has wandered a moment of introspective awareness.
Training the mind to recognise mind-wandering
Although this process is unconscious, Dr Yates argues, one can train the mind to make the discovery and bring it into consciousness sooner and more often.
One of the ways to do this is by taking a moment and appreciating this minor epiphany, the exact moment when you consciously realised your mind has wandered.
“Savor the sense of being more fully conscious and present. Cherish your epiphany and encourage yourself to have more of them. Conscious intention and affirmation powerfully influence our unconscious processes. By valuing this moment, you’re training the mind through positive reinforcement to wake you up more quickly in the future.” — Dr John Yates
Realising that the mind has wandered is called introspective awareness and it should be cherished and positively reinforced in order to train the brain to wake up from mind-wandering more quickly in the future.
Smiling works as powerful positive reinforcement
It then occurred to me that I could use smiling as a positive reinforcement whenever I caught myself mind-wandering during meditation.
Counteracting negative thoughts and feelings
Smiling in those moments helps me not only counteract any tendency of feeling frustration, anger or self-judgment but also triggers a biochemical reaction that works to positively reinforce that unconscious behaviour.
In other words, by smiling when you realise your mind has wandered, you train your brain to make it more likely for that moment of introspective awareness to occur again in the future.
Smiling gently during this brief moment of introspective awareness creates a flood of biochemical reactions, including the release of neurotransmitters, that work as positive reinforcement, making you a better meditator.
Developing introspective awareness as a psychological trait
The act of smiling when your conscious brain realises that your mind has wandered from the object of attention you should be focusing on not only momentarily turns the potential negative experience into a positive one.
That moment of introspective awareness can be very brief, especially when we’re eager to go back to our focus of attention, such as the breath.
However, as Rick Hanson, PhD, explains in his book Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness, since “neurons that fire together, wire together”, one of the ways to use neuroplasticity is to stay with the experience for a breath or two longer.
Smiling during the introspective awareness epiphany allows you those much needed moments to let the positive experience sink it.
Thanks to the power “experience-dependent-neuroplasticity”, those extra seconds enables your brain to gradually consolidate this positive experience in the long-term storage in the brain. This is how you can progressively turn introspective awareness into a psychological trait.
During meditation, instead of instantly and automatically going back to the object of your attention when you realise your mind has wandered, smiling allows you to stay with this positive experience for a bit longer, helping you to develop introspective awareness as a psychological trait.
