420: The Mindfulness Mystery Tour! And Two HUGE Discoveries!

The Mindfulness Mystery Tour!

And Two Mind-Boggling Discoveries about Meditation!

Featuring Jason Meno

Today, Jason Meno, our beloved AI guy on the Feeling Great App team, shares some incredible and innovative research he recently did on the effect of meditation on how we think and feel. As you know, basic research is a high priority of our app team, and our major focus is to make basic discoveries in how people change, and especially on what triggers rapid and dramatic change. We use that information to develop and refine the app on an ongoing basis, and also to contribute to basic science.

Jason recently created a “New Cool Tools Club” which has 160 members who Jason can notify whenever he has a cool new app tool that he wants to test. If you are interested in joining, you can find his contact information at the end of the show notes. There is no charge if you’d like to join this group!

Jason had a strong background in Buddhism and has been working with our company for several years, focusing in the last year on the AI chat bot portion of the Feeling Great App. He has meditated for many years, and uses TEAM-CBT as well to deal with his personal moments of stress and unhappiness, something that most if not all of us experience at times!

Introduction

Jason was interested in evaluating the short-term impact of meditating, and did a literature review but found that most or all of the published studies had a focus on the effects of daily meditation over longer periods of time, like two months for example.

He was also interested in how long and how often people should meditate, and what types of meditations, if any, were the most effective.

So, he decided to test a one-hour meditation experience consisting of five ten-minute recorded meditations, including

1. A body scan meditation, systematically relaxing various parts of your body, beginning with your feet and toes.
2. A breathing and counting meditation, where you focus on your breathing and count the breaths going in and out.
3. A loving kindness meditation, starting with sending feelings of love, happiness, and health first to someone you love, then to yourself, then to someone you aren’t especially close to, or don’t particularly like, and on and on until you are projecting love and kindness to the entire universe.
4. A mindfulness exercise where you notice if you are thinking, hearing, watching, remembering, and so forth as various thoughts pass through your mind.
5. A “Do Nothing” meditation where you are instructed to simply “do nothing” for ten minutes.

Because previous research on meditation did not use scales that assessed specific kinds of negative feelings in the here-and-now, he decided to use the highly accurate 7-item negative feelings sliders as well as the 7-item positive feelings sliders prior to the start of the medicine, after each meditation, and at the end of the app.

He also asked many questions about motivation and expectations prior to the start of the meditation experiences, all answered from 0 (not at all) to 100 (completely), including

1. How familiar are you with David’s work?
2. How familiar are you with meditation?
3. How strongly do you believe that meditation will make you feel better?
4. How strongly do you believe that meditation will be rewarding?
5. How strongly do you believe that meditation will only have a small effect?
6. How strongly do you believe that meditation will be a waste of time?
7. How strongly do you believe that meditation will make you feel worse?
8. How strongly do you believe that it will be painful or difficult?

You can find these data at this link.

He also asked every participant to generate an upsetting negative thought, like “I’m a loser,” and use 0 to 1000 sliders to indicate how strongly they believed that thought, and how upsetting it was.

60 individuals started the experiment, and 35 completed it, with 25 dropping out prematurely before they completed some of the meditations.

He presented the data as a two-group analysis, those who completed and those who failed to complete the hour of meditation. Here, are just a few of the preliminary findings, and more refined analyses are planned so we can look at causal effects.

1. Both groups were moderately to very familiar with David’s work and with meditation.
2. The completers had higher scores on the questions about positive expectations than the dropouts, although the differences were not great.
3. The dropouts had substantially higher scores on four questions about negative expectations for th