Video and Transcript: Why Meditate?

Hi, everyone! Dr. Orit Hickman here. And, this is a little bit of a different location for me to shoot a video, but I wanted to talk very quickly about meditation. 

So, in my clinic, we treat a good number of patients who have persistent pain. And, one of the things we talk about is how do we develop strategies that will help calm the nervous system so that the system can tolerate things better? 

Typically, when a patient has been experiencing persistent pain, and you may be one of those-one of those individuals, the nervous system is in a pretty high state of fight, flight, freeze. It's also in a state of doing constant check-ins, so it's constantly looking for areas and protecting areas and being aware of areas that might be experiencing high sensitivity, and the brain may be producing pain in the response to those-those areas of-of discomfort or sensitivity. And, if you've watched any of my other videos on persistent pain, there’s some context around what it is I'm talking about in those videos. 

But, specifically, I'll talk to patients about meditation. And, meditation is one of those techniques or tools that I think that almost everybody has heard,  “Oh. Well, the point of meditation is for me to clear my brain.” 

There's a wonderful YouTube video by Dan Harris, and he's a-he's a-he's a newscaster who actually had a panic attack on live television. And, I really like his approach to explaining meditation because, as he describes it, there's no way you can clear your brain. Your brain is not something that is supposed to not think. In fact, that’s the job of the brain. The brain is supposed to think. 

But, the job of meditation is to help you be aware of when your brain is tugging you in directions that we don't want it to. So, maybe it is focusing in on an area way too often. Maybe you have pretty negative thought patterning that's happening around that area. Maybe there's just-it's just-it's just too active. Right? The brain is just spending way too much time-you know-jumping from one thing to another to another. And so, meditation is about developing a skill, and that skill is awareness and then shifting and changing thought patterns. 

I'll give you an example: I experience persistent anxiety. I also have persistent pain symptoms, but anxiety tends to be the most common experience that I have from an emotional state in my-in my body and my nervous system. And so, I have been meditating on and off for the last three years. I literally only do 10 minutes in the morning. I don't leave my bed. I wake up. I grab my phone, and I have an app that I go through. It is a guided meditation. It is the same exact meditation every single day. And, originally, when I started this, I started at like one minute. Right? I was like, “This is really hard for me. I'm going to start really, really low and easy.” And, that's what I typically recommend to patients is start with one minute and then slowly, over time, work up as you can tolerate. And so, I've made it to 10 minutes. I've maybe done one or two 15 minute ones recently. But, in general, I'm sticking to that 10 minute mark. It's very easy for me to do it. I-it's part of my routine now. 

And, when I first started doing meditation, I really didn't understand what the benefits were, especially for me having persistent anxiety. And, one of the things that I found is that, with my anxiety, I'm able to catch a negative thought before I go into a downward spiral. And, I wasn't able to do that before. 

And, if there's anything that you learn when you experience anxiety or persistent pain, it's that the brain has a lot of background noise. And, there's a lot of things that the brain’s doing without you saying, “This is okay.” With pain, specifically, the brain is constantly, again, checking in on different body parts, and then what the brain is doing is it's saying, “Oh. Something dangerous is about to happen, so I need to protect you, and I need to be on high alert.” 

It's a similar thing with anxiety. When I flew, (I just flew this past weekend) I had to do a ton of work to redirect my brain because it kept wanting to take me down these paths that were going to then amp up my blood pressure [and] my heart rate and make me even more anxious. And, you might experience the same thing when you're about to do a movement that's threatening or that you've had pain with in the past. It might be something as simple as bending forward to brush your teeth. If you experience pain in your low back when you go to brush your teeth, then, before you even do that activity, the brain is already starting you on a path of, “Hey! This activity is going to be really dangerous. You need to be guarded. You need to be protecting.” And so, it's already going to that high alert place. 

A big part of treating persistent pain is to become aware of these thought patterns because they ramp up the nervous system, they make your muscles tighter before you even do the activity, and you're much more likely to experience pain just because of your brain protecting you. So, getting in there and changing those thought patterns is incredibly important and something that we work with with patients all the time. And so, meditation is a tool because it helps teach you how to do that. Right? If you are not aware that your brain is doing these things, how are you going to change it? So, meditation helps you be aware of these things that your brain is doing. And, it also starts to teach you skills and tools to change what your brain is doing.

So, that was a little longer than I expected it to be. So, I hope that that was helpful. If you thought that was a helpful video, I would really appreciate a thumbs-up. Feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel so [that] you can get more videos like this one, helping you live your best life, especially if you are a patient with persistent pain. And, I was supposed to turn off those reminders. Sorry about that. Have a great day!