Mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety by engaging brain regions that regulate emotion and self-referential thought. In fifteen healthy novice meditators, four days of training lowered state anxiety during meditation sessions but not during a simple breath-attention task. Anxiety relief correlated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and anterior insula. Greater default-mode activity in the posterior cingulate cortex during meditation was linked to higher anxiety, suggesting difficulty controlling self-referential thoughts. The findings indicate that mindfulness meditation attenuates anxiety through mechanisms involved in regulating self-referential thought processes.
People who naturally have higher trait mindfulness—the ability to nonreactively pay attention to the present moment—report lower pain intensity and unpleasantness when exposed to noxious heat. In 76 healthy volunteers who had never meditated, higher scores on the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory were linked to less pain. Brain scans showed that more mindful individuals had greater deactivation of a region from the precuneus to posterior cingulate cortex during pain, areas involved in sensory, cognitive, and emotional processing. These results suggest that dispositional mindfulness reduces pain through specific neural mechanisms, pointing to mindfulness and the posterior cingulate cortex as potential targets for pain therapies.