Philippe Goldin, PhD, presented at the 2024 Wellness Academy, delving into the cognitive neuroscience of mindfulness, offering practical strategies for enhancing mental resilience.
The following Q&A session addresses audience inquiries on initiating mindfulness practices, their neurological impacts, and managing modern distraction
About the expert: Philippe Goldin, PhD
Philippe Goldin, PhD, is a professor at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing at UC Davis, where he teaches, conducts research and mentors students in the areas of health promotion, clinical psychology and cognitive-affective neuroscience.
As a clinical neuroscientist, he uses functional neuroimaging in the context of randomized controlled trials to investigate how different types of interventions, including cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based stress reduction, compassion cultivation training and aerobic exercise, impact neural and behavioral indicators of emotion reactivity, emotion regulation, attention regulation, and conceptual self-views. His work focuses on adults with diagnosed mood, anxiety disorders and chronic pain disorders, as well as community samples of adults and children.
Q&A with Philippe Goldin, PhD
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Q: How should beginners start a mindfulness practice? Does the environment matter?
Goldin: Great question. A simple answer to this is to get out of the house. Get out of the box. Go somewhere with nature – flowers, tress, and bushes – and give yourself the gift of three, four, five minutes to take in the beauty of a flower, listen to the birds, to look at the sky, to smell nature and the non-linearity that is throughout nature as opposed to these boxes.
If you drop into nature, that’s one way to do it right. There are many other ways you can create a mindfulness practice, and there is not one single way. But nature is an incredible facilitator for this. And if you’re fortunate enough to live next to a park, or even if you have a beautiful flower or plant by your window, or a balcony you can do that.
That’s one way to do it. Another way to do it is also you can have a formal meditation practice. This is something I do every morning, I love coffee and grinding the beans, something I do everyday, and make it a mindfulness practice by stopping to smell the beans. I stop everything, and smell the beans and it’s beautiful. I think about where the beans came from, how they made their way to my kitchen. And then I grind the beans, put them in the French Press and add the water. I slow down the process to actually see what I am doing, I smell, taste, touch, and appreciate. It’s an opportunity for gratitude and inter-connectivity.
So we can do this even if you have a dog, cat, or partner, you can take a moment and you can just notice. I have a cat that I love, and the cat just sits and purrs and it’s an opportunity for me to drop into meditation.
So yes, there are many formal practices and there’s about 30 plus different mindfulness practices, but we could take everyday activities and just overlay a different quality of mind onto that everyday activity. And that makes it kind of seamless, effortless. I highly recommend playing with that and experiment.
We really need to be creative about this. So if I live in a big city, I’ll put on one of my favorite music and go outside and take a short walk in nature, like in a park nearby. I’ll notice the sky, a cloud, the color of the flowers, and anything in my surroundings.
I highly recommend music. Because even when we were in our mom’s wombs, we could here sounds. So that’s one of the fundamental windows into one of our most powerful sensory, capacities, using music to regulate our attentional capacity. But please be creative, because that’s much more fun.
Q: How much time is needed to see measurable changes in the brain from mindfulness practices?
Goldin: Very good question. Comes up often. As a psychologist, I have to say individual differences both psychologically and biologically, hormonally, we all come with different psychological, biological readiness. So for some people just a short window into practice has a huge effect, for others like myself, it takes longer.
The timing will vary. There is some evidence that if people do even just short practices, five minutes, sometimes three times per day, you build up momentum that actually begins to develop a skill, a muscle. If you have the luxury of doing it longer, go for it, but longer is not necessarily better. So I think short practices that can lead to a direct experience which allows us to notice our anxious thoughts, jealousy, fear. We see those thoughts rising and then changing and dissolving like a cloud taking shape.
You can get to the level of direct experience and confidence to realize those thoughts are just sensations. I am even doing it now, I have chronic pain and I can go, oh, that’s just a pain, a sensation. I don’t have to get caught in the thought.
That’s really what we want, because then you can apply that process anytime, anywhere, all day long.
Q: What are the impacts of mindfulness on children and adolescents?
Goldin: Again, another huge question. There are many people studying this. Our lab has tried several times. Young people, children and adolescents, even young adults, enjoy when they have a direct experience, when it’s not conceptual. It needs to be integrated into their world Think about sports coaches using this, and they have clout to be able to introduce young people as a part of a team or individual athletes.
The adolescent brain, is in such change. When we look back at the previous question, and think about immediate emotional reactivity, it is possible to down regulate and to introduce at least an alternative way of responding to internal and external stressors, whether societal, familial, or internal.
Most studies are with adults, either cross-sectional or across the lifespan. And there’s evidence that longer, sustained training of the mind, actually can begin to lead to slower rates of decay, of the neural matter, the neurons in different parts of the brain that are important.
So there is evidence for that, and we need longitudinal and replication. But going back to adolescence, I think there’s so much plasticity that when we’re teenagers and young adults that it’s a fantastic opportunity to at least bring in different ways of using the mind-brain perspective taking. Oh, how does that feel in me? How does it hurt the other?
Bringing in that awareness and noticing into their activities, not just making them sit on a cushion. I have two teenage daughters, they don’t want to do that. But rather talk about friendships, sports, relationships.
Find creative opportunities to integrate mindfulness, and be playful and skillful.
Q: How can we combat mind-wandering and distraction from excessive internet and social media use?
Goldin: This is a real challenge. I mean, for those of us who are lucky enough to not have to, our work doesn’t rely on social media, or we don’t have the habit. It takes so much inhibitory control, and we know that the neural circuitry for this is not developed yet until you’re in your early 20s, if ever.
Like I mentioned, I have two teenage daughters, and this is such a struggle. And as a parent, this can be painful, so you’re hitting a nerve in me. How do we help these young minds?
One way is to try and literally get out and do other activities where the phone is not required. Right? It requires skillful redirection. How about we shift to listening to music. Most teenagers, young adults and adults like music. That’s one way. Or we ask what they would rather do in this moment, like talk to their friend?
Because anything can be better than scrolling through these images that induce social comparison. All of this automatic imperative negative thinking. It’s about finding ways to redirect attention creatively and collaboratively, rather than imposing rigid rules that lead to resistance. Because yes, it can induce anger, frustration in the parent, and I need to be aware of this and override that temporarily and find more skillful ways of interacting that it’s almost like aikido. Even going with the tool and redirect it, as opposed to going, you know, can I turn it off?
I can’t turn off the whole internet. I can’t turn off the whole phone, when I have tried I get named a dictator. So I need to step up and be more skillful.
For adults, the strategy is similar. Notice how certain habits, like endlessly scrolling or consuming overwhelming news, affect your mind. Right now I am practicing with myself because I read the New York Times every morning and NPR. I am noticing what it does to my mind, and so now I’m intentionally reading less and listening less to the news that makes my mind go off balance. When my mind is off-kilter, I’m not at my best for others.
To explore these concepts further, watch Dr. Goldin’s Wellness Academy presentation.
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