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20-26 3/2/05 4:53 AM Page 22‘‘It ’ s like training any other musclein your body.You’re developing your brainto cope better with the world’’meditation and wanted to test them firsthand.He is one of a growing number ofresearchers at U of T who are investigatingthe biological, psychological andcircumstantial causes of happiness.Historically, psychology has probedthe dark corners of the human mind.Psychologists have focused on ways tocure, or at least curb, mental illness. It’sonly in the past 10 years that researchershave been trying to identify the factorsthat contribute to happiness and a satisfyinglife – a study that has come to beknown as “positive psychology.”Anderson’s early-morning meditationsessions didn’t induce Zenlikebliss: a construction projectwas going full tilt outside his office window. “It wasn’t like anidyllic setting with a babbling brook,” he says with a laugh.“I heard jackhammers and saws. So I just said, ‘I’m going tofind peacefulness in the din.’”While practising mindfulness, people learn how to findcalm in a difficult world. Being mindful means paying attentionto moment-by-moment experiences. It means observingphysical sensations and the mind’s thoughts and feelings, bothpositive and negative, without suppressing them or lettingoneself be engulfed by them. A mindfulness response to angerwould be “This is anger, and it will pass” rather than “I amreally angry.”Students of mindfulness begin by focusing on theirbreathing. Inevitably, the mind wanders. The challenge, saysAnderson, is to keep bringing your attention back to yourbreath as a means of anchoring yourself in the presentmoment. Mindfulness instructors suggest meditating for 20to 45 minutes every day. These sessions are the foundationof the whole practice, but the objective is to be mindfulthroughout all of life.“Rather than labelling your daily experiences as good orbad,” says Anderson, “you just experience them for what theyare.” When you wake up in the morning feeling down, forexample, you monitor the dark thoughts and any relatedbodily symptoms such as heaviness or tension while gettingon with your day. You simply note the sadness. You don’truminate on how you could possibly feel like this whenthe sun is out, who is to blame, whether it’s ruining yourlife and so on. “Mindfulness is a childlikesensibility. It’s more sensory,” hesays. It’s what Buddhists call the “beginner’smind.”People who master this skill are lessprone to get upset when unpleasantfeelings arise. Everyday mindfulness hashelped Anderson, a Canada ResearchChair in Cognitive Neuroscience whocame to U of T from Stanford Universityin 2003, handle the pressures ofbeing a new professor. “When I’mworking on something, I feel guiltybecause I know it’s taking me away fromworking on something else. But I’m ableto have those thoughts now without theanxious feelings that would normallyaccompany them,” he says. “I feel morecomposed.” Meditation, he adds, is like fitness for the brain.“It’s like training any other muscle in your body. You’re developingyour brain to cope better with the world.”New research has found that mindfulness can help peoplewho suffer from depression. Professor Zindel Segal, theMorgan Firestone Chair in Psychotherapy at U of T andMount Sinai Hospital, combines the principles of mindfulnesswith cognitive behavioural therapy, a form of psychotherapythat helps people see the connection between theirthoughts and feelings. In people who have been depressedbefore, even mild sadness can trigger an excessive amount ofnegative thinking, which can, in turn, cause a recurrence offull-blown depression.Professor Segal has discovered that mindfulness can keeppeople out of that harmful loop by teaching them to be awareof temporary unhappiness without being swallowed up by it.They learn that sad feelings are a part of life and usually transient,provided they don’t dwell on them. In a study publishedin 2000 involving individuals who had recovered from severalbouts of depression, Segal found that those who completedmindfulness-based cognitive therapy relapsed in thefollowing year only half as often as those who did not receivethe therapy. A subsequent study in the U.K. replicated thesefindings, and researchers concluded that mindfulness therapyis most effective in preventing the recurrence of depression inpatients who have had three or more previous episodes.Why does mindfulness meditation work? Neuroscientistsfrom several North American universities have been studying22 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO MAGAZINE