Neural correlates of mindfulness meditation-related anxiety relief
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience April 24, 2013 Fadel Zeidan, Katherine T. Martucci, Robert Kraft et al. 196 citations
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.