Marines expanding use of meditation training
Mind
Fitness Training found to help troops improve mental performance under stress
of war
By Patrick
Hruby - The Washington Times - Wednesday, December 5, 2012
While
preparing for overseas deployment with the U.S. Marines late last year, Staff
Sgt. Nathan Hampton participated in a series of training exercises held at Camp
Pendleton, Calif., designed to make him a more effective serviceman.
There were
weapons qualifications. Grueling physical workouts. High-stress squad
counterinsurgency drills, held in an elaborate ersatz village designed to
mirror the sights, sounds and smells of a remote mountain settlement in
Afghanistan.
There also
were weekly meditation classes — including one in which Sgt. Hampton and his
squad mates were asked to sit motionless in a chair and focus on the point of
contact between their feet and the floor.
“A lot of people thought it would be a waste
of time,” he said. “Why are we sitting around a classroom doing their weird
meditative stuff?
“But over time, I felt more relaxed. I slept
better. Physically, I noticed that I wasn’t tense all the time. It helps you
think more clearly and decisively in stressful situations. There was a
benefit.”
That
benefit is the impetus behind Mindfulness-based Mind Fitness Training
(“M-Fit”), a fledgling military initiative that teaches service members the
secular meditative practice of mindfulness in order to bolster their emotional
health and improve their mental performance under the stress and strain of war.
Designed by
former U.S. Army captain and current Georgetown University professor Elizabeth
Stanley, M-Fit draws on a growing body of scientific research indicating that
regular meditation alleviates depression, boosts memory and the immune system,
shrinks the part of the brain that controls fear and grows the areas of the
brain responsible for memory and emotional regulation.
Four years
ago, a small group of Marine reservists training at the Marine Corps base in
Quantico, Va., for deployment to Iraq participated in the M-Fit pilot program,
taking an eight-week mindfulness course and meditating for an average of 12
minutes a day.
A study of
those Marines subsequently published in the research journal Emotions found
that they slept better, had improved athletic performance and scored higher on
emotional and cognitive evaluations than Marines who did not participate in the
program, which centers on training the mind to focus on the current moment and
to be aware of one’s physical state.
The Army
and Marines have since commissioned separate studies of larger groups of troops
receiving variations of M-Fit training, the results of which currently are
under scientific review and likely will be published in the next few months.
“The findings in general reinforce and extend
what we saw in the pilot study,” said Ms. Stanley, an associate professor of
security studies at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. “These techniques
can be very effective in increasing situational awareness on the battlefield,
in not having emotions drive behavior, in bolstering performance and resilience
in high-stress environments. I’ve seen effects in my own life.”
Military
meditation
A former
Army intelligence officer, Ms. Stanley served in Korea, Macedonia and Bosnia.
Subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), she
struggled after leaving the military and enrolling in graduate programs at
Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Frustrated
by the ineffectiveness of prescription medication, she began to research
mindfulness and quickly became convinced that the mental and emotional health
benefits of meditation could help not only her, but also other service members.
Ms. Stanley
wrote a paper for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), essentially
arguing that meditative techniques similar to those used by Buddhist monks were
both necessary and appropriate for today’s military — from drone pilots coping
with information overload to infantrymen conducting dangerous and stressful
counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations.
“The
initial concerns form the military were, ‘Is this going to be a waste of time,
and is this going to interrupt my finely honed rapid-action drills?’” Ms.
Stanley said. “The concerns coming from the mindfulness side were, ‘If you
teach them these skills, and they become more open people, will it undermine
their ability to armor up psychologically? A few people even wondered if I was
trying to make, quote, ‘better baby-killers.’”
Undaunted,
Ms. Stanley sought support for a pilot program through her connections in the
Army — the same Army that in the mid-1980s conducted a Trojan Warrior Project,
in which 25 Special Forces soldiers nicknamed the “Jedi Knights” received six
months of meditative and martial-arts training that helped them perform better
than their peers on psychological and biofeedback tests.
She found
an advocate in Maj. Jason Spitaletta, a then-Marine reservist who was a
psychology graduate student in non-military life. Mr. Spitaletta read Ms.
Stanley’s DARPA paper and brought it to the attention of his superiors, who
agreed to participate in the 2008 study.
Over eight
weeks of 12-hour days otherwise devoted to mock firefights and exhausting field
exercises, 31 Marine reservists were taught breathing exercises and yoga poses,
how to focus their attention and how to prevent their minds from wandering.
More than once, they could be seen outdoors, sitting cross-legged and
practicing meditation.
Amishi Jha,
the researcher who evaluated the troops, found that the service members in the
program ended up with improved moods and greater attentiveness — and that the
individuals who spent additional time meditating on their own saw the biggest
improvements.
“It’s like working out in the gym,” said Ms.
Jha, the director of contemplative neuroscience for the University of Miami’s
Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. “Right now, the military has
daily physical training. Every day, they get together and exercise. But the
equivalent is not given to the mind. The more [these troops] practiced, the
more they benefited.”
Brain
training
Why the
cognitive boost? The answer lies in neuroscience. Previous studies have shown
that habitual meditation:
• Changes
the way blood and oxygen flow through the brain;
•
Strengthens the neural circuits responsible for concentration and empathy;
• Shrinks
the amygdala, an area of the brain that controls the fear response;
• Enlarges
the hippocampus, an area of the brain that controls memory
• In a
recent, incomplete study of Marines taking an M-Fit course — the one Sgt.
Hampton participated in — University of California at San Diego and Navy
researcher Chris Johnson took blood and saliva samples from the participating
service members and used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan
their brains.
• According
to a report in Pacific Standard, the troops recovered better from stressful
training, while their brain scans showed similarities to those taken of elite
Special Forces soldiers and Olympic athletes.
“Basically, there are parts of the brain that
work differently in high performers,” said Robert Skidmore, director of
operations for the Alexandria, Va.-based Mind Fitness Training Institute. “It’s
possible to train our minds to process things differently. With eight weeks of
training, working memory capacity increases.”
Essentially
the short-term, scratch-pad system we use to manage relevant information, solve
real-time problems and regulate our current emotional state, working memory is
roughly equivalent to random access memory in a computer and functions on a
daily basis like money in a bank account: Use it, and it depletes until it can
be replenished.
Heavy
cognitive tasks, such as scanning an alley for armed insurgents, require
working memory. So do emotional challenges, like dealing with the stress of
leaving one’s family for an overseas deployment.
According
to Ms. Jha, depleted working memory has been linked to emotional impulsivity,
prejudiced behavior, domestic violence and alcoholism.
“It’s the core resource for regulating your
own behavior,” she said. “It’s not like your psychological state or mood is
separate.”
In the
M-Fit study, troops who meditated regularly increased their working memory
capacity; moreover, they were more aware of their physical responses to combat
stress.
In a
fight-or-flight situation — for instance, a firefight — the pupils dilate to
take in more information. Blood flows away from the stomach and into the
muscles, producing the familiar “butterfly” sensation. Heart and breathing
rates rise. Stress hormones course through the body.
More
importantly, blood flow in the brain is redirected away from the areas that
control rational thought and toward the areas associated with instinct and
survival.
“It’s really hard to access rational thought
during high-intensity stress situations,” said Jared Smyser, 28, a former
Marine who lives in Richmond, Va., and is training to become an M-Fit
instructor. “All this stuff happens in your body because we’ve evolved to get
away from predators. But it’s not really relevant in today’s warfare. You need
to be calm, collected, making better decisions.”
According
to Ms. Stanley, meditative training can help troops do so by increasing
efficiency in the insular cortex, which allows people to rapidly switch between
thinking and unthinking states of mind.
“It can be exercised when we are attending to
sensations in the body,” she said. “So a whole lot of our course is teaching
the ability to track those sensations. People come into the course thinking it
will ruin their ability to respond fast in combat, but actually, we’re
enhancing their ability.”
In the
future, Ms. Stanley said, meditation may become as standard in the military as
rifle practice, another way of making troops more effective and resilient. Next
year, the Marines will incorporate M-Fit classes into an infantry school at
Camp Pendleton, making the program a tentative part of its regular training
cycle.
Mr. Smyser,
who served in Iraq in 2005, said military mental training is overdue.
“It absolutely would have beneficial to me [in
Iraq],” he said. “I was very skeptical at first, but I’ve seen benefits in my
own life. I’m interested in working with veterans with PTSD. And if we teach
this upfront, we might be able to prevent some of the problems we have to fix afterwards.”
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