by Christine Lustik, PhD
Mindfulness has become a do it all drug. Could it really help support those living with PTSD?
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a response to trauma that can cause a person to relive the event and cause the brain to change in certain ways. Most notably, the amygdala gets stuck in high alert and at the same time, the hippocampus, which is trying to make sense of things for us, connects the current event to the previous traumatic event to warn us and keep us on alert. The brain often makes this connection through a sound or some other sensory clue. This causes high anxiety and exhaustion to occur, among many other possible outcomes.
Now, let’s look at mindfulness. First let’s remember, the goal of mindfulness practice is to bring us back to the present moment. This is most often practiced through mindfulness meditation. This is helpful when done carefully as it can help those with PTSD return from the memory arising of the past event before getting stuck in that memory. In addition, regular mindfulness practice is shown to increase activity in the pre-frontal cortex and decrease reactivity in the amygdala, both of these counteract the effects of the PTSD. This all sounds positive and when applied can help those with PTSD interrupt the brain when it’s remembering the traumatic event as if the event is happening in real time. The more we interrupt and redirect the brain, the more it’s able to create a different neural pathway for those situations.
In 2015 and 2021, systemic reviews of the research to date on PTSD and mindfulness were completed. These reviews determined that there are a lot of promising results, but there is more work to be done. It was determined that we need to study if there are specific types of trauma that respond more positively to mindfulness and also which forms of mindfulness are most effective for PTSD.
So yes, mindfulness practice can support those with PTSD. That said, for mindfulness practice to be effective, it takes regular and dedicated practice to begin building new neural pathways. In addition, researchers have yet to understand fully why some people develop PTSD after a traumatic event, while others don’t, and what triggers traumatic events. Therefore, it is suggested individuals with PTSD work with programs and guides that are trauma-informed to be as safe as possible.