Send
in the Meditating Marines!
Tai
Chi is a meditation that is also a martial art.
The Marines train to fight and now are adding meditation to the
program. Is this good? Is this bad?
Ironic? I’ll leave it to you to
sort out. Interesting article for those
inclined… Tom
Marines
expanding use of meditation training
Washington
Times, December 5, 2012
Mind
Fitness Training found to help troops improve mental performance under stress
of war
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."
