How Mindfulness & Meditation Support PTSD Management
By: Melissa Mcclain
Tags: Meditation, Trauma, Traumatic Brain Injury, Mindfulness, PTSD

It’s been a while since I’ve written about my mindfulness practice. Mostly because my meditation practice (and I!) have been on hiatus due to a Traumatic Brain Injury. I have lots to share about my TBI recovery process but today I want to share a real-world, real-time look at what happens in your brain when a PTSD trigger occurs & how the regular practice of meditation can support recovery long-term and “in the moment.”

Today I was doing a meditation with my neurofeedback meditation headset, the Muse. My meditation felt fairly “normal” (post TBI normal which is a whole other story).

I was relatively calm & focused until I wasn’t thanks to an unexpected trigger

Let’s back up a little to give today’s experience some context. ‪Most of my 15 year Crisis Management career was spent preparing for and responding to mass casualty events like aviation accidents and terrorist attacks. Most of my work days were spent talking about “what if” scenarios and actual stories of “what happened.” I was able to talk about “what happened” because I was a student…and a participant…of crisis response. I have a Bachelors and Masters degree in Disaster Management and during my career I responded to numerous aviation accidents and terrorist attacks. I also trained hundreds of people in response operations, re-telling stories of tragedy and grief and facilitating video after video of actual response situations. TV images of broken and burned planes, grieving families…and my own mental images of those I’d been a part of…were a regular part of life. After a while it became too much and several years ago I made a conscious decision, for my own well-being, to step out of my career.

Shortly before I left I was diagnosed with PTSD

I didn’t believe the diagnosis when I got it. I associate PTSD with wars, soldiers, death and violence. I ignored the diagnosis, yet knew I had a lot of healing to do. Shortly after I quit my job there was an aviation accident. It was all over the news…and then it was all over my body and my mind.

My adrenaline spiked.

Anxiety left me feeling like I was driving an out of control semi on a winding road.

There were tears.

There was fear.

There was sadness.

All taking residence deep inside of me.

I was at the wheel, alright. The wheel of my own trauma-filled body and mind.

I knew I had to do something about this and so I embarked on a healing journey which I’ve written about here before. Early in that journey I discovered mindfulness and then meditation. In February 2017, I began meditating with the Muse and slowly but surely life began to change. On the meditation cushion I learned how to bring my mind into a state of calm and focus.

To let thoughts come, because they always will, and then to let them go.

I also learned to do the same with physical sensations that sometimes followed these thoughts.

I connected with my mind and the thoughts that inhabit it. I got in touch with recurrent thoughts and themes. I also began to connect with my body and discover where those thoughts lived and what sensations and reactions they triggered.

After practicing on a regular basis and building up to a 30–45 minute daily meditation practice (I started at 7 minutes a day), I began to notice changes in thoughts and behaviors outside of my daily practice.

That’s when I realized that my meditation practice was helping with my PTSD

For me, a PTSD trigger could look something like this. ‪A low flying plane in an urban area automatically sent my mind into thoughts & visions of a crash. My mind then took my nervous system with it & amygdala hijack sent me into high anxiety and rumination on past memories and scenarios or “what if” future thinking. It could derail my whole day…or multiple days with the discomfort of anxiety.

After building my practice I began to gain some control over my mind and my body. A low flying plane could still trigger, but I learned to control what thoughts I held on to. I learned to control what thoughts my BODY held on to.

You might be curious about all this.

You might not understand all this.

You might not get how meditation can help.

The data from today’s meditation will show you what was happening in my brain during a trigger event.

‪I started today’s meditation in a fairly calm and focused state. I’m still rehabbing my traumatic brain injury so meditation has become more challenging. My brain is a much noisier place than it was 4 months ago!

As the graph above shows, almost 7 minutes in and I was spending most of my time in the dark purple or calm mind state.

Then everything changed!

A plane flew over.

It was low and it was loud in a not normal kind of way.

I could feel it rumble in my body and I was immediately triggered.

My heart began racing and I could feel it pounding in my chest, getting louder and stronger the closer the plane came. My thoughts raced to the plane crashing into my house, the Puget Sound or downtown Seattle. ‬

Thump, THUMP, THUMP

‪The pictures of that not real calamity began to form in my mind. The sounds from ‬my beating heart got louder and louder. My body began tensing.

Then there was a moment where I felt like my mind split in two.

Part of me was traveling down that road to false (thankfully) calamity. It was both making up a worst-case story and listening intently for the “boom” I was sure would come as the plane fell from the sky.

The other part of me was fully in the meditation and “watching” my reaction. I was fully present and working to get my body and mind to the safety zone that is calm and focused meditation. You can see the trigger on the graph below around 6 minutes and 40 seconds in. That’s when I first heard the plane, too loud and too low.

The battle between my two sides lasted about 6 minutes. The meditating, self-regulation self trying to come back to present moment and calm while the amygdala highjacked side was spinning off into the land of trauma.

Because of my practice and the value of using the Muse, after 6 minutes my mind came back to present and my body began to calm.

Without the self-regulation I’ve worked hard to master in my two year practice, my amygdala would have taken over fully. I would have stayed in fight or flight with adrenaline and cortisol pumping into my body and exacerbating and prolonging the mental and physical reaction. Taken in additional context of a recent aviation accident and ever-present news stories, these results are even more impactful to me.

I chose today to extend my meditation time from 20 to 30 minutes, as part of my rehab program to return to pre-TBI capabilities with a still noisy and sometimes unregulated brain. My meditation beyond 20 minutes was a bit rocky but not as dramatic as my “trigger window.”

Meditation isn’t just about the time you spend “in practice” but what that practice brings to your everyday life.

In this instance that “everyday life” happened to be the a trauma trigger. Your everyday might be anxiety, grief, anger or attention management. It’s not easy, healing really never is, but if you are ready to do the work there’s something available to help.

Have questions? Feel free to reach out!

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About Melissa

Melissa spent over 15 years working in Crisis Management with a focus on customer and employee care and advocacy. During her career she supported companies and organizations around the globe in preparing for and responding to large scale mass casualty disasters such as aviation accidents, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and terror attacks overseas. She has facilitated training sessions for front-line employees and provided crisis response consulting to senior leaders.

Melissa is a Fine Art Photographer and founder of Sense Of Mind™ Sensory Wellness Programs and creator of an 8 week meditation program that is a robust companion to the Muse™ technology and takes your meditation practice “off the cushion” and into your every day life. She created Sense Of Mind™ to help others learn the scientific benefits of meditation and the value of discovering a personal wellness practice tailored to needs, beliefs and lifestyles. She believes supporting brain health and performance is more important than ever in our increasingly demanding and neurologically taxing lifestyles.

She has an M.S. in Crisis Management, has attended Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute and Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction training, is a certified Creatively Fit Coach and completed a certificate program in Brain Health. She has integrated therapeutic grade Essential Oils for trauma, nervous system regulation and brain health in her recovery process and is a doTERRA Wellness Advocate. She is currently working on certification to be a Trauma Release Exercise (TRE) provider.

Melissa is available for individual wellness consultations, corporate/individual Muse meditation program facilitation and guest speaker opportunities.