Meg Van Deusen

The Power of Eye Contact: A Free and Easy Stress-Reducer

In a world of screens, a moment of warm eye contact can offer something easily overlooked: the feeling of being seen. I explore the links between compassionate attention, social connection, and relief from stress.

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Loving Kindness Meditation: A Response to Loneliness

How can sitting quietly with yourself help you feel less alone? Loving-kindness meditation offers a way to notice self-judgment, practice compassion, and approach both yourself and others with greater warmth and connection.

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Five Things To Do When Feeling Defeated and Overwhelmed

When life feels like an endless treadmill, pushing harder may leave you more depleted. These five steps begin with a pause and lead toward understanding your needs, clarifying what matters, and taking one small step forward.

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Help Relieve Stress by Cultivating Hope

Chronic stress can narrow our view until problems seem like all there is. I explore how noticing what is good, treating ourselves kindly, and creating a practical path toward meaningful goals can help restore hope.

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Meditation Benefits

Stress can make it difficult to focus, regulate emotions, and think through decisions. I look at how mindfulness meditation may help us pause, steady our attention, and respond from a calmer place.

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Reducing Stress In The Classroom

What changes when a teacher asks what a student has been through before judging their behavior? A conversation with an experienced educator explores how understanding trauma, collaborative learning, and restorative justice can build trust and reduce classroom stress.

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Social Media (for better or worse?)

We often reach for social media to feel connected, yet leave feeling lonelier or less satisfied. I examine that tension and share ways families, schools, and communities can support healthier habits and more time together in person.

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Could Your Gut Be Causing Your Anxiety and Stress?

Stress can unsettle the gut, but could the gut also influence how we feel? I explore the two-way relationship between the microbiome and the brain, including the promise and limitations of early research on probiotics.

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Coping with Holiday Stress

The gap between an ideal holiday and the one we actually experience can bring disappointment and tension. Through one family’s story, I explore how compassion, flexible expectations, and intentional choices can make room for a more meaningful celebration.

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Anxiety Self Help Tips

Worry can keep us circling problems we cannot control. Through one father’s experience, I explore how compassionate engagement with the people we love can interrupt anxious rumination and strengthen our sense of connection.

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Living in a World of Information Overload

Constant messages, notifications, and news can leave little room to hear ourselves think. I explore the pull of always being available and how stepping away from our devices can create space for calm, curiosity, and genuine connection.

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Feeling Lonely

Why can someone surrounded by people feel lonely while someone living alone feels deeply connected? I explore the role of perception and self-judgment, and how hope, compassion, and openness can help us feel a greater sense of belonging.

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Meditation Benefits

Stress can make it difficult to focus, regulate emotions, and think through decisions. I look at how mindfulness meditation may help us pause, steady our attention, and respond from a calmer place.

Decisions, Decisions – How Meditation Helps you Make Them

“You can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of
what might happen.”
- Michelle Obama

Meditation Benefits: Emotional Stress

Are you aware of the benefits of mediation? You may have heard the sayings, “run while you can” or “he’s a bat out of hell.” These common idioms illustrate the tendency we have as humans to react quickly when we sense danger. The amygdala is the region of the brain that houses our emotional stress responses, such as the flight, fight, freeze response when we feel we’re in harm’s way.

It can be an extremely useful system when we have to quickly exit a burning building or evade a wild animal. However, when we are under chronic stress, the amygdala can be quite reactive and compromise our better judgment or what psychologists call our “executive functions” (the ability to focus attention, learn, manage time, make decisions, and regulate emotion).

The executive functions are located in the prefrontal cortex—that is, in the brain’s frontal lobe, on the other side of the forehead. The prefrontal cortex that houses executive functions is connected to the amygdala through something called the default mode network.

When the amygdala is active, it can hijack the prefrontal cortex. This causes us to act impulsively—without thinking, so to speak. In other words, the amygdala and prefrontal cortex do not work in balance when someone is chronically stressed. Instead, the amygdala (the emotional center) takes over and can cause a person to forget lines to a song (like Barbara Streisand did once at her Central Park performance.) Or cause someone to fly into sudden anger (like maybe some of you have done when you’ve been under duress.)

Meditation Benefits: Restoring Balance

Here’s the important part: when we meditate, we activate the prefrontal cortex, which not only focuses our attention but, in turn, quiets the default mode network, thus regulating the amygdala. As a result, we are less likely to storm out of a frustrating meeting at work and more likely to calmly offer feedback if we disagree with something.

This is true not just for seasoned meditators, but for beginners, too. One study showed that non-meditators who took an eight-week MBSR course did better on cognitive tasks that tested these executive functions than before they took the course [i].

Furthermore, Richard Davidson and Daniel Goleman report that just ten minutes of mindfulness seems to temporarily improve concentration. Eight minutes of mindfulness temporarily lessens mind-wandering. And about ten hours of mindfulness over a two-week period strengthens attention and working memory.

Meditation Benefits for Students

In one study, improvement of working memory through mindfulness led to improved scores on a graduate school entrance exam among trained participants.

Stressed-out students have much to gain from practicing mindfulness. This might be why the popular mindfulness app, Calm, just added a Mindfulness 101 for college students. It also may be why more colleges and universities are adding meditation rooms to their campuses.

Eight Minutes a Day

So, the next time you are struggling to make a decision, no matter how small or how big, maybe you should meditate first. Remember, just eight minutes can tame your wandering mind and help you focus. I always tell my clients that decisions are best made from a place of calm. Meditation may help you find that place.

[i] Tammi R.A. Kral et al., “Impact of short- and long-term mindfulness meditation training on amygdala reactivity to emotional stimuli,” Neurolmage Volume 181, November 1, 2018 pp 301–313.