Anatomy of the Brain - Cerebral Cortex Function

The cerebral cortex is the thin layer of the brain that covers the outer portion (1.5mm to 5mm) of the cerebrum. It is covered by the meninges and often referred to as gray matter. The cortex is gray because nerves in this area lack the insulation that makes most other parts of the brain appear to be white. The cortex also covers the cerebellum.

The cerebral cortex consists of folded bulges called gyri that create deep furrows or fissures called sulci.

The folds in the brain add to its surface area and therefore increase the amount of gray matter and the quantity of information that can be processed.

The cerebrum is the most highly developed part of the human brain and is responsible for thinking, perceiving, producing and understanding language. Most information processing occurs in the cerebral cortex. The cerebral cortex is divided into four lobesthat each have a specific function. These lobes include the frontal lobes, parietal lobes, temporal lobes, and occipital lobes.

CEREBRAL CORTEX FUNCTION

The cerebral cortex is involved in several functions of the body including:

• Determining Intelligence
• Determining Personality
• Motor Function
• Planning and Organization
• Touch Sensation
• Processing Sensory Information
• Language Processing

The cerebral cortex contains sensory areas and motor areas. Sensory areas receive input from the thalamus and process information related to the senses.

They include the visual cortex of the occipital lobe, auditory cortex of the temporal lobe, gustatory cortex and somatosensory cortex of the parietal lobe. Within the sensory areas are association areas which give meaning to sensations and associate sensations with specific stimuli. Motor areas, including the primary motor cortex and the premotor cortex, regulate voluntary movement.

CEREBRAL CORTEX LOCATION

Directionally, the cerebrum and the cortex that covers it is the uppermost part of the brain. It is superior to other structures such as the pons, cerebellum and medulla oblongata.

CEREBRAL CORTEX DISORDERS

A number of disorders result from damage or death to brain cells of the cerebral cortex. The symptoms experienced depend on the area of the cortex that is damaged. Apraxia is a group of disorders that are characterized by the inability to perform certain motor tasks, although there is no damage to motor or sensory nerve function. Individuals may have difficulty walking, be unable to dress themselves or unable to use common objects appropriately. Apraxia is often observed in those with Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson's disorders, and frontal lobe disorders. Damage to the cerebral cortex parietal lobe can cause a condition known as agraphia. These individuals have difficulty writing or are unable to write. Damage to the cerebral cortex may also result in ataxia. These types of disorders are characterized by a lack of coordination and balance. Individuals are unable to perform voluntary musclemovements smoothly. Injury to the cerebral cortex has also been linked to depressive disorders, difficulty in decision making, lack of impulse control, memory issues, and attention problems.

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information on the cerebral cortex, see:

• Functional Divisions of the Cerebral Cortex
• Cerebral Lobes

DIVISIONS OF THE BRAIN

• Forebrain - encompasses the cerebral cortex and brain lobes.
• Midbrain - connects the forebrain to the hindbrain.
• Hindbrain - regulates autonomic functions and coordinates movement.

This article originally appeared on thoughtco.com and was written by Regina Bailey

The Big Brain Benefits of Meditation

Science proves meditating restructures your brain and trains it to concentrate, feel greater compassion, cope with stress, and more.

Yoga citta vritti nirodhah.

Yoga is the ending of disturbances of the mind.

—Yoga Sutra I.2

Nothing is quite as satisfying as a yoga practice that's filled with movement. Whether you prefer an intense and sweaty vinyasa practice, a gentle but deliberate Viniyoga practice, or something in between, all systems of hatha yoga provide a contented afterglow for the same reason: You sync your movement with your breath. When you do, your mind stops its obsessive churning and begins to slow down. Your attention turns from your endless to-do list toward the rhythm of your breath, and you feel more peaceful than you did before you began your practice.

For many of us, accessing that same settled, contented state is more difficult to do in meditation. It's not easy to watch the mind reveal its worries, its self-criticism, or its old memories. Meditation requires patience and—even more challenging for most Westerners—time. So, why would you put yourself through the struggle?

Quite simply, meditation can profoundly alter your experience of life. Thousands of years ago the sage Patanjali, who compiled the Yoga Sutra, and the Buddha both promised that meditation could eliminate the suffering caused by an untamed mind. They taught their students to cultivate focused attention, compassion, and joy. And they believed that it was possible to change one's mental powers and emotional patterns by regularly experiencing meditative states. Those are hefty promises.

But these days, you don't have to take their word for it. Western scientists are testing the wisdom of the masters, using new technology that allows researchers to study how meditation influences the brain.

The current findings are exciting enough to encourage even the most resistant yogis to sit down on the cushion: They suggest that meditation—even in small doses—can profoundly influence your experience of the world by remodeling the physical structure of your brain. Read on to find out how, and then put each finding into practice with meditations by yoga teachers Christopher Tompkins, Frank Jude Boccio, and Kate Vogt.

How Meditation Trains Your Brain

Using a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, Eileen Luders, a re-searcher in the Department of Neurology at the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine, looks for evidence that meditation changes the physical structure of the brain. Until recently, this idea would have seemed absurd. "Scientists used to believe that the brain reaches its peak in adulthood and doesn't change—until it starts to decrease in late adulthood," Luders says. "Today we know that everything we do, and every experience we have, actually changes the brain."

Indeed, Luders finds several differences between the brains of meditators and nonmeditators. In a study published in the journal NeuroImage in 2009, Luders and her colleagues compared the brains of 22 meditators and 22 age-matched nonmeditators and found that the meditators (who practiced a wide range of traditions and had between 5 and 46 years of meditation experience) had more gray matter in regions of the brain that are important for attention, emotion regulation, and mental flexibility. Increased gray matter typically makes an area of the brain more efficient or powerful at processing information. Luders believes that the increased gray matter in the meditators' brains should make them better at controlling their attention, managing their emotions, and making mindful choices.

Why are there differences between the brains of meditators and nonmeditators? It's a simple matter of training. Neuroscientists now know that the brain you have today is, in part, a reflection of the demands you have placed on it. People learning to juggle, for example, develop more connections in areas of the brain that anticipate moving objects. Medical students undergoing periods of intense learning show similar changes in the hippocampus, an area of the brain important for memory. And mathematicians have more gray matter in regions important for arithmetic and spatial reasoning.

More and more neuroscientists, like Luders, have started to think that learning to meditate is no different from learning mental skills such as music or math. Like anything else that requires practice, meditation is a training program for the brain. "Regular use may strengthen the connections between neurons and can also make new connections," Luders explains. "These tiny changes, in thousands of connections, can lead to visible changes in the structure of the brain."

Those structural changes, in turn, create a brain that is better at doing whatever you've asked it to do. Musicians' brains could get better at analyzing and creating music. Mathematicians' brains may get better at solving problems. What do meditators' brains get better at doing? This is where it gets interesting: It depends on what kind of meditation they do.

Over the past decade, researchers have found that if you practice focusing attention on your breath or a mantra, the brain will restructure itself to make concentration easier. If you practice calm acceptance during meditation, you will develop a brain that is more resilient to stress. And if you meditate while cultivating feelings of love and compassion, your brain will develop in such a way that you spontaneously feel more connected to others.

Improve Your Attention

New research shows that meditation can help you improve your ability to concentrate in two ways. First, it can make you better at focusing on something specific while ignoring distractions. Second, it can make you more capable of noticing what is happening around you, giving you a fuller perspective on the present moment.

Some of the most fascinating research on how meditation affects attention is being conducted by Antoine Lutz, PhD, an associate scientist at the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in collaboration with Richard Davidson and the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Their work has shown that concentration meditation, in which the meditator focuses complete attention on one thing, such as counting the breath or gazing at an object, activates regions of the brain that are critical for controlling attention. This is true even among novice meditators who receive only brief training. Experienced meditators show even stronger activation in these regions. This you would expect, if meditation trains the brain to pay attention. But extremely experienced meditators (who have more than 44,000 hours of meditation practice) show less activation in these regions, even though their performance on attention tasks is better. The explanation for this, in Lutz's view, is that the meditation training can eventually help reduce the effort it takes to focus your attention. "This would be consistent with traditional accounts of progress in meditation practice. Sustaining focus becomes effortless," Lutz says. This suggests that people can immediately enhance concentration by learning a simple meditation technique, and that practice creates even more progress.

The researchers also looked at whether vipassana meditation training can improve overall attention. (Vipassana means "to see things as they really are," and the meditation techniques are designed to increase focus, awareness, and insight.) Researchers label our inability to notice things in our environment as "attentional blink." Most of us experience this throughout the day, when we become so caught up in our own thoughts that we miss what a friend says to us and have to ask her to repeat it. A more dramatic example would be a car accident caused by your thinking about a conversation you just had and not noticing that the car in front of you has stopped. If you were able to reduce your attentional blink, it would mean a more accurate and complete perception of reality—you would notice more and miss less.

To test whether meditation reduces attentional blink, participants had to notice two things occurring in rapid succession, less than a second apart. The findings, published in PLoS Biology, reveal that the meditation training improved the participants' ability to notice both changes, with no loss in accuracy.

What explained this improvement? EEG recordings—which track patterns of electrical activity in the brain, showing precise moment-by-moment fluctuations in brain activation—showed that the participants allocated fewer brain resources to the task of noticing each target. In fact, the meditators spent less mental energy noticing the first target, which freed up mental bandwidth for noticing what came next. Paying attention literally became easier for the brain.

As a result, Lutz and his colleagues believe that meditation may increase our control over our limited brain resources. To anyone who knows what it's like to feel scattered or overwhelmed, this is an appealing benefit indeed. Even though your attention is a limited resource, you can learn to do more with the mental energy you already have.

Reduce Your Stress

Dhyana heyah tad vrttayah.

Meditation removes disturbances of the mind. —Yoga Sutra II.11

Research also shows that meditation can help people with anxiety disorders. Philippe Goldin, director of the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience project in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, uses mindfulness meditation in his studies. The general practice is to become aware of the present moment—by paying attention to sounds, your breath, sensations in your body, or thoughts or feelings—and to observe without judgment and without trying to change what you notice.

Like most of us, the participants in Goldin's studies suffer from all sorts of disturbances of the mind—worries, self-doubt, stress, and even panic. But people with anxiety disorders feel unable to escape from such thoughts and emotions, and find their lives overtaken by them. Goldin's research shows that mindfulness meditation offers freedom for people with anxiety, in part by changing the way the brain responds to negative thoughts.

In his studies, participants take an eight-week mindfulness-based course in stress reduction. They meet once weekly for a class and practice on their own for up to an hour a day. The training includes mindfulness meditation, walking meditation, gentle yoga, and relaxation with body awareness as well as discussions about mindfulness in everyday life.

Before and after the intervention, participants have their brains scanned inside an fMRI (or functional MRI) machine, which looks at brain activity rather than the structure of the brain, while completing what Goldin calls "self-referential processing"—that is, thinking about themselves. An fMRI scanner tracks which brain areas consume more energy during meditation and, therefore, which regions are more active.

Ironically, the brain-scanning sessions could provoke anxiety even in the calmest of people. Participants must lie immobilized on their back with their head held in the brain scanner. They rest their teeth on dental wax to prevent any head movement or talking. They are then asked to reflect on different statements about themselves that appear on a screen in front of their face. Some of the statements are positive, but many of them are not, such as "I'm not OK the way I am," or "Something's wrong with me." These are exactly the kinds of thoughts that plague people with anxiety.

The brain scans in Goldin's studies show a surprising pattern. After the mindfulness intervention, participants have greater activity in a brain network associated with processing information when they reflect on negative self-statements. In other words, they pay more attention to the negative statements than they did before the intervention. And yet, they also show decreased activation in the amygdala—a region associated with stress and anxiety. Most important, the participants suffered less. "They reported less anxiety and worrying," Goldin says. "They put themselves down less, and their self-esteem improved."

Goldin's interpretation of the findings is that mindfulness meditation teaches people with anxiety how to handle distressing thoughts and emotions without being overpowered by them. Most people either push away unpleasant thoughts or obsess over them—both of which give anxiety more power. "The goal of meditation is not to get rid of thoughts or emotions. The goal is to become more aware of your thoughts and emotions and learn how to move through them without getting stuck." The brain scans suggest that the anxiety sufferers were learning to witness negative thoughts without going into a full-blown anxiety response.

Research from other laboratories is confirming that mindfulness meditation can lead to lasting positive changes in the brain. For example, a recent study by Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University put 26 highly stressed adults through an eight-week mindfulness-based course in stress reduction that followed the same basic format as Goldin's study. Brain scans were taken before and after the intervention, along with participants' own reports of stress. The participants who reported decreased stress also showed decreases in gray -matter density in the amygdala. Previous research had revealed that trauma and chronic stress can enlarge the amygdala and make it more reactive and more connected to other areas of the brain, leading to greater stress and anxiety. This study is one of the first documented cases showing change occurring in the opposite direction—with the brain instead becoming less reactive and more resilient.

Together, these studies provide exciting evidence that small doses of mental training, such as an eight-week mindfulness course, can create important changes in one's mental well-being.

Feel More Compassionate

Maitryadisu balani

The cultivation of friendliness creates inner strength.—Yoga Sutra III.24

We typically think of our emotional range as something that is fixed and unchanging—a reflection of the personality we're born with. But research is revealing the possibility that we may be able to cultivate and increase our ability to feel the emotional state of compassion. Researchers have found that feeling connected to others is as learnable as any other skill. "We are trying to provide evidence that meditation can cultivate compassion, and that you can see the change in both the person's behavior and the function of the brain," Lutz says.

So what does compassion look like in the brain? To find out, Lutz and his colleagues compared two groups of meditators—one group whose members were experienced in compassion meditation, and the other a group whose members were not—and gave them the same instructions: to generate a state of love and compassion by thinking about someone they care about, extend those feelings to others, and finally, to feel love and compassion without any specific object. As each of the participants meditated inside the fMRI brain scanners, they were occasionally interrupted by spontaneous and unexpected human sounds—such as a baby cooing or a woman screaming—that might elicit feelings of care or concern.

All of the meditators showed emotional responses to the sounds. But the more experienced compassion meditators showed a larger brain response in areas important for processing physical sensations and for emotional responding, particularly to sounds of distress. The researchers also observed an increase in heart rate that corresponded to the brain changes. These findings suggest that the meditators were having a genuine empathic response and that the experienced meditators felt greater compassion. In other words, compassion meditation appears to make the brain more naturally open to a connection with others.

These meditation techniques may have benefits beyond the experience of spontaneous compassion. A study by psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and the University of Michigan, found that a seven-week lovingkindness meditation course also increased the participants' daily experience of joy, gratitude, and hope. The more participants meditated, the better they felt. Participants also reported a greater sense of self-acceptance, social support, purpose in life, and life satisfaction, while experiencing fewer symptoms of illness and depression. This study provides strong evidence that chipping away at the illusion of separation can open us up to a far more meaningful connection to life.

Commit to Change

As the evidence for the benefits of meditation grows, one of the most important outstanding questions is, How much is enough? Or, from the perspective of most beginning meditators, How little is enough to see positive change?

Researchers agree that many of the benefits happen early on. "Changes in the brain take place at the very beginning of learning," Luders says. And many studies show change in a matter of weeks, or even minutes, among inexperienced meditators. But other studies suggest that experience matters. More practice leads to greater changes, both in the brain and in a meditator's mental states. So while a minimal investment in meditation can pay off for your well-being and mental clarity, committing to the practice is the best way to experience the full benefits.

Luders, who was a lapsed meditator when she started her research, had such a positive experience being around seasoned meditators that she was motivated to come back to the practice. "It's never too late," Luders says. She suggests starting small and making meditation a regular habit. "The norm in our study was daily sessions, 10 to 90 minutes. Start with 10."

If you do, you may discover that meditation has benefits beyond what science has revealed. Indeed, it will take time for science to catch up to the wisdom of the great meditation teachers. And even with the advances in brain technology, there are changes both subtle and profound transmitted only through direct experience. Fortunately, all you need to get started is the willingness to sit and be with your own body, breath, and mind.

Also see5 Solutions to Common Meditation Excuses

Put It Into Practice

Lovingkindness Meditation by Kate Vogt

Sit comfortably in a place where you won't be disturbed. Take three to five quiet breaths. Gently close your eyes.

Imagine the horizon spanning through your chest with a radiant sun rising in your innermost center—your heart. As though being melted by the solar warmth, release tension in your shoulders and across your throat. Soften your forehead and rest your attention inward on the light deep within. Take 7 to 10 smooth, even breaths.

As you inhale, invite the glow from your heart to expand toward the inner surface of the body. With each exhale, let the light recede. Take another 7 to 10 peaceful breaths. Inhaling, invite the light to touch the parts of you that interact with the world—your eyes and ears, the voice center in your throat, the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet. Exhaling, feel your light shine more clearly. As you continue to inhale and exhale, silently say: "I radiate friendliness for those who are happy, compassion for those who are unhappy, equanimity toward all." Continue until your attention wavers. Then, sit quietly for several minutes.

When you feel complete, place your palms together in front of your heart and bow your head. Release the backs of your hands to your thighs and lift your head. Gently open your eyes to return to the horizon of the world.

Also seeFind Your Meditation Style

Mindfulness Meditation by Frank Jude Boccio

Mindfulness requires concentration, but rather than concentrate on any one object, we concentrate on the moment and whatever is present in that moment.

To begin, take a comfortable seat. Bring attention to your breath by placing your awareness at your belly and feeling it rise and fall. This will help you tune in to the sensorial presence of the body. Once you feel settled, widen your awareness to include all the sensations in your body as well as any thoughts or feelings.

Imagine yourself as a mountain. Some thoughts and feelings will be stormy, with thunder, lightning, and strong winds. Some will be like fog or dark, ominous clouds. Inhaling, note "mountain." Exhaling, note "stable." Use the breath to focus on the present moment; cultivate the ability to weather the storm. If you find yourself swept up in a thought or emotion, notice it and simply return to the breath. The key is to pay attention to the ever-changing process of thinking rather than to the contents of your thoughts. As you begin to see that they are indeed just thoughts, they will begin to lose their power. You will no longer believe everything you think! Continue to watch and become mindful of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations for 5 to 20 minutes.

Also see The Mindfulness Meditation Guide
 

This article originally appeared on yogajournal.com and was written by Kelly McGonigal.
 

Basic Self-Massage Tips for Myofascial Trigger Points

Learn how to massage your own trigger points (muscle knots)

Massaging yourself might seem as useless as trying to tickle yourself. But if there is a good reason for rubbing your own muscles, it’s probably muscle “knots” or trigger points: small patches of clenched muscle fibres that are sensitive and cause aching and stiffness. They may be a major factor in many common pain problems like low back pain and neck pain. Most minor trigger points are probably self-treatable.

You can often get more relief from this kind of discomfort with self-massage than you can get from a massage therapist. Professional help can be nice — and sometimes essential — but it can also be cost-effective to learn to save yourself from trigger points. It is a safe, cheap, and reasonable approach to self-help for many common pain problems.1

It’s also a controversial one: there is plenty of scientific uncertainty about trigger points. It’s undeniable that mammals suffer from sensitive spots in our soft tissues … but their nature remains unclear, and the popular idea that they are a kind of mini-spasm could be wrong.2

This article just introduces the basic principles of treating trigger points with self-massage. If you’d like to dive deeper into the subject, see my huge trigger points & myofascial pain tutorial.

Why are minor trigger points so easy to deal with?

A lot of trigger point pain can be relieved with a surprisingly small amount of simple self-massage with your own thumbs or cheap tools like a tennis ball. Although trigger points can be amazingly nasty, most are fairly easy to find and get rid of with a just little rubbing.

Dr. Janet Travell3 wrote that “almost any intervention” can relieve a trigger point, and self-massage is usually the simplest, cheapest, safest, and most effective. Which sounds to good to be true, so we should probably be suspicious of it. How can such a trivial treatment work?

The pain may be more of a sensory phantom than something wrong with the tissue.4 It may be relatively easy to change with massage because there’s not much to “fix” — just a sensation to change.

A little self-massage is often the most effective treatment for minor muscle knots. But how can such a trivial treatment work?

Or maybe the rubbing actually helps muscle tissue directly in some way, like stirring a sauce until it’s free of lumps. Maybe massage works because it’s literally pushing and flushing waste metabolites out of a trigger point5 — which, in theory, interrupts a vicious cycle and prevents the trigger point from coming back. But, so far, no one has actually been able to demonstrate how a muscle “knot” can be untied by massage.

Isolated trigger points are probably much easier to manage — neurologically simpler.6 If the problem is limited to one body part, there’s a better chance of dealing with it.

Basic self-massage instructions for trigger points

Just a few moments of gentle rubbing can be enough for an easy case.7 For moderate cases, several larger doses — a minute or two — of rubbing over a couple days will usually do the trick. The toughest self-treatable cases might need an investment of about a half dozen 5–minute treatments per day for a week. But none of this is science-based, and treatment can definitely fail.8

Here are a bunch more basic tips …

Rub with what? Rub the trigger point with your fingertips, thumbs, fist, elbow … whatever feels easiest and most comfortable to you. Simple tools are handy for spots that are harder to reach — various balls and other handy objects. Tennis ball massage is surprisingly good stuff! You can use a foam roller, of course, but the contact area is just too wide for many jobs.

A tool like Pressure Positive’s Backnobber can be great. But for quick and easy self-massage, there’s usually something around the house that works pretty well — like a tennis ball!

Rub in what way? For simplicity, either simply press on the trigger point directly and hold for a while (10–100 seconds), or apply small kneading strokes, either circular or back and forth, and don’t worry about the direction of the muscle fibres. Really, anything goes. But, if you happen to know the direction of the muscle fibres — sometimes it’s obvious — then stroke parallel to the fibres as though you are trying to elongate them, because that might be more effective.

Rub how hard? This matters more! Because massage is mostly about having a conversation with your nervous system, you want it to have the right tone: Friendly and helpful! Not shouty and rude. The intensity of the treatment should be Goldilocks just-right: strong enough to satisfy, but easy to live with. On a scale of 10 — where 1 is painless and 10 is intolerable — please aim for the 4–7 range, and err on the side of gentle at first. Beginners are often much too aggressive. (And the pros too!)

What should it feel like? Pressure on a muscle knot should generally be clear and strong and satisfying; it should have a relieving, welcome quality. This is “good pain.” Massage is a conversation with your nervous system. So you want it to have the right tone. Friendly and helpful! Not shouty and rude.If you are wincing or gritting your teeth, you probably need to be more gentle. You need to be able to relax. See the next section for more information about how trigger point massage should feel.

What if it backfires? It probably won’t, especially if the pressure is reasonable. But if you experience any negative reaction in the hours after treatment, just ease up. In basic therapy, you can count on tissue adapting to stronger pressures over the course of a few days of regular treatment. If they don’t, either the problem isn’t really trigger points, or they are (much) worse trigger points than you thought.

Rub where? For basic self-treatment, you can trust your instincts: rub where it hurts! Do explore for sensitive spots, but you can limit your exploration to a fairly small area of muscle tissue around the “epicentre” of your symptoms. So, for instance, if the top of your shoulder aches, search for trigger points mainly in the top of your shoulder. (You will notnecessarily be able to feel a bump or “knot” in your muscle, so don’t worry too much about that.)

What if the trigger point is not where the pain is? Trigger points may generate symptoms that aren’t where the trigger point is. What’s a beginner to do? Don’t worry about it too much — this is basic trigger point treatment. Bear in mind the possibility of confusing referred pain, but don’t worry about it unless basic therapy is failing.

Rub how much? Massage each suspected trigger point for about 30 seconds, give or take depending on how helpful it feels. This is actually enough for many trigger points — especially if you think that you have several that all need attention! Five minutes is roughly the maximum that any trigger point will need at one time, but there is not really any limit — if rubbing the trigger point continues to feel good, feel free to keep going.

Rub how often? As long as you aren’t experiencing any negative reactions, you should massage any trigger point that seems to need it at least twice per day, and as much as a half dozen times per day. More is probably too tedious and involves too great a risk of just pissing it off.

How do you know it’s working? Getting a trigger point to “release”

The goal of self-massage for trigger points is to achieve a “release.” What is trigger point “release” and what does it feel like? How do you measure success? It mostly refers to an easing of sensitivity of the trigger point, and/or a softening of the tissue texture — the melting of the knot.

But release is a vague term with no specific scientific definition. It’s a label for the unknown, for whatever is going on when the trigger point seems to goes away. Maybe it refers to the literal relaxation (or even the violent disruption!) of the tightly clenched muscle fibres. Or maybe it’s “just” a sensory adaptation, which might be a kind of healing (it just stops hurting), or trivial and temporary (like scratching a mosquito bite).

A release may not be obvious. In fact, things could even feel worse before they feel better: tissue might remain “polluted” with waste metabolites even after a successful release. Release might even require some damage to the tissue of the muscle knots — that is one theory. If so, the area would probably still be quite sensitive even if you’ve succeeded.

In my experience — both treating and being treated — it’s a weird mixture of these possibilities: initially there’s a satisfying but profound sense of scratching an itch, but the tissue is actually more sensitive afterwards, not less.

For beginners, don’t worry about the details: just stimulate the trigger point, and trust that you probably achieved a release, or a partial release, and then wait for the trigger point to calm down. If you were successful, you will notice a reduction in symptoms within several hours, often the next morning.

If you were successful, you will notice a reduction in symptoms within several hours, often the next morning.

Good pain? With easy trigger points, successful release is typically associated with “good pain” — that clear, strong, and satisfying sensation that is somehow both painful and relieving. It is positive in the same sense that barfing is positive: it’s not pleasant, and yet your body “knows” that it needs and wants that much pressure. Usually, if you feel “good pain,” a trigger point release is more likely.

On the other hand, if you are wincing or gritting your teeth, you probably need to be more gentle. Comfort is an important component of successful treatment for most people! If you can’t massage the trigger point without wincing, you’re being too brutal on yourself, especially in the early stages. Sometimes a trigger point will feel nasty and hot and burning and still release anyway. But often such a rotten trigger point will need more persistent or advanced treatment. The “pressure question” — how much is too much? — is surprisingly complicated.

This is the tip of the trigger point iceberg

There are many reasons why basic self-massage might fail. The skeptics could be right: maybe there’s really nothing there but an abnormal sensation, nothing in the flesh to fix. Or it could fail for quite technical reasons — due to the neurological phenomenon of “referred pain,” the trigger point may not actually be located in the same place as the pain. This sends people on wild goose chases, rubbing the wrong things, and the only solution is education and experimentation.

this article originally appeared on painscience.com and was written by  Paul Ingraham.

Here's What Just 3 Weeks Of Acupuncture Did For My Digestion, Sleep & Energy Levels

Acupuncture always seemed like a voodoo-type practice to me, so I never considered it an option. However, I recently experienced about two months of consistent bloating to the point that I looked three months pregnant in a swimsuit. I tweaked my diet, cut out coffee, started meditating more, but still the bloating remained. So, I decided to finally give acupuncture a try. What could happen? After all, I have been battling ulcerative colitis for nine years now and have become open to just about anything that will alleviate my symptoms.

I saw an acupuncturist twice a week for one month. He applied traditional acupuncture techniques while incorporating craniosacral work. Here's what happened:

Week 1:

After my first week of treatment, my bloating decreased significantly to where I no longer felt discomfort. Unexpectedly, I also noticed fewer chronic fatigue symptoms. I often get body aches but those were gone and I felt like I had quite a bit more energy.

Week 2:

I told the acupuncturist that I was having a hard time sleeping so he adjusted his needle points accordingly and began performing craniosacral work on my head and neck. Without realizing it, I fell asleep on the table almost immediately and had the most restful sleep I'd had in a while. Even more, I've been able to sleep well and wake up feeling rested ever since this treatment.

In addition, I usually know when my period is about to start by the severe back pain and discomfort in the day and hours leading up to it. The first day of my period is always the worst—and I mean the absolute worst. Painful cramps normally plague me on the first and second day. This time around? I had NONE—I couldn't believe it. The second day showed very slight discomfort but was the easiest period I’ve had in a long time. To me, this meant that the acupuncture was lowering my inflammation levels and helping ease my hormonal changes throughout the month.

Week 3:

I didn’t fall asleep this time, but that is likely because I was already getting great sleep at night and was feeling very alert. I mentioned to the acupuncturist that I was having exams in grad school and that I was stressed about them. Again, he adjusted the location of the needles and let me rest on the table, listening to Bob Marley. Maybe it was the needles, maybe it was Bob—or probably a combination of the two—but I felt like I had just had a massage as I walked out of the office. I also started feeling more alert and energized during the day, without the help of coffee, and was able to focus in classes better than before.

The take-home message? Acupuncture is the bee’s knees! I am officially a skeptic turned believer in just three short weeks. Will the effects keep on lasting? It's hard to say, but so far so good. My health condition is not an easy one to manage, so knowing that this is a viable option for me to help keep my symptoms at bay is absolutely priceless.

This article originally appeared on MindBodyGreen & was written by Holly Campbell.