Mindfulness meditation training is premised on stabilizing attention, acknowledging sensory events as momentary and releasing them without an emotional reaction. This practice modifies the mind’s cognitive and affective evaluations of sensory events and allows one to reevaluate them.
A study was conducted to show the effectiveness of mindful meditation on the average person. Fifteen healthy people participated and none of them had prior meditation experience. The training was spread over four days with each session lasting 20 minutes.
They found that after each session, every participant’s anxiety dropped between 15-22%, suggesting that meditation activates higher functioning of the PFC and ACC. Thus, meditation is postulated to regulate emotions by stabilizing the attentional processes, allowing one to detach from affective appraisals and having the individual remain in the present moment.