How a Mantra Can Help with Stress and Depression

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I know a woman who, in her younger days, frequently self-harmed. Within a few months, the skin on her left inner wrist and forearm went from beautifully unmarred to covered in cuts sewn together by a nurse with Frankenstein’s monster-style stitches. She knew that the thick black threads holding her broken skin together would eventually come out, but scars would mark her skin forever — a constant reminder of the worst days of her life. A year later, still in treatment but slowly getting better, she got a tattoo to cover them. In block letters down the length of her left inner arm, from elbow to wrist, she’d had a mantra tattooed: THIS TOO SHALL PASS.

She knew that there’d be moments when she’d feel like her world was collapsing, nothing would ever get better, and she’d feel tempted to self-harm. With her tattoo, when that urge to cut came again, she would see her mantra — words to remind her that it gets better. Her tattoo reminded her that time can heal emotional wounds. She only had to wait a little while for the intense wave of emotions to pass. I often think of her tattoo when considering the helpfulness of mantras.

Mantras have their origin in Hinduism and Buddhism. They are words meditators say to help with their concentration. In the Western world, people use mantras to help them get through the ups and downs of daily life. From my own observations, mantras seem to work for people dealing with stress and depression. But what does the science say?

In a 1973 study on meditation’s effect on brainwaves, “Spectral Analysis of the EEG in Meditation,” (1) JP Banquet found that test subjects’ brain waves changed as they practiced meditation with mantras. Specifically, their alpha rhythms — an electrical brain rhythm associated with wakeful relaxation — increased in amplitude. Banquet noted “the ability of the meditators to maintain alpha activity after the end of meditation with eyes open.” Meditation with mantra usage helped subjects stay relaxed even after their meditation session ended. “EEG records from meditators practicing this distinguish the meditative state from other states of consciousness,” Banquet concluded.

In “Repetitive speech elicits widespread deactivation in the human cortex: the ‘Mantra’ effect?” (2), Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, et al. discuss how well mantras work for subjects who frequently practice meditation and for those less experienced or unfamiliar with meditation and mantras. The study’s authors concluded that “In accord with its Sanskrit translation as ‘an instrument of thought,’ we show that one isolated component of this practice — the element of repetitive speech even in untrained subjects, causes widespread reductions in cortical activity.... To sum, our study suggests a possible underlying neurophysiological explanation that may account, at least partially, for the relaxing power of Mantra recitation and show that repetitive speech has a readily observable fMRI signature,” they write. For newcomers to mantras, their results are good news: “Repetitive speech, an easy cognitive task, is sufficient to induce a wide-spread unidirectional reduction in activation in the human cortex even outside the context and training of commonly practiced Mantra,” the study concluded.

I’m not suggesting you get your mantra tattooed on your body (your body, your choice), but if you’re feeling stressed out, anxious, or often find yourself in an un-centered, un-mindful state, you may want to try using a mantra. Find a quiet place where you can be alone for a few minutes, or slip on a pair of noise-canceling headphones or regular headphones hooked up to a white-noise-generating app on your phone. Close your eyes and repeat your mantra silently to yourself for a few minutes. You might have to try out a few different ones before you settle on a word or phrase that you find most helpful. A few suggestions beyond the classic aum (or om):

• I am love.
• I am enough.
• This too shall pass. (An adage traced back to ancient Persia)
• Feast on your life. (From “Love After Love” by Derek Walcott)
• Just keep going. No feeling is final. (From “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke)
• Today is the first day of the rest of my life, and I will take notice of the many positive things this day has to offer. (DBTSelfHelp.com)
• Wrap experience until knowledge is translucent. (From “Coherence in Consequence” by Claudia Rankine)
• I am large, I contain multitudes. (From “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman)
• So it goes. (Kurt Vonnegut)
• I ask myself about the present: how wide it is, how deep it is, how much is mine to keep. (Vonnegut)