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James Wade is a numbers kind of guy, a data-driven researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University.
But Wade, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry, is also a caring, compassionate clinician who promotes healing and healthy living.
One place the yin and the yang of his professional existence converge is loving-kindness meditation. The practice promotes kindness, compassion and unconditional love of self and of others. It can lead to increased happiness and declines in depression and social anxiety, according to researchers.
Studies have shown the practice can have a positive impact on health by increasing a sense of well-being and happiness. That includes a recent study led by Wade titled "Associations Between Religiosity, Spirituality, and Happiness Among Adults Living With Neurological Illness." It was reported in June in the journal Geriatrics and looks at how spirituality and happiness affect people dealing with neurological disease, conditions including brain injury, hypoxia (oxygen deficiency), and Alzheimer’s and metabolic diseases.
The study found that people who scored higher for personal spirituality (described as existential spirituality), a spiritual grounding in self, not in a religion, fared better in terms of happiness than those who scored higher on a religious spirituality scale. The researchers explain the difference between the two saying a person who is more existentially spiritual draws more from personal strength when coping with "lifestyle adversity," while someone who is more religiously spiritual draws from God, an "external superior force."
“We found that subjects with a strong existential spiritual belief system enjoyed greater happiness while confronting the lifestyle threat of neurological illness,” researchers wrote. That held true for the participants across a range of severity of their symptoms.
Loving-kindness meditation comes into play in that it may help foster that sense of existential spirituality. Religion and spirituality are described as determinants in longevity and play a role in healthy life expectancy.
Wade says that he sees it as a useful tool in a world with an increasing number of people age 60 and older who have to deal with an uptick in physical complaints and ailments, the loss of loved ones and friends as those people die, and their own impending mortality.
The research builds on some of his previous work.
A 2017 study by Wade and others of people with end-stage liver disease and their caregivers involved mindfulness-based stress reduction, which included the meditation practice, progressive relaxation, body scan and group therapy. The subjects were on a list for transplant, and their quality of life was “pitiful,” says Wade. The study showed that participants showed declines in stress levels and slept better.
James Wade (Photo courtesy VCU)
Wade’s interest in this line of research had its origins in a video on happiness he watched on a streaming service, and in his observations in an in-patient unit of how two people with the same disorder can be totally different in how they deal with their conditions, and how that can affect health.
He says he was surprised and impressed by what he saw on the video regarding the impact a sense of happiness can have on living your life. He was also struck by the difference that spirituality can make for people dealing with illness and suffering that he saw in his clinical work.
Research led by Wade in 2013 found that chronic pain sufferers who were widows and widowers were more resilient and reported less emotional suffering than others. That finding was reinforced with the results of a 2016 study by Wade of people with neurological illness, which found that study subjects who had lost a spouse had adapted and become more resilient; they found new ways to deal with stress and illness in comparison to people who still had their spouse or companion.
“What we found blew us away,” Wade says.
The researchers weren’t quite sure why their liver study patients improved, so that led to the current round of research, and also a personal bit of inquiry, too.
Wade began a regimen of meditation. “I thought I better know about it on a personal level,” he says.
He notes that too often we go through the motions of life, outside of the moment, ruminating on the “woulda, shoulda, coulda” issues, how we could have or should have acted or reacted to a situation. It’s the “knee-jerk response” in humans, and meditation helps to rewire the brain’s circuits into a new, default network so you can deal with and experience life differently.
It’s a line of research pioneered by John Kabat-Venn at the University of Massachusetts. You also can find information on the practice at schools including Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley.
Wade describes meditation as a proven tool that changes brain structure, as evidenced in the liver study.
“The message needs to be heard,” he says. “I think it’s a very valuable technique.”
