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Meditation helps you relax. Regular meditation can help you through stressful moments because it basically trains and transforms your mind to think more peacefully.
The mind is very powerful. It can go any way you want it to go. For the sake of good health, it’s crucial you train your mind to be at peace.
Learning how to meditate can help you overcome the stress that comes with all the uncertainties and chaos of life. You can never avoid them but you can certainly learn how to live with them if you take a couple of minutes a day to meditate.
Yes, anybody can meditate. You don’t have to belong to a certain group to enjoy the benefits of meditation. You can do it on your own and you can start anytime.
The coolest thing about meditation is that it’s free. All you need is a quiet corner and you can get started right away.
So why should you even meditate? Well, the answer is simple. It’s good for your brain. If it’s good for your brain, then it’s good for you. Here are the 7 interesting ways your brain stays healthy with meditation.
7. Meditation Can Help with Addiction
A growing number of studies has shown that, given its effects on the self-control regions of the brain, meditation can be very effective in helping people recover from various types of addiction. One study, for example, pitted mindfulness training against the American Lung Association’s freedom from smoking (FFS) program, and found that people who learned mindfulness were many times more likely to have quit smoking by the end of the training, and at 17 weeks follow-up, than those in the conventional treatment.
6. Meditation Reduces Anxiety — and Social Anxiety
There’s a whole newer sub-genre of meditation, mentioned earlier, called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts’ Center for Mindfulness (now available all over the country), that aims to reduce a person’s stress level, physically and mentally. Studies have shown its benefits in reducing anxiety, even years after the initial 8-week course.
5. Just a Few Days of Training Improves Concentration and Attention
One recent study found that just a couple of weeks of meditation training helped people’s focus and memory during the verbal reasoning section of the GRE. In fact, the increase in score was equivalent to 16 percentile points, which is nothing to sneeze at.
4. Meditation May Lead to Volume Changes in Key Areas of the Brain
In 2011, Sara Lazar and her team at Harvard found that mindfulness meditation can actually change the structure of the brain: Eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was found to increase cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory, and in certain areas of the brain that play roles in emotion regulation and self-referential processing.
3. Its Effects Rival Antidepressants for Depression, Anxiety
A review study last year at Johns Hopkins looked at the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and pain. Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which makes the effect of meditation sound pretty good. Meditation is, after all an active form of brain training.
2. Meditation Reduces Activity in the Brain’s “Me Center”
One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried out at Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts – a.k.a., “monkey mind.” The DMN is “on” or active when we’re not thinking about anything in particular, when our minds are just wandering from thought to thought.
1. Meditation Helps Preserve the Aging Brain
A study from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. Participants who’d been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain — although older meditators still had some volume loss compared to younger meditators, it wasn’t as pronounced as the non-meditators.
It really doesn’t take much for you to meditate but the benefits are awesome. So why not give it a try?
It’s very interesting how the brain benefits from meditation. You can learn more about it here. This article is worth reading as it scientifically backs up all the 7 benefits of meditation.