Meditation is not only a powerful means of relaxing, it is also useful for addressing anxiety, managing pain, preventing disease and relieving stress.
There is growing evidence demonstrating your mind and body are intricately connected, and wide acceptance that whatever is going on in your mind has some bearing on your physical health. Brain imaging has shown meditation alters your brain in beneficial ways, and scientists have identified thousands of genes that appear to be directly influenced by your subjective mental state.
The mind-body connection is real, and what you think does affect your health.
In fact, research suggests a persistent negative state of mind is a risk factor for heart disease.
Conversely, happiness, optimism, life satisfaction and other positive psychological states are associated with a lower risk of heart disease.
The study authors said: “[The] findings suggest that positive psychological well-being protects consistently against cardiovascular disease, independently of traditional risk factors and ill-being. Specifically, optimism is most robustly associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular events.”
While some people appear to be born with a sunnier disposition than others, meditation has been shown to boost optimism and help regulate mood. Meditative practices have also been shown to help optimise your LDL cholesterol and lower your blood pressure, cortisol and heart rate.
Such findings are consistent with a down-regulation of your hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympathetic nervous system, both of which are over-activated by stress. Stress is also a well-known risk factor for heart disease, making meditation all the more important. In addition to promoting heart health, meditation:
- Boosts emotional health and well-being
- Encourages self-awareness
- Helps fight addictions
- Improves sleep
- Increases feelings of compassion and kindness
- Lengthens attention span
- Lessens anxiety and depression
- Manages pain
- Promotes concentration and memory
- Reduces stress
Your Brain Benefits From Meditation
Meditation can be considered a form of ‘mental exercise’ for your brain. The goal is to continually draw your attention to your breath to the exclusion of everything else. Whenever your mind wanders, you seek to gently bring it back to your breath.
According to Forbes.com, meditation helps us connect with and leverage our minds:
“Through meditation, we get better acquainted with the behaviour of our minds, and we enhance our ability to regulate our experience of our environment, rather than letting our environment dictate how we experience life. With recent neuro-scientific findings, meditation as a practice has been shown to literally rewire brain circuits that boost both mind and body health. These benefits of meditation have surfaced alongside the revelation that the brain can be deeply transformed through experience — a quality known as neuroplasticity.”
Indeed, neuroplasticity allows the nerve cells in your brain to adjust to new situations and changes in their environment. The short-term effects of meditation include enhancing attention, inhibiting inflammation, lowering blood pressure and reducing stress.
Long-term meditation benefits, reaped over time with consistent practice, include enhanced empathy and kindness, greater emotional resilience and increased grey matter in brain regions related to memory and emotional processing.
As noted in one of the largest studies to-date on meditation and the human brain, different types of meditation produce different changes to your brain.
Neuroscience researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences conducted a meditation program through which 300 participants were examined with respect to three different types of meditation, for three months each.
Brain scans performed after each three-month program showed more grey matter in regions of the brain involved in each type of meditation, as compared to scans from the control group. The focal point for each type of meditation and the brain changes elicited were as follows:
| Type of Meditation | Meditation Focused On | Brain Region Showing Increased Grey Matter |
| ATTENTION (MINDFULNESS) | Mindful attention to breath and body | Prefrontal cortex and parietal lobes, both of which are linked to attention control |
| COMPASSION | Emotional connections established through loving-kindness meditations and partner-based problem-sharing sessions | Limbic system, which processes emotions, and anterior insula, which assists in bringing emotions into conscious awareness |
| COGNITIVE SKILLS | Thinking about issues from different perspectives through both partner activities and individual meditation | Regions involved in theory of mind, which helps attribute thoughts, desires and intentions to others as a means of predicting or explaining their actions |
The study authors suggested additional research is needed to evaluate the effectiveness of meditation training for individuals suffering from social cognition deficits, such as those related to autism or psychopathy.
Other areas of potential future work include meditation-related training to increase co-operation and well-being in corporate settings and social intelligence in children.
About the current outcomes, the study authors stated:
“[O]ur findings of structural plasticity in healthy adults in faculties relevant to social intelligence and social interactions suggest that the type of mental training matters. Depending on whether participants’ daily [meditation] practice focused on cultivating socio-emotional capacities (compassion and pro-social motivation) or socio-cognitive skills (putting oneself into the shoes of another person), grey matter increased selectively in areas supporting these functions. Our findings suggest a potential biological basis for how mindfulness and different aspects of social intelligence could be nurtured.”
Reduce and Manage Stress With Meditation
Stress is one of the biggest challenges facing many adults. Given the extent of stress and its far-reaching effects, meditation is a simple technique you can practice anytime, anywhere to alleviate stress.
If you are not sure where to begin, gratitude can be a great focal point for lower stress.
Simply reflecting on things for which you can be thankful (versus what is irritating or lacking) can do wonders to energise your mood and ratchet down your stress levels.
One type of meditation easily applied to virtually any activity is called mindfulness, which involves paying attention to the moment you’re in right now.
Rather than letting your mind wander, you actively choose to live in the current moment, while letting distracting thoughts pass through your mind without getting caught up in them.
You can incorporate mindfulness into virtually any aspect of your day — eating, doing household chores, driving or working — simply by reining in your mind and paying attention to the sensations you are experiencing in the present moment.
In a 2017 study,1270 adults with generalised anxiety disorder who completed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) class fared better when facing stressful situations than those who were trained in stress-management techniques alone.
In the MBSR class, participants learned elements of mindfulness meditation, including paying attention to the present moment, as well as gentle yoga and body scan meditation. The MBSR group reported meditation helps reduce stress and most notably, their physical measures of stress were also lower, including the stress hormone ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone) and pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are markers of inflammation.
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