Benefits of meditation.
Meditation has been the focus of thousands of studies
over the past 50 years. Today we're going
to take a look at the top six benefits
adopting a meditation habit can have for you.
The first benefit is that it
physically changes your brain. A study
conducted in 2011 at Harvard, led by a
dr. Sarah Lazar, found that meditating
for just eight weeks increases your
brain size in three crucial areas.
The left hippocampus, which is responsible
for your ability to learn as well as
your ability to retain information, the
posterior cingulate, which is involved in
your ability to control where your mind
wanders, and the temporal parental junction,
which is responsible for empathy and
compassion. Meditation doesn't only grow
the good parts of your brain. The same
study found that after eight weeks of
meditation, there were also decreases in
cell volume in the amygdala, which is the
area of your brain that is responsible
for fear, anxiety and stress. The second
benefit of meditation is that it reduces
bad feelings. To further expand on the
last point made they have been numerous
studies that looks only at the effects
of meditation on emotions such as stress
depression and anxiety. Now stress isn't
inherently bad for you in fact the
little stress is actually healthy for
you.
However there are many people who
stressed too much and this can cause
serious health problems.
A study in 2004 found that meditation
can help you better manage as well as
dramatically decreased the negative side
effects of stress.
A recent study published on JAMA
internal medicine by Professor Willem Kuyken
worked with people who suffer from
depression. Kuyken found mindfulness
meditation helped people quote just as
much as commonly prescribed
antidepressant drugs and quote people
undergoing to study had a thirty-one
percent less of a chance of relapsing.
A similar study in 2014 managed by a dr.
Elizabeth Hoge worked with people
diagnosed with general anxiety disorder.
She found that meditating for just eight
weeks dramatically reduce the anxiety
symptoms. And if all these studies still
aren't enough to convince you that
meditation reduces bad feelings,
researchers of John Hopkins published a
paper on JAMA internal medicine in which
they reviewed over 19,000 meditation
studies. And they came to the conclusion
that meditation helps ease depression
and anxiety.
The third benefit of meditation
is that it helps you overcome bad habits.
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is
the part of your brain that is
responsible for willpower. A study
conducted in 2015 found that meditation
stimulates growth in this part of your
brain. A study in 2014 conducted by a dr.
Sarah Bowen separated a large group of
alcoholics into two smaller groups. One
group was taught mindfulness meditation
while the other followed your typical
12-step program. They found that only
eight percent of participants in the
mindfulness meditation program reported
relapsing a year later. As compared to
twenty percent of participants in the
12-step program reported relapsing a year later.
The fourth benefit of
meditation is that it increases your
ability to concentrate and focus.
A study in 2010 conducted by a dr. Catherine
MacLean of the university of California
Davis had subjects perform extremely
boring tasks such as looking for small
differences in lines. She found that the
group who underwent meditation during
the course of the study performed
significantly better. Suggesting that
meditation increases your ability to
concentrate. Another study conducted at
the University of Washington by a
professor dr. Levy found that meditation
increase the length of which workers
were able to concentrate on a single task.
The fifth benefit of meditation is
that it is extremely healthy. A study
conducted on older adults at the
university of california los angeles
found that meditation decreased amount
of c-reactive protein in the blood, which
directly correlates with the development
of heart disease. This same study found a
drop in inflammation in the body.
Another study conducted at the Benson
Henry Institute for mind-body medicine
in Boston looked at a group of
hypertension patients. They discovered
with just three months of meditation
practice, the patients were able to
drastically decrease their blood
pressure. The most mind-blowing of all
was a study conducted in 2010 by Nobel
prize winner, Elizabeth Blackburn.
She found that
meditation had the effect on your body
and a genetic level. They found that
meditation could protect the length of
your telomeres. For those of you who
don't know what telomeres are, short
telomeres are a marker for accelerated
aging. This is evidence that meditation
may slow down the process of aging.
And finally but definitely not least, the sixth
benefit of meditation is
that makes you happier. In a famous study
conducted in 2004 by a dr. Richard
Davidson, he placed electrodes on the
heads of monks, who are practitioners of
meditation for years. He discovered that
the monks had 30 times the normal amount
of gamma waves, which are associated with
intelligence, compassion, self-control and
feelings of happiness in the brain.
Another study published in 2008 in the
journal of personality and social
psychology by Professor Barbara
Fredrickson, stated that the results show
that a meditation practice produce
positive emotions that increased over
time as you practiced it on a daily
basis. So it's no surprise why some of
the top performers of the world today
like CEOs, sports teams and entrepreneurs
are all jumping on the meditation
bandwagon.
There's just so many positive benefits.
In our next video we're going to talk
about exactly how to meditate, so you can
reap all of these benefits. So if you
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