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Meditation or mindfulness help us to relax and calm a racing mind. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) and allows us to redirect our focus away from stressful thoughts and instead, increasing awareness on our breathing. Consistent meditation can benefit us in so many ways including increasing gray matter in the hippocampus, insula and prefrontal cortex which improves attention, learning, working memory and emotional regulation. It has also shown to reduce stress, anxiety, depression and increase compassion and empathy. Finally, it can benefit our sleep, improve our immune system and a variety of other health conditions.
Mindfulness is one of the most popular kinds of meditation, and the easiest place to start if you intend to incorporate meditation into your daily routine. Psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman describes that “mindfulness means simply being present, without reaction, without judgement to what’s happening to your thoughts and to your feelings.” It’s very simple to begin practicing, all you have to do is begin bringing awareness to your breath and when your mind wanders, you just need to focus on bringing awareness back. According to Goleman, “every time you bring it back you strengthen the circuitry for managing concentration, for ignoring distraction.” The concept is simple, but making it a consistent practice requires commitment.
Increases Gray Matter in the Hippocampus & Insula
Participants in a mindfulness-based stress reduction training showed an increase in gray matter within the left hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for learning, memory processes and modulating emotions. During meditation, the insula has also been shown to be activated which is postulated to play a key role in the process of awareness.
Improves Attention, Learning & Working Memory
Due to increases in the gray matter of the hippocampus and activation of the insula, mindfulness-based stress reduction improves awareness in brain regions that are responsible for learning and memory process, emotion regulation, self-referential processing and perspective taking. Goleman describes that with consistent practice of mindfulness, we “learn better, working memory is stronger, the ability to pay attention to what you’re taking in, transfer it to long term memory and bring it back.” Attention, learning and working memory is especially beneficial for students. One study at the University of California distributed reading comprehension and working memory tests to students and after a program of mindfulness meditation, students who participated in mindfulness meditation scored an average of 16% higher on the graduate school entrance exam.
Many studies have shown that meditation improves attention for long-term meditators after practicing for months to years of intensive meditation training. However, recent studies have confirmed that even 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body-mind training method has shown a significant increase in attention.
Increases Gray Matter in Prefrontal Cortex
In addition to the hippocampus and insula, meditation also increases gray matter in the prefrontal cortex. By increasing the prefrontal cortex, meditation improves the regulation of our attention and our ability to think. After practicing insight meditation for only 8 weeks, magnetic resonance imaging showed that the cortical thickness of meditators was thicker in brain regions associated with attention, interoception and sensory processing. Interestingly, they found that prefrontal cortical thickness was larger in older participants which suggested meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning. Consistent meditation practice has also shown to reduce neural degeneration of the prefrontal cortex. Researchers concluded that due to the changes in the prefrontal cortex and insula, meditation may improve sensory, cognitive and emotional processing and may reduce age-related declines in the structure of the brain.
Improves Emotional Reaction
The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for managing the amygdala. Since meditation increases matter in the prefrontal cortex, it positively influences our emotional processing. Specifically, it positively affects emotional reaction because the amygdala is responsible for our fight, flight or freeze stress response. According to Goleman, consistent meditation reduces our impulsive emotional reaction because it calms down the reactive part of our brain, “meditation strengthens the circuitry from the prefrontal cortex that helps you handle the amygdala.”
He further describes what is commonly referred to as the amygdala hijack, what happens is “you have a strong negative emotion, it’s very sudden, and then you do something that later you regret, you say or do something.” Meditation reduces our susceptibility to the amygdala hijack because it improves our emotionally resiliency. Instead of negatively reacting and staying in a negative emotional state, we are able to redirect our emotional reaction because meditation “strengthens the brain circuitry that controls negative emotions so when you get upset you recover more quickly, that’s the actual definition of resilience.”
Reduces Stress, Anxiety & Depression
Meditation has significant effects on our emotional resiliency, and even has shown to reduce stress, anxiety and depression. According to Goleman, treating anxiety and depression with meditation is strongly recommended because “mindfulness based cognitive therapy is extremely powerful, as good as medication goes.” After meditation practice of less than one week, one study of 40 undergraduate students experienced lower anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue, and higher vigor on the Profile of Mood States scale, and significantly reduced stress-related cortisol.
The results of one randomized trial suggested that mindfulness reduces ruminative thought, of which is a precursor and cause of stress. In addition to stress and anxiety, meditation has even shown to improve psychological conditions of insomnia, phobias and eating disorders.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is a popular practice shown to significantly reduce symptoms of psychological disorders, in addition to improving psychological well-being that is experienced long after an individual is engaged in habitual meditation.
Increases Compassion & Empathy
Daniel Goleman describes that “compassion is directly enhanced by meditation”, particularly from the meditation practice called loving-kindness. He states that “it strengthens the parents’ caretaking circuitry… the circuitry for caring gets stronger and stronger the more you do this.”
Brain imaging studies have shown changes in the brain responsible for an empathic response to another’s pain. In response to observing photographs of suffering individuals, Goleman states that people instinctively look away because they empathize with the feelings of anguish, “the studies have found people who see someone suffering actually avert their eyes.” Interestingly, meditation increases our ability to take action, “meditation enhances the ability to look at keep looking at someone who is suffering and actually go help them.”
Results from brain imaging studies showed that during meditation, in response to negative sounds, activation in the insula increased which supports the role of the limbic circuitry in emotion sharing. The researchers concluded that the mental expertise to cultivate positive emotion alters the activation of circuitries previously linked to empathy and theory of mind in response to emotional stimuli.
Strengthens the Immune System
Meditation also has profound health benefits. It has been shown to strengthen the immune system and you don’t need to be a long-term meditator to reap these benefits. After 5 days of 20 minutes of integrative training, participants in one study experienced an increase in immunoreactivity.
Reduces Risk of Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes
In addition to benefiting the immune system, meditation improves inflammation and helps people handle chronic pain. Goleman states that “if you’re an advanced meditator, a day of meditation lowers inflammation levels in the body, inflammation is what feeds into a range of disease, from diabetes to heart disease to arthritis, you name it.”
Studies have shown that meditation improves a wide range of medical conditions including cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes and chronic pain.
Improves Sleep
Meditation has also been shown to improve many factors related to sleep. First, meditation increases melatonin levels, of which melatonin is a key player in the regulation of sleep. Additionally, a study measuring the effects of vipassana meditation on sleep showed that meditators experienced better quality of sleep, an improvement in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and experienced meditators spent more time in slow wave sleep (SWS). People experience age-related declines in the processes associated with slow wave sleep, however, vipassana meditation has been shown to preserve slow wave sleep because the results of the study suggested that experienced meditators were able to retain the sleep pattern of younger non-meditating controls.