Anti-Aging Benefits of Meditation

Meditation can offer immense mental, emotional and health benefits. Consistent meditation can increase 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. Meditation can benefit our sleep, improve our immune system and a variety of other health conditions. 

Improving cognitive function, emotional regulation and health benefits are great, yet what people are really concerned with is how they can live well, delay age-related disease and maintain youthfulness. Meditation provides anti-aging benefits by improving cellular health and longevity in addition to reducing our susceptibility to biologically aging faster than we should. 

Telomeres & Telomerase 

Chronological age is one of the most significant predictors of disease and death. Besides chronological age, there are many lifestyle factors and individual variance that affects our susceptibility to illness and mortality. 

Scientists use telomeres as a biological marker to assess differences in how individuals age. By assessing the length of telomeres, scientists are able to measure how poor health and lifestyle factors determine lifespan as opposed to just chronological age.

Telomeres are protective caps found on the ends of chromosomes, which protect chromosomes from damage. Telomeres do get shorter over time as we age and there are many lifestyle factors that tend to shorten our telomeres faster. These include but are not limited to, smoking, lack of physical activity, obesity, stress and exposure to pollution. Additionally, there are lifestyle factors to promote the lengthening of telomeres which include exercise, nutritional factors including caffeinated coffee and even dietary fiber intake. 

Another way to promote telomere length is to increase telomerase activity. Telomerase is an enzyme that has the ability to rebuild and lengthen telomeres. Telomerase promotes cell longevity even for critically shortened telomeres. 

Increasing habits and lifestyle factors to reduce telomere shortening, promote telomere lengthening and increase telomerase activity is beneficial to promote optimal cellular health and longevity in addition to mitigating the risk of cell death. 

Meditation Reduces Stress 

Stress can have adverse effects on our cellular health and longevity. Objective stress and psychological stress is significantly associated with increased oxidative stress, lower telomerase activity and shorter telomere length. Since stress shortens telomere length, chronic stress can significantly age us biologically. One of the leading telomere researchers Elissa Epel, and her team of researchers found that women with high levels of perceived stress have telomeres shorter on average by the equivalent of at least one decade of additional aging compared to low stress women. These findings are profound because they show how significantly stress can add years onto our lives if we don’t effectively manage it. In this case, stress increased the biological age of these women to be at least 10 years older than their chronological age. 

What these findings tell us is that when you manage your mind, you can control your biological age. Meditation is one of the most effective strategies to manage your mind. It is an effective anti-aging practice because it has been shown to significantly reduce stress. After 5 days of meditation practice, one study of 40 undergraduate students experienced lower anxiety, depression, anger and fatigue, and higher vigor on the Profile of Mood States scale, in addition to significantly reduced stress-related cortisol.

Meditation & Telomerase

Since meditation reduces psychological stress and improves negative emotional states, one study concluded that consistent mindfulness practice over time may decelerate cellular aging. This is due to the fact that meditation promotes cellular longevity by decreasing cortisol and oxidative stress, and increasing hormones that may protect telomeres.

Meditation has also been shown to directly increase telomerase activity. One study measured the effects of intensive meditation on telomerase activity and found a significant positive association. During a meditation retreat, 30 participants meditated for about 6 hours per day and after 3 months, telomerase activity was significantly higher in participants who meditated. 

Meditation & Reduction of Age-Related Decline

Another benefit of meditation is that it increases gray matter in the prefrontal cortex and activates the insula. Due to these changes, researchers believe that meditation may improve sensory, cognitive and emotional processing and may reduce age-related declines in the structure of the brain. Confirming this, another study has shown that consistent meditation practice reduces neural degeneration of the prefrontal cortex.

Researchers have also found that prefrontal cortical thickness is larger in older participants who meditate which suggest that meditation might offset age-related cortical thinning.

In addition, the epigenetic aging rate decreased significantly with the number of years of consistent meditation. Researchers have concluded that meditation offers a protection effect on epigenetic age acceleration which they suggested could be progressive and cumulative. 

During a time in which stress and anxiety is so prevalent, meditation offers significant benefits to reduce accelerated biological aging. Practicing mindfulness is as simple as bringing awareness to observing your breathing and can be done anywhere.