MEDITATION — THE SCIENCE
You can read all the books in the world on oceanography but unless you actually get in the water, you will never learn to swim. The same is true for meditation — once you begin practicing, the science is irrelevant because, on an experiential level, you know you are healing, growing, waking up. But, sometimes a little science can be enough to persuade you to begin! You can find some of the latest research on the benefits of meditation below.
- Calms the mind (shown by structural and functional brain changes)
- Reduces anxiety including biological signs of anxiety reduction such as reductions in inflammatory cytokines and stress hormones
- Increases resilience to stress (reduced reactivity to stress can occur in as little as three days of meditation)
- Reduces cellular ageing by preserving telomere length (the protective caps at the ends of chromosomes)
- Enhances athletic performance through decreasing anxiety and ruminative thinking and enhancing flow state
- Enhances working memory and cognitive capacity in high pressure situations
- Increases focus by reducing mind-wandering
- Increases understanding of others’ feelings and beliefs
- Improves concentration by reducing activity in the Default Mode Network (a part of the brain related to mind-wandering and self-related thinking)
- Enhances attention and interoception (the ability to sense and understand what’s going on inside your body) linked to corresponding brain changes (e.g. increased cortical thickness in the left posterior insula and increased functional connectivity with the prefrontal cortex)