Meditation Is Proven to Change and Benefit Your Brain
Recent studies show that meditation can change your brain, and the long-term practice of meditation can indeed bring life changing benefits in many ways.
Meditation has been around for thousands of years, and the benefits are widespread and well known. Only recently though, has the brain-meditation connection been well documented, providing scientific confirmation of the benefits many meditators have sworn by for so many years.
MRI and EEG results now conclusively prove that there are a variety of neurological benefits to meditation, and prove that grey matter changes and results in a healthier brain.
Emotional Intelligence
1. One proven benefit of meditation is the reduction of the amygdala, or the rudimentary caveman-style reaction area of the brain. The amygdala is responsible for what many specialists in Emotional Intelligence call the fight or flight response. Technically it is the instant and often negative emotional reaction people have to rousing or unexpected stimuli when they have only a moment to respond and haven’t thought things through logically.
A good example of this is road rage, where a driver cuts another off, causing the offended person to yell and scream profanities. The offended person’s reaction is instantly negative, instead of a calm reaction where they could have assumed the person had a good reason to swerve, like avoiding a child on a sidewalk or another car. If the amygdala is larger, reactions are negative. If it is smaller, then reactions may be calmer, and people may be more focused and caring in their response to sudden unexpected stimuli.
Meditation helps reduce the size of the amygdala, giving less power to the amygdala, and allowing the smarter parts of your brain to react with grace and focus instead.
2. Brain Preservation
UCLA studies have shown that participants who meditated an average of 20 years have more healthy grey matter volume throughout the brain, and in a variety of regions, instead of just a few areas of the brain that had been previously studied. And in fact, compared to non-meditators, the healthy volume was far more pronounced and notable. This is exciting because grey matter is the tissue where cognition occurs and memories are stored. It essentially means that people who meditate long-term will be sharper and have stronger memories as they grow older. So meditation may act as an exercise of some sort, to keep your brain and memory sharp as you age.
3. Mindfulness
Studies at Yale University found that meditation reduced “monkey mind,” a negative state where your mind wanders from thought to thought, instead of being focused on the present. The reason it is perceived to be negative is that when people’s mind flutter this way, they are typically ruminating on the past or the future. This could mean people are creating stories and imagining a world that is better or worse than the reality of the world that is present at that moment. Mindfulness meditation focuses on being present, helps decrease brain-wandering activity, and brings about a much more peaceful, joyful and accepting state of mind.
Additional ways that meditation can help the brain include:
Reduced anxiety and depression, improved concentration and attention, overcoming various types of addictions, and stress reduction.
Short Meditation Breaks Are Proven to Benefit Students
Short meditation breaks have also been proven to help students stay focused and deal better with cognitive and emotional stress in school. In fact, a high risk school in San Francisco started a twice daily meditation program and saw suspensions decrease, while grades and attendance increased for its students.
Sources:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01551/full
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/330/6006/932
https://www.forbes.com/colleges/yale-university/
https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/san-francisco-schools-transformed-power-meditation-n276301
