4 Reasons to Try Meditation

Shutterstock.com

Meditation has become extremely popular in the last handful of years. There are endless playlists on Spotify and YouTube that claim to be filled with music specifically tailored for meditation, and guided meditation recordings can be found splashed across the internet and on DVD’s in nearly equal measure. Self-help and inspiration blogs are covered with images of people sitting in a lotus position on a mountain top, by the ocean or in front of a stunning sunset. Meditation seems to be a panacea for every ill a person can complain about today. Can sitting and breathing really bring that many benefits?

Bizarre as it may sound, taking a few minutes to be still and focused can do incredible things for your health. Meditation has been shown to improve nearly every aspect of a person’s life. From marital conflict to insomnia to social anxiety, meditation seems to be a constant answer to people’s needs. There are many different types of meditation, and some are more suited to certain concerns than others. Mindfulness meditation, for example, may be better at decreasing stress while focused-attention meditation brings more cognitive benefits. There are nearly as many forms of meditation as there are benefits, and that is quite a high bar. To list every benefit of meditation would take days, but here are four reasons to try meditation today.

Emotional

Alice Popcorn / Flickr.com

Everyone has heard how meditation helps a person to lower their stress levels. This is, to many people, no surprise. Of course, a few quiet moments alone can help a person calm down. Meditation, however, does more than simply help a person temporarily relax. Meditation has been shown to actually decrease the amount of the stress hormone, cortisol, a person produces. In a study exploring how meditation affected anxiety, participants who meditated had lower anxiety levels three years after the study was complete. Similarly, meditation has been shown to decrease the amount of inflammatory chemicals, called cytokines, which can negatively affect a person’s mood and even lead to depression.

In addition to lowering a person’s stress levels and anxiety, meditation has been shown to increase a person’s happiness. The brains of people who meditate have been shown to have increased activity in the areas of the brain related to positive thinking and optimism.

Cognitive

MeditationMusic.net/Flickr.com

Meditation has been shown to improve a person’s cognitive abilities. Employees who meditate have been shown to be able to focus on specific tasks for longer than their peers who do not meditation. In fact, some researchers believe that meditation actually reverses the patterns in the brain that cause both a person’s mind to wander and a poor attention span. Even short term meditation has been shown to increase a person’s attention span. One study found that four days of practicing meditation is enough to show a marked improvement in a person’s attention span.

In addition to improving a person’s attention span, people who meditate tend to have better memories. Meditators are more likely to remember task-related details and suffer from less age-related memory loss. The combined increase in memory and attention span, unsurprisingly, leads to an increase in general productivity, but it can also increase a person’s ability to think creatively and innovatively.

The cognitive effects of meditation are visible on the physical brain. Meditation has been shown to increase a person’s grey matter and the cortical thickness in areas that are related to focus and attention.

Physical

shutterstock.com

Everyone wants to be healthy, and meditation has been shown to be as effective at treating some ailments as conventional medication. A 2003 study found that meditating significantly increased the number of antibodies a person produced, enabling them to better fight disease. In addition to increasing the number of antibodies in a person’s body, meditation has been shown to improve a person’s sleep. A study of insomniacs found that meditators tend to fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer than those who do not meditate. An increased antibody count and better sleep leads to a greatly increased ability to fight disease.

Meditation has also been shown to help diminish both pain and blood pressure. Both chronic pain and high blood pressure are ailments that often require intense medication regimes, but meditation can carry many of the same benefits without the myriad side effects that come with taking large numbers of drugs.

Social

shutterstock.com

Meditation is a largely solitary activity, but it can actually improve your social life. Meditation is known for increasing a person’s self-awareness. Self-awareness, of course, is essential for a person to grow into the best self they can be and is important when it comes to relating to others.

Meditation has also been shown to increase a person’s compassion and empathy for those around them. Metta meditation has been shown to be especially effective at increasing a person’s compassion and kindness. No less than 22 separate studies found that this form of meditation demonstrably increased people’s compassion toward themselves and others. Metta also decreased participant’s social anxiety, marriage conflict and helped them better manage their anger.

In addition to increasing a person’s interpersonal abilities, meditation has been shown to reduce feelings of loneliness. Given that loneliness and isolation have been shown to be leading causes of depression, the ability to decrease feelings of loneliness is extremely useful.