Short-term stress can cause headache, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, difficulty concentrating, upset stomach and irritability, and other symptoms. Long-term stress, however, can lead
to more serious health issues such as depression, high blood pressure, arrhythmia, hardening of the arteries, heart disease, weight gain or loss and many other serious conditions. Biologist Elizabeth Blackburn has received a Nobel Prize for her groundbreaking work on what makes our bodies age, and the one glaring fact is stress. Managing your stress can make a real difference to your health, and meditation is a natural element that can help to manage and alleviate stress, with a host of other benefits.
MANAGING STRESS There is no cost to meditation and the benefits are priceless. Neuroscience has proven that meditation calms the mind and stops recursive loops of thought often known as monkey mind. It also suppresses ‘negativity bias’ – a survival mode of thinking where we are always on the alert, looking for possible danger. After meditating, the ability to regain focus with a reduced sense of beta, means you are more relaxed and have the ability to be more solution focused. Meditation also produces more gamma waves, opening the opportunity to have insights.
RESEARCH ON MEDITATION Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, was one of the first scientists to take the anecdotal claims about the benefits of meditation and mindfulness and test them in brain scans. What she found was that meditating can literally change your brain. She explains: “The amygdala, the fight or flight part of the brain, which is important for anxiety, fear and stress in
general,… got smaller in the group that went through the mindfulness-based stress reduction program. The change in the amygdala was also correlated to a reduction in stress levels.” When questioned about how long someone has to meditate before they begin to see changes in their brain, Lazar responded that her data showed changes in the brain after just eight weeks.
//STRESS MEANS DIFFERENT THINGS
TO DIFFERENT PEOPLE DEPENDING ON THEIR PERSONALITY AND HOW THEY RESPOND TO SITUATIONS. //
Lazar also reported that studies
show that meditation changes brain physiology to slow ageing. “Cognition seems to be preserved in meditators,” she said, adding that meditators have more gray matter – literally, more brain cells. Lazar’s colleague, Elizabeth Hoge,
did a study that showed meditators also have longer telomeres, the caps on chromosomes indicative of biological age (rather than chronological). Hoge says: “There is something about meditation that is associated with longer telomeres … [perhaps that] it reduces stress and its effects on the body.” This is the same field of study for which biologist Elizabeth Blackburn won her Nobel Prize. It was the shrinking of the telomeres from stress, anxiety and trauma that Blackburn attributed to the onset of ageing and disease. Meditation may keep us more at ease than disease!
LONG-TERM BENEFITS So what would be your response to dealing with stress? Medicate and live your life with numbed emotions? Keeping stress and emotions submerged but not attended to? Or meditate and allow your emotions to flow in their natural way while gaining the abundant benefits that meditation, a natural and effective buffer, provides? It has been documented that meditation improves alertness and focus, gives better sleep, enhances memory, concentration and perception, increases levels of happiness and compassion and improves the immune system. The practice benefits cardiovascular and the immune system, inducing relaxation and improves immunity. If you are wondering what happens
when you meditate for a long time, it only gets better. Scientific studies were carried out on Buddhist monks and practitioners who had practised the art of meditation over years, highlighting the long-term effects of meditation on the brain. They showed an elevated brain activity within those regions associated with self- awareness, relaxation, happiness, concentration and other positive emotions, and the brain areas responsible for stress and anxiety had shrunk. So why not give it a try? You have everything to gain and nothing to lose but stress and anxiety! l
Connect with other readers & comment on this article at
www.livingnow.com.au
Glenda is a children’s book author, counsellor, NLP/ hypnotherapy practitioner, and meditation teacher. She has been meditating
for over 30 years, and writing to help others gain a more spiritual aspect to this life experience.
MARCH | APRIL 2018 15
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