5 amazing health benefits of Meditation

Meditation is that which gives you deep rest. The term meditation refers to a broad variety of practices that includes techniques designed to promote relaxation, build internal energy or life force and develop compassion, love, patience, generosity, and forgiveness.

A particularly ambitious form of meditation aims at effortlessly sustained single-pointed concentration meant to enable its practitioner to enjoy an indestructible sense of well-being while engaging in any life activity.

Here are five amazing health benefits of Meditation:

1. Stay Focused
Learning to sustain one’s attention through mindfulness seems to improve overall ability to focus and maintain attention during everyday tasks. In a 2012 study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researchers evaluated individuals with no previous exposure to meditation. Some of them received three hours of mindfulness-meditation training and were asked to meditate for 10 minutes each day for up to 16 weeks. During tasks that involved attention to detail, those who meditated showed more control over executive functions involving attention than nonmeditators. The research suggests that even ‘low doses’ of meditation training can significantly change neural function related to processing conflicting stimuli.

2. Manage Anxiety and Depression
Mindfulness meditation might be on par with antidepressants in treating depressive symptoms. In a 2014 study in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, researchers examined 15 participants with no prior meditation experience. Over the course of just four days of mindfulness-meditation training, participants experienced significantly less anxiety. Essentially, mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety by improving mood and enhancing cognitive control mechanisms.

3. Reduce Stress
Research suggests that mindfulness-meditation training not only reduces stress and anxiety following a stressful episode, but that practicing it can actually help mitigate stress in the moment. In a 2013 study, Kirk Warren Brown, PhD, a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and colleagues reported that mindful individuals showed lower brain arousal in response to highly unpleasant images compared with controls. This suggests that mindfulness changes how stress-related emotion centers in the brain are activated. As a result, not only do these brain areas get less active when provoked, but the reaction may be easier to regulate because it’s not so strong, says Brown.



4. Ease Pain
In a 2011 study, Wake Forest researcher Zeidan and his colleagues showed that after just four days of mindfulness-meditation training, meditating during episodes of 
pain reduced the unpleasantness by 57 percent and participants’ pain-intensity ratings 
by 40 percent. The researchers also identified specific brain regions that appear to 
be involved in the experience of pain and how it is modulated through meditation. 
By altering the context for pain via cognitive control and emotional regulation, meditation may change the way we perceive pain.

5. Avoid Colds and Flu
Mindfulness meditation may help boost immune function. In a 2012 Annals of Family Medicine study of adults aged 50 or older, researchers showed that mindfulness meditation is about as effective as exercise for reducing the occurrence of acute respiratory infection, which includes colds and seasonal flu. These bolstered previous studies which showed that mindfulness meditation can help fight illness by reducing stress and therefore helping to support a healthy immune response.

Source: Yoga Journal