Meditation can make you younger.
50-year-olds can have the Brains of 25-year-old if They Meditate According to Research
Mass General and Harvard Medical School Neuroscientist, Sara Lazar, started studying meditation by accident. She sustained injuries training for the Boston Marathon, and her physical therapist told her to stretch. She decided to take up yoga.
Yoga will extend your compassion and open your heart
"The yoga teacher made all sorts of claims, that yoga would extend your compassion and open your heart," said Lazar. "And I'd think, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm here to stretch.' But I started discerning that I was calmer. I was better able to manage more challenging situations. I was more compassionate and open-hearted and able to see things from others' points of view."
Meditation boosts quality of life.
Ultimately, she looked up the scientific literature on mindfulness meditation (a category into which yoga can fall). She discovered the ever-increasing body of evidence that shows that meditation reduces stress, depression, and anxiety, reduces pain and insomnia, and boosts the quality of life.
She started doing some neuroscience study of her own.
Mindfulness meditation makes you relaxed and become aware of the present moment.
In her first study, she looked at long-term meditators (those with seven to nine years of experience) versus a control group. The results revealed that those with an active meditation background had increased gray matter in several areas of the brain, including the auditory and sensory cortex, as well as the insula and sensory regions.
The research makes sense since mindfulness meditation makes you relaxed and become aware of the present moment, including physical sensations such as your breathing and the sounds around you.
50-year-old meditators in the study had the same amount of gray matter as those half their age.
Though, the neuroscientists also found that the meditators had more gray matter in another brain region, this time linked to decision-making and working memory: the frontal cortex. While most people see their cortexes shrink as they age, 50-year-old meditators in the study had the same amount of gray matter as those half their age.
That's exceptional.
Study was conveyed for eight weeks of meditation.
Lazar and her team wanted to make sure this wasn't because the long-term meditators had more gray matter, to begin with, so they conveyed a second study. In it, they put people without experience of meditation into an eight-week mindfulness program.
The results? Even just eight weeks of meditation changed people's brains for the better. There was thickening in several regions of the brain, including the left hippocampus (involved in learning, memory, and emotional regulation); the TPJ (involved in empathy and the ability to take multiple perspectives); and a part of the brainstem called the pons (where regulatory neurotransmitters were generated).
Yoga makes positive changes in just 15 to 20 minutes a day.
Additionally, the brains of the new meditators saw a depreciation of the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with fear, anxiety, and aggression — this reduction in the size of the amygdala correlated to reduced stress levels in those participants.
In the study, participants were told to meditate for 40 minutes a day, but the average ended up being 27 minutes a day. Several other studies suggest that you can see notable positive changes in just 15 to 20 minutes a day.
Exercising three times a week is excellent.
As for Lazar's meditation practice, she says it's "highly variable." Exercising three times a week is excellent. But if all you can do is just a little bit every day, that's a good thing, too."
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