By Aimee Rowley • April 20, 2018 • Comments Off on How Meditation Can Help Your Brain
In the last recent years, research has been steadily showing just how much your brain benefits from the power of medication. It has shown results to change the volume of grey matter. It’s funny how taking a moment in your head can help you stay out of your head during the stress of the day.
Here are some benefits of how we found meditation can help the brain.
Preserve Your Brain’s Age
Participants of long-term meditation of over twenty years or more have shown to have more grey matter volume within their brain. Grey matter is the darker tissue that is housed in your brain and spinal cord. The matter consists mainly of nerve cells and branching dendrites. Needless to say, this is a good thing.
It Helps With Anxiety, Depression, and Other Mental Illnesses
Other studies have shown links that mindfulness, or meditating to stay in the moment, helps to decrease activity within the DMN. The DMN is the default mode network, the place where the brain is responsible for self-referential thoughts. Mind-wandering is associated with feelings of worry, and decreasing the time that our brain “wanders” helps to take these feelings down a notch.
With the effect of meditation on anxiety, depression, and even pain at 0.3, even if it sounds low, it is said to have the same effect size as antidepressants. As an active form of brain training to increase awareness, it’s beneficial over the long term. Like any other skill, it needs to be practiced continually in order to see improvement.
Helps To Alter and Improve Concentration
Another recent study has shown that a couple of weeks of meditation and brain training help an individual’s focus as well as their memory. These results aren’t incredibly surprising, however, since the primary focus of meditation as an activity is to centralize your focus. Still, it’s nice that scientific results supported our assumptions of the action. If your kids are having trouble with school, or your partner is having problems at work, consider turning meditation into a family activity.
It Can Even Change The Brain’s Structure?!
Eight weeks of mindfulness meditation in one study was shown to increase the cortical thickness of the hippocampus. This part of your brain is what assists with learning and memory. It also plays a role in regulating your emotions and how you process or cope with situations.
The study also showed a decrease in the cell volume of the amygdala. This part of the brain is responsible for anxiety, fear, and stress.
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