Buddhists, yogis and ayurvedic doctors have said
for centuries that meditation improves health and well-being. Now
scientists are trying to prove it.
Several clinical studies have documented specific ways that meditating
may help people stay healthier, sharpen mental focus and gain more power
over their emotions. Some studies even show that the brain of someone
who meditates may be physically different from the next guy’s.
Scientists
say it’s a very new field of study. But their findings to date offer
compelling confirmation to the more than 20 million Americans who
meditate — and tell skeptics that those who are getting on the cushion
every day might be onto something.
Can meditation make you happier?
When emotions wreak havoc, it helps to “get it out” — ranting to a
therapist, friend or spouse, or writing about your feelings in a
journal. Sitting down on a cushion to meditate is seemingly the polar
opposite of this catharsis. But could it be that the two approaches are
helpful for similar reasons?
Talking or writing about your feelings forces you to call them
something. And one technique taught in mindfulness meditation is naming
your emotions. It’s part of noticing and detaching from those emotions
vs. letting them hijack your bliss. Meditation instructor Dianna Dunbar
calls it “the mindfulness wedge.” It’s about “helping people develop
that pause button,” she says, so they can observe emotions from the
outside.
Two UCLA studies showed “that simply labeling emotion promotes
detachment,” says David Creswell, Ph.D., a meditation researcher at the
university who joined colleague Matthew D. Lieberman, Ph.D., in heading
up the studies.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record brain
activity and pinpoint where in the brain it occurs, Lieberman’s team
found that assigning names to negative emotions turns down the intensity
of activity in the amygdala — an almond-sized sector of the brain that
acts like an alarm system: When you witness a car crash, argue with your
spouse or get yelled at by your boss, it’s your amygdala’s job to set
off a cascade of stress-related reactions.
But if you simply name the distressing event, Lieberman says, you can
wield more power over your amygdala’s freak-out. “When you attach the
word ‘angry,’” he explains, “you see a decreased response in the
amygdala.”
Creswell’s 2007 study supported these findings. His team asked 27
undergraduates to fill out a questionnaire on how “mindful” they were —
how inclined they were to pay attention to present emotions, thoughts or
sensations. They found a striking difference between the brains of those
who called themselves mindful and those who didn’t: Mindful patients
showed more activity in the areas that calm down emotional response,
known as the prefrontal cortex; and less activation in the amygdala.
Twenty-year meditation practitioner Joyce Bonnie says the UCLA findings
aren’t surprising to her. But she says having that emotion-diffusing
ability is one thing, and using it is another.
“It’s very challenging to bring what you practice on the meditation
cushion out in a real-life situation,” says Bonnie, an independent
filmmaker in Santa Monica, Calif. “When you’re actually in that moment —
say someone is yelling at you — you have to remember to step back, say,
‘Oh, that’s anger I’m feeling,' and change what you do with that
emotion, all in a millisecond. It takes a lot of practice.”
Still, the clinical results “may explain the beneficial health effects
of mindfulness meditation,” Creswell says, “and suggest why mindfulness
meditation programs improve mood and health.
“For the first time since [the Buddha’s] teachings,” he adds, “we have
shown that there is actually a neurological reason for doing mindfulness
meditation.”
Can meditation make you healthier?
Thirty-seven-year-old mom Nikki Ragonese has meditated for six years as
one way to cope with painful degenerative osteoarthritis. Meditation,
she says, makes it easier to accept her pain and the difficult emotions
it fuels.
“Often when you feel something, you don’t acknowledge it,” Ragonese
says. “And by avoiding that feeling, you perpetuate greater pain.
Meditation helps me realize that I create my own feelings. If I’m in a
state of frustration and I stop and observe it, I realize there’s
another way to deal with the pain.”
Ragonese’s mindfulness meditation instructor in Boulder, Colo.,
therapist Dianna Dunbar, agrees. “I’ve seen patients who gain a greater
sense of awareness of their pain become nonjudgmental observers of their
pain,” she says. “They are less irritable, and more able to calm down
and relax.”
Science is starting to churn out more evidence echoing Ragonese and
Dunbar’s experience, showing signs that mindfulness meditation can help
ease symptoms of conditions including psoriasis and hypertension as well
as chronic pain.
Meditating also slows breathing rate, blood pressure and heart rate, and
there’s some evidence that meditation may aid treatment of anxiety,
depression, high blood pressure and a range of other ailments.
Can meditation make you smarter?
The buzz about meditation’s ability to turn out shiny, happy people
makes you wonder: Do people who meditate have something different going
on upstairs than non-meditators do?
A noted 2005 study by Sara Lazar, Ph.D., an instructor in psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School, aimed to find out which parts of the brain
become active when a person practices mindfulness and meditation. Her
team studied 20 people who meditate regularly and 20 who don’t.
The results were astounding: Brain regions associated with attention,
sensory awareness and emotional processing — the cortex — were thicker
in meditators. In fact, meditators’ brains grew thicker in direct
correlation with how much they meditated.
The findings suggest that meditation can change the brain’s structure —
perhaps because certain brain regions are used more frequently in the
process of meditation, and therefore grow.
Lazar says it’s a “huge, huge, huge” leap to assert that meditators’
brains function better. “We really don’t know how meditation works,”
Lazar cautions, stressing that scientists are merely uncovering “pieces
of the puzzle.”
Yet for anyone accustomed to waiting for a chorus of nods from science
before trying alternative methods, these tip-of-the-iceberg findings may
be ample proof of what Eastern cultures have been saying for centuries:
Meditation is good for you.
(source: Gaiam.com | article by Rachel Brand)
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