Meditation Benefits Your Health

Meditation benefits your health in various ways. Even though meditation is still a relatively new field of study for scientists, the practice of meditation is ancient. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., from the University of Massachusetts, studied actual brain movements of people who meditated. He found that through meditation we actually change the brain activity from one part of the cortex to another. This explains the scientific reason behind how meditation improves overall health.

Health Benefits of Meditation

• Meditation benefits your health by increasing happiness. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin reported that people newly trained in meditation have shown an increase in electrical activity in the left frontal part of the brain, an area associated with positive emotion and happiness.
• Meditation boosts the immune system. In the same study, meditators also showed a significant increase in immunity to the flu.
• Meditation benefits your health by enhancing memory and attention. A study at Massachusetts General Hospital found that parts of the brains cerebral cortex were thicker in people who had practiced meditation daily for just 40 minutes for several years. The cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that deals with attention and processing sensory input and tends to thin with age.
• Meditation benefits your health by reducing the physical pain, anxiety, and stress of fibromyalgia. A study published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics showed sustained benefits over a three year period in a group of women who had taken an eight-week course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
• Meditation lowers blood pressure. A 2004 study published in the American Journal of Cardiology showed meditation can lower blood pressure and mortality rates in older people with hypertension.
• Meditation helps alleviate mild to moderate anxiety and depression. Researchers at the University of Louisville found that mindfulness meditation alleviates depression in women with fibromyalgia.
• Meditation benefits your health by increasing alertness. University of Kentucky researchers found that sleepy people who meditated for 40 minutes did better on a test of mental quickness than people who had taken a 40-minute nap.
• Meditation helps to control binge eating. A study at Indiana State University found that obese women who practiced mindfulness meditation had an average of four fewer binge-eating episodes a week than before they took up the practice. Mindfulness can help bingers recognize when they want to overeat and lower the odds that they will.
• Meditation benefits your health by helping to lower blood sugar: Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles showed that patients were able to lower their blood pressure, blood sugar and insulin by practicing transcendental meditation.

These few things alone can have profound secondary impacts on all areas of your life and relationships. It is simply astounding that a practice of sitting still can make us so much healthier. What is even more interesting to me is how hard so many of us find it is to sit still.

Mind and Body Benefits of Meditation

Meditation does not necessarily mean you need to spend large amounts of time to get the benefits to your mind and body it is:

• For everyone who wishes to relax and enjoy their own inner peace.
• A pleasant way to gain deep relaxation as well as creating time and space for yourself.
• Beneficial for your general well-being, but by using some simple words and images while you meditate (visualization) you can encourage improvement in a specific area of your life, you can gain the confidence to cope with an event in the future.
• A technique that can be utilized for its therapeutic and relaxing benefits in stress management, or simply in pursuit of self-awareness.
• For anyone wanting to improve their concentration.
• For everyone who wants to foster a more positive attitude to life.
• A way to enable you to gain a clearer sense of purpose.

FREE - 7 Minute Deep Relaxation

This is an easy meditation that will only take 7 minutes and it will relax you completely, be it after a hectic day or before a meeting. It is best used through stereo headphones. Download it now with our compliments, and use it often.