Many different studies have been conducted to examine how meditation may be helpful for a variety of physical and psychological conditions. Studies have also been designed to help researchers learn how meditation might work and how it affects the brain.
Research indicates that practicing meditation may be a good way to help improve certain aspects of health such as reducing blood pressure and symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and stress. Practitioners of meditation have said that it has helped them with pain management as well as to be able to quit smoking.
Meditation
There are many different styles of meditation that come from different periods in time and that originated in different places around the world. As a very general definition, meditation can be described as a set of techniques that are intended to encourage a heightened state of awareness and focused attention. Another way to describe meditation is a habitual process of training one’s mind to focus and redirect one’s thoughts.
Meditation has been recognized in the field of psychology as a consciousness-changing technique that provides benefits to many practitioners’ psychological well-being. Traditional medical doctors along with alternative health practitioners are fast recognizing the value of meditation for helping their patients’ to achieve overall better health outcomes.
Science-Based Benefits of Meditation
The following are just a few of the many science-based benefits of meditation.
Stress Reduction Physical and mental stress can cause an increase in levels of the hormone cortisol. One of the harmful effects of stress on a person’s body is that it produces and releases inflammatory chemicals called cytokines. This can lead to insomnia, it can cause or increase levels of depression and anxiety, and the release of cytokines can increase a person’s blood pressure. As well, it can lead to fatigue and the feeling of a “brain fog” that has been described as “feeling clouded in one’s mind”.
A mindfulness meditation style was the focus of an 8-week study on the body’s inflammatory response to stress. It was found that this meditation style helped to reduce the inflammation response caused by stress. Studies have also shown that people with other stress-related conditions such as IBS (irritable bowel syndrome), PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), and fibromyalgia, may find relief from symptoms of these problems.
Stress Relief = Less Anxiety
When a person’s stress levels are reduced, this often leads to less anxiety. Less anxiety can lead to improved physical, mental and emotional health. There are many small sample studies and analyses that indicate that people who suffer from different kinds of stress have found relief when engaged in a range of different kinds of regular meditation practices.
Science Meets Mindfulness Meditation for Improved Mental Health
A gap in mental health treatment is that while traditional frontline interventions such as talk-therapy and medications help many people with their mental health issues, unfortunately, these do not help everyone.
Gaëll Desbordes, an instructor in radiology at Harvard Medical School and a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, and Benjamin Shapero, an instructor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and a psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital’s (MGH) Depression Clinical and Research Program, are working together to find out more about how the brain responds to mindfulness-based meditation.
Desbordes became interested in studying the effects of meditation on stress and other mental health issues when she became convinced in graduate school that what she experienced with reducing her stress and frustrations of academia when she began meditating, was in fact real. This made her want to see if she could underpin a meditation-therapy that could help others. In previous studies, Desbordes used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), images of the brain from a machine that takes pictures of the brain the same way a regular MRI does but that also records brain activity that occurs during the scan. In these studies, Debordes demonstrated that changes in brain activity in subjects who learned to meditate, hold steady- even when they’re not meditating.
Debordes’ current work involves clinically depressed patients who have been selected and screened by Shapero. She is performing functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on them before and after an eight-week course in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT. Debordes is hoping to be able to support studies that show MBCT’s effectiveness in helping people with clinical depression.
These are just a few of the many recent forays into science driven research that supports the cause for developing meditation-based therapies to help people with many different kinds of mental-health issues.
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