Meditation improves self-control, reduces pain sensitivity, improves multitasking skills, cultivates compassion, helps in the fight against depression, and much more.
Meditation is much more than just relaxing
Surprisingly, all of the above benefits are available to everyone and are completely free. Meditation is a simple exercise that does not require expensive equipment or chemicals, applications, books or other products.
Some recommendations on how to meditate will be given below so that you can act now.
However, before turning to them, let’s take a closer look at the main benefits of meditation.
Benefits of meditation
- Forms steady self-control
Meditation allows us to feel calmer while we are busy with it, but can this property remain in everyday life?
Scientists scanned people’s brains before and after participating in the 8-week course of meditation. During the study, participants looked at photos aimed at obtaining positive, negative and neutral emotional reactions. For the meditation classes this is important.
After a course of meditation, the activity of the emotional center of the brain was reduced while viewing all the pictures.
This suggests that meditation allows you to maintain emotional control, even when you are not meditating.
- Develops compassion
For a long time it was believed that one of the main advantages of meditation is the enhancement of virtuous qualities and compassion. Now it is a proven scientific fact.
In one study, participants were in a waiting area with two actors, while the third actor entered on crutches, depicting that he was in great pain. The actors sitting next to the study participants ignored the disabled person, sending an unconscious signal to others not to interfere.
Those who meditated, at least 50% of cases, sought to help the person in pain. One of the authors of the study, the truly amazing aspect of the study is the fact that meditation makes people willing to act virtuously to help those who suffer, even in the context of a social norm of inaction.
- Changes the structure of the brain
Meditation is such a powerful technique that after 8 weeks changes the structure of the brain.
To show these effects, scientists recorded an image of the brain of 16 people before and after the course of meditation. Compared to the control group, the density of gray matter in the area of the brain associated with learning and memory has been increased.
- Reduces pain
One of the benefits of meditation is pain reduction, after regular practice. Scientists have confirmed a decrease in the pain threshold of sensitivity in meditators. Joshua Grant explained: “During a study of the frontal lobes of meditators, we found thickening in certain areas of the brain responsible for low sensitivity to pain.”
- Accelerates learning and memorization.
Would you like your brain to work faster? Scientists have discovered significant benefits for beginners to meditate, already after 80 minutes of meditation for 4 days. Despite a very short period of practice, participants had an improvement in the functions of working memory, executive functioning and visual-spatial processing.
