Why I started believing in Meditation: 6 Studies Every Skeptic should be aware of.

I have been amazed with the kind of impact 10 minutes meditation practice has brought to my life. I must say this exercise of the mind has helped be remain sane in the most stressful times of my life.

Unfortunately a lot of people, are not looking at meditation in the same way as scientists are looking at it. The positive impact of meditation has been blurred by so many religious, spiritual, superstitious connotations.

Here is an attempt to de-clutter the religious & spiritual aspects of it and looking at meditation from the same lenses as one would look at any other health practice.

1.Meditation Improves Our Resilience to Stress.

One of the things that we find in the brain is that there prolonged activation in a particular part of the brain called the amygdala which is very important for emotion in particularly for stress and negative emotions and anxiety. We've actually been able to measure the duration of time that the amygdala response to a particular discrete emotional stimulus that we can present in the laboratory and one of the things that we found is that practicing mindfulness will actually lead to faster recovery in the amygdala. The amygdala comes back down to baseline more quickly. So it doesn't change the response itself but what it does seem to do is it changes how quickly you recover and that may be a key attribute of resilience. - Dr. Richard Davidson (Dr. Davidson is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Founder and Director of the Center for Healthy Minds . He is best known for his groundbreaking work studying emotion and the brain. Time Magazine?named Davidson one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2006.)

Click Here to Read the Research Paper.

2. Meditation Increases Our Compassionate Concern For Others.

“The cultivation of a loving concern for other people’s well-being has a surprising and unique benefit: the brain circuitry for happiness?emerges , along with compassion,” - Dr. Richard Davidson. Cultivating concern for other is an integral part of the Compassion Meditation practice. Link for the research paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3713090/

This is what happens inside the brain when we practice compassion meditation.

3. Meditation augments our capacity to focus and pay attention.

"We recruited adults with a Attention Deficit Disorder that and we didn't tell them to change their clinical treatment.My collaborator that was at the University of Pennsylvania Michael Bain he actually the first day of class their exercise their homework for the week was a 1-minute mindfulness exercise and what they did during that minute was listen to this recording which was silence for a minute except for every ten seconds there was a little ding and it was and that was it. That was the exercise and that and the instruction was bring her attention back to the here and now when you hear the ding. What we found was that it did improve their ability to protect against mind-wandering and improved their attention and what was very interesting also was that they said that they didn't change the amount of medication but they were better able to use it so they were better able to know when the adderall had worn off and maybe now it's time to take it again so something shifted." - Dr. Amishi Jha

(Amishi Jha is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Miami whose research on attention, working memory, and mindfulness has investigated the neural bases of executive functioning and mental training using various cognitive neuroscience techniques. Research Paper link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6167711_Mindfulness_training_modifies_subsystems_of_attention )

Neuroscientist Dr. Amishi Jha sharing about her research study on adults with ADHD and mindfulness practices.

4. Meditation helps you to stop seeing yourself as the center of the universe.

"A study out of Yale that looked at what's called the default mode network of the brain it's a connected series of brain regions that are active during most of our waking hours when we're doing that thing that human beings do all the time which is obsessing about ourselves thinking about the past thinking about the future doing anything but being focused on what's happening right now meditators not only turn off the default mode Network of their brain while they're meditating but even when they're not meditating in other words meditators are setting a new default mode and what's that default mode they're focused on what's happening right now in sports this is called being in the zone" - Dan Harris (Author _ 10% Happier)

How does meditation allow us to be in the now and not ruminate about the past or worry about the future.

5. Meditation on the Pain helps in Lessening the Pain.

Our psychology plays a very important role in our experience of the pain. What is being found in the studies that mindfulness actually lessens the pain without directly acting upon the source of the pain.

What exactly happens to our experience of the pain due to mindfulness practices ? in the video

6. Meditation Helps in Slowing the Ageing Process.

Telomerase—an enzyme responsible in longer cell life and hence longevity, is found be higher in regular meditation practitioners. Research Link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24636500

Know how meditation affecting aging & longevity

Here is a short video by Dr. Rick Hanson (Neuropsychologist), which kind of summarizes various physiological changes in the brain due to meditation.

While I fundamentally believe that meditation has its core in spirituality but at times it may blur our vision towards the very tangible benefits. Of the many studies based on meditation and its impact, above are among the most rigorous ones and come from extremely renowned scientists