7 Really Good Reasons to Start Meditating
By Jennifer Abbasi
Meditation used to feel like something reserved for yoga addicts, but
growing research is showing benefits for the mind and body that every one of us
could use.
Meditation Helps You Sleep Sounder
Researchers at the University of Minnesota
looked at seven studies on mindfulness meditation and sleep, concluding that
the practice helps some people get better rest. Mediation might help people
break the cycle of obsessing about not being able to get to sleep, which makes
it harder to your zzz’s, says Nicole Winbush, who co-authored the study.
Reducing stress hormones like cortisol, which can interfere with sleep, may
also help.
Meditation Eases Pain
Mindfulness meditation has been shown to help ease chronic discomfort like
neck and back pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia and recurring headaches. It teaches
you to open your senses to your breathing, the sound of the wind rustling or
the feel of the sun on your skin, says Jeffrey Greeson, a clinical health
psychologist at Duke University.
“If some attention’s going toward other things, the pain’s not going to bother
you as much,” Greeson says.
Meditation Improves Your Ability to Focus
“Mindfulness training improves your ability to maintain attention and
regulate emotional distractions,” says Fadel Zeidan, a cognitive neuroscientist
at Wake Forest School of Medicine. In one study he conducted, people who did
20-minute meditation sessions for just four days did significantly better on
timed cognitive tests than a control group. The meditators were better able to
ignore the timer and simply focus on the task, he explains.
Meditation Reduces Anxiety and Stress
Recent studies are proving that meditation can actually lower levels of the
stress hormone cortisol in our bodies. And in a new study by Zeidan, levels of
everyday anxiety decreased by a whopping 39 percent after just four 20-minute
mindfulness meditation classes. How? Being more aware of our immediate
experiences through meditation may keep us from stewing over the past or
worrying about the future.
Meditation Makes You Feel Less Moody
Many of us automatically interpret things in a negative way and assume the
worst about ourselves and others. This can cause depression, which meditation
has been shown to alleviate . “One of the reasons why meditation is effective
for mood and depression is because it helps us
not believe these
automatic thoughts that we have,” says Greeson. “It involves focusing on what’s
possible, not what’s impossible.”
Meditation Improves Your Sex Life
Your sex life could get a boost with mindfulness meditation, which enhances
the connections and size of an area of the brain called the insula that’s
important for awareness. Strengthening the insula may be what helps some women
pay better attention to arousal after meditation training—and even have better
orgasms—says Marsha Lucas, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist in Washington, D.C
Meditation Helps You Heal Faster and Live Longer
In a study last year, people who took eight weeks of
mindfulness meditation training had far fewer cases of colds and flu and less
severe infections compared to a group of non-meditators. Daniel Muller, a
doctor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who worked on this study, says
meditation may help to restore the body’s homeostatic balance. It may even help
us live longer by keeping our DNA from degrading over time, according to recent
research at the University of California, San
Francisco
