How Meditation Lengthens Telomeres
Here are five ways that meditation changes the brain, and how those changes lead to tangible benefits for you.
1. Meditation keeps your hippocampus healthy to enhance learning and memory.
The hippocapmus is a small region of the brain buried deep within the subcortex. It plays important roles in learning, emotion regulation and specifically helps with the consolidation of information, from the short-term to long-term memory.
In 2011, researchers at Harvard were among the first to demonstrate that just eight weeks of mindfulness meditation training caused significant increase in the thickness of the hippocampus.
2. Meditation tells your amygdala to chill out and helps to lower stress levels.
The same team of Harvard researchers also found that mindfulness meditation decreases brain cell volume in the amygdala, the part of our brain responsible for fear, anxiety and stress.
These changes matched with the participants’ self-reports of their stress levels, demonstrating how changes in the brain correlate with subjective perception and feelings as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment