Benefits of Meditation
If you plan to start on a meditation course or are just curious about how you could benefit from meditation, you will first need to be clear about what you should expect from it. Meditation benefits different people in different ways. Here are some of the most common meditation benefits which you are likely to get through constant practice and commitment.
Meditation makes your emotional state positive
Regular meditation results in an increase in activity in the part of the brain that is connected to lower levels of anxiety and a balanced emotional state. As a result, anxiety levels come down in you and your emotional state becomes more positive. Practicing meditation for an hour and three times every week can lead to positive changes in your mood. This is one of the most commonly known meditation benefits. This is especially true among those who had high stress levels and resorted to meditation.
Meditation improves visuospatial skills
Visuospatial skills refer to a person’s ability to understanding and conceptualizing spatial relationships and visual representations. By continual meditation sessions, you can effect an improvement in your visuospatial abilities.
Meditation increases the number of grey cells in your brain
Engaging yourself in meditation regularly can lead to an increase in your brain’s grey cells. Recent research has suggested that meditating for an average of 40 minutes a day will help increase grey cells in the brain. Meditation, when practiced regularly, will also help to increase visual, auditory and sensory abilities and can help reduce the pace of aging of the brain.
Meditation can increase concentration
The ability to increase attention and focus are also two of the common meditation benefits. Since our capacity of attention is limited, in instances when we have to deal with more than one stimulus at the same time, we tend to miss them frequently. One of the popular forms of meditation known as Vipassana meditation focuses on controlling mental distraction along with improving sensory alertness. By regularly practicing meditation, a person can keep his mind focused on the task at hand and has more control than other people over distracting thoughts that may flit through his mind.
Meditation helps deal with various disorders
Meditation could prove to be an important remedy for people with conditions like attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), depression and anxiety disorder, conditions which are characterized by extreme brooding over thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand and a tendency to be distracted from it. Several studies have been conducted to show that meditation can have significant benefits in these conditions.
Meditation helps in better pain management
Practicing Zen meditation results in the thickening of certain areas around your cortex. This can lead to lesser sensitivity to pain and can be useful for better pain management. It is also useful in preventing age-related lowering of the number of grey cells in the brain or for similar conditions where grey cells in the brain are compromised, like during a stroke.
Author Bio: Teisha Mahabir specializes in writing articles about health, diet, longevity and health specialists like Brenda Rusnak. Brenda Rusnak is a health care specialist who writes about health-aging and prevention. For more information about healthy-aging and Brenda Rusnak, check her out on BoomersForever.
Category: Advice
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