When you think of meditation, what comes to mind? For many of us, we picture someone sitting in a lotus position, eyes closed, possibly on a beach at sunrise. Meditation doesn’t require you to wear special clothing or have a beach nearby, nor does it require an hour of quiet concentration. Meditation does improve your overall health, and it’s fairly easy to start.
- It really can change your brain. Multiple scientific studies support what practitioners have known for thousands of years: Meditation helps alleviate stress and depression, as well as improve overall psychological well-being. A UCLA study has discovered that those who have meditated steadily for an average of 20 years had more gray matter in their brains, thus helping preserve the brain as they aged. And a 2011 study from Harvard discovered that a mere eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction improved the areas of the brain that deal with learning and memory, as well as emotion regulation, as well as decreases in the amygdala, which controls our fear and stress.
- It makes you kinder. Sara H. Konrath from the University of Michigan has discovered that since the early 1990s, concern for others’ welfare has dropped significantly. Meditation helps to improve empathy and compassion for others, taking you out of your own needs and thinking of others, something that really does require some brain power. Meditation refocuses the brain on the current moment and helps lessen feelings of shared pain (which can cause someone to shut down emotionally) but keeps the feelings of compassion. A school in Baltimore has even begun to use meditation instead of typical detention for their young students, with solid results.
- It helps you focus. In a world where all of our gadgets have made us impatient to read an article longer than a page or to wait more than ten seconds for a website to load and we constantly have distractions, meditation for just a few weeks can improve both memory and focus. Our minds tend to wander; meditation again helps to change the brain, quieting that activity and potentially improving cognitive abilities. Because meditation requires one to focus on a specific object or even just breathing or counting while clearing the mind of other thoughts, it retrains the brain to do that more often.
If you want to start meditating, use an app such as Headspace or Insight Timer to begin — you can even reap benefits in just a few minutes. Try what others have done for ages and reap the benefits of a calmer, kinder self. Reach out to the experienced recruiters at Medical Professionals for health and wellness or employment tips today!
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