Meditation has been proven in hundreds of unrelated scientific studies across the globe to have significant benefits to health, happiness, learning, creativity, and elimination of stress, anger, and substance abuse.
Health Benefits of Meditation
Meditation offers many health benefits for all types of ailments and diseases, including both physical and psychological ailments. Some of the positive effects of meditation include stress reduction, increased feelings of inner peace and great joy, improved personal and professional relationships, original creative ideas, and reduction of the biological aging processes by about ten years.
Sources of more detailed material include many publications including books, magazines, websites with both text and video health data which are too numerous to list and are continually increasing. Meditation has been shown to be an important part of prevention and cure of diseases.
Meditation improves immunity and memory functions, increases air flow to the lungs, decreases high blood pressure, removes depression, anxiety, and anger, especially in older individuals and people with disabilities. It can also greatly increase other positive changes in personality and in the user’s spiritual life.
Silent meditation easily eliminates harmful stress which can cause not only problems with health but also in every other aspect of life. The meditation replaces stress and negative problems with joy and happiness, inner peace, and positive solutions. After getting accustomed to it, meditation can even be used with eyes open and within minutes, but is best used as instructed, especially when first learning to meditate.
Scientific Findings About How Meditation Works
Levels of the healthy hormones, including the anti-aging hormone DHEA, (dehydroepiandrosterone) produced by the adrenal glands greatly increases during meditation. Dehydroepiandrosterone is released while in the delta brainwave state of 4-8 cps (cycles per second), and thus is rarely significantly increased unless increased through meditation. Dehydroepiandrosterone is significantly decreased in the body by about age 30 and continues to diminish with advancing age.
If an individual suffers from serious disease, such as immune system problem, some forms of cancer, or illnesses such as osteoporosis, etc, DHEA levels will be extremely low regardless of age. Just as the systemic levels of oxygen and alkalinity are low in individuals with serious diseases, and high in healthy individuals, low or high DHEA levels also reveal and determine immune function and physiological age.
Other hormones that increase during meditation include the natural painkiller endorphins; the antioxidant sleep-aid melatonin; serotonin which influences happiness, headaches and anxiety; growth hormone HGH which also protects against muscle loss, obesity, and brittle bones.
In addition to increasing levels of healthy hormones, meditation also reduces levels of cortisol and adrenaline hormones that are associated with increased risks of heart attacks, strokes, and pulmonary embolisms.
Blood clotting problems also affects the ability of cancer to metastasize and can cause other cancer complications. These serious health risks need to be monitored by a physician. Regular check ups with a physician, and meditation, healthy dietary habits and exercise can ensure that the essentials of maintaining health are addressed.
Meditation is one of the most effective methods of reducing stress
Meditation improves health, happiness, concentration, perception, and causes the brain to have a more positive outlook. Meditation shows the user how to learn from negative situations to help others, and how to easily improve his or her own personal life also.
Other results of meditation include significant elimination of addictions to illegal drugs, alcohol, and tobacco. Meditation has proven more effective than standard treatments at reducing addictions to substance abuse. When using meditation for treatment, the relapse rate with traditional methods of treatment is replaced by even more improvement over time.
Meditation can help anyone who is willing to give the small amount of time it takes to completely relax for about ten minutes twice a day. It does take some time to learn to set aside ten or 20 minutes to completely relax but it is definitely worth the minutes spent. Considering meditation is such a flexible activity and reduction of stress can be achieved in just twenty minutes per day, meditation becomes a very valuable aid for improving every aspect of life.
Here is a 20-minute guided mindfulness meditation to help you make meditation a daily habit.