Do you know that your pulse rate can drop down to below fifty beats per minute and that too without medications? While the normal bpm is considered to be sixty to eighty, a bpm less than fifty without any medications is a strong indication of that person’s long life.
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This is the summary of research conducted on 6,733 people and following them closely for ten long years. Now we all wish to know, how this low heart rate can be maintained without medications. Isn’t that correct? The answer is through “MEDITATION”.
We all know that an anxious brain leads to heart palpitations and fluttering feelings. Meditation is the technique to sit, detaching from the outside world, giving yourself a pause, focusing only on the present moment and so slow down. As your mind calms down, it signals your heart that it should also slow down.
Meditation finds its roots in Indian history, with the name of DHYANA YOGA.
Meditation has measurable effects on three areas of your brain:
Prefrontal Cortex: Responsible for decision makingAmygdala: Controls emotional responses like stress, fear and anxietyHippocampus: Responsible for memory and learning
Here are some ways in which meditation changes the brain structure itself and more.
Brain Structure changes:
Meditation is the practice of focusing on one thing. By doing so for an extended period and training yourself to do so consistently, our brain structure changes.
Yes, that’s correct! As when we practice yoga consistently, we tend to change the physical structure of our outer body, similarly, when we practice meditation consistently, the physical structure of our brain can change too.
We will see further, how the various parts of the brain change for regular meditators.
Reduction of Stress:
Amygdala is the part of the brain that controls our emotional response to various emotions including stress, fear and anxiety. It’s been found that regular meditators’ time of recovery from stress is greatly reduced compared to non-meditators, leaving them much calmer and less prone to negative effects. This is because the amygdala appears to shrink by regular meditation.
You start taking better decisions:
Single-focused attention in meditation decreases our mind/body connection to stress and increases the area of the brain associated with attention span.
The pre-frontal cortex grows the more time is spent in meditation. This means you take better decisions and stay more focused.
You get excellent Memory Power:
An 8-week mindfulness training results as published by NCBI in 2011, showed that the gray matter thickness of the hippocampus increases. This means an increase in memory and learning power. Additionally, because meditation involves single-pointed focus and the practice of pushing out mental distractions, the ability to access memories is greatly increased.
Improved Focus:
A study by the Journal of Neuroscience on 11 April 2012 compared the brain scans of a group of people who meditated to those who did not. The researchers found that those who meditated showed more stability in their ventral posteromedial cortex — the region of the brain linked to spontaneous thoughts and mind wandering.
This suggests that those who meditate can rein in their wandering thoughts better than those who don’t.
Slows Ageing:
A 2015 study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found that meditation might preserve the brain’s gray matter, which controls how fast you process information. This would stall or even reverse the usual cognitive declines that come with aging.
In this study, researchers compared the brain scans of 50 people who meditated regularly over 20 years with the brain scans of those who didn’t. Both groups showed a loss of gray matter as they aged, but there was less of a decline for those who meditated.
So, with all these benefits, why not start your meditation routine today?
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Meditation Changes Your Brain! Read to Find How… was originally published in Mindful Mental Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.