Better Health Through Meditation
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Meditation is gaining mainstream acceptance as a beneficial preventative health program. It is one of the better studied alternative therapies and has been shown to provide a wide range of health benefits.
More and more doctors are recommending meditation as an effective stress buster and useful support for patients with many types of chronic and acute conditions.
When you meditate, you quickly move into a deep level of relaxation. This enables the body to re-energise itself and shift into its natural state of optimum health. The beneficial effects that meditation brings have both short-term and long-term implications.
Researchers have shown that meditation lowers levels of stress hormones.In particular, while meditating, your cortisol level drops and stays low for hours afterward. . Cortisol is one of the most important stress hormones. It is present in your blood in small amounts all the time, but when you experience stress, your body produces much more of it. High quantities of cortisol produces unhealthy and unpleasant effects. Getting it out of your blood stream, in contrast, has beneficial and positive effects.
When you meditate, there is an increase in the amount of alpha brain waves and this helps to produce feelings of calmness and tranquility and can result in lower level of lactic acid in the blood. As high levels of lactic acid are related to anxiety, this can explain why meditation can reduce anxious feelings. When you meditate, your breathing slows down and becomes more rhythmic and this also helps to invoke a sense of stillness that is conducive to managing anxiety.
There’s even clinical evidence to indicate that meditation can help with weight loss. When your cortisol levels are high, your body has a greater tendency to store fat – especially in your stomach. It can encourage you to eat high-calorie food. The Journal of the American Dietetic Association reported that stress in general is a “primary predictor of relapse and overeating.” And they concluded that meditation is an effective method for managing the kind of stress that causes weight gain.
Meditation has been found to be particularly helpful for the heart. Meditators have been found to have improved blood circulation, as well as a lowered heart rate, which places less demands on the heart. These results have been demonstrated in many rigorous scientific studies, a few of which are mentioned below.
A 1998 study published in Psychosomatic Medicine showed that people who practiced meditation had lower levels of lipid peroxide than those who didn’t. Lipid peroxide can contribute to atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) and other chronic diseases associated with aging. A 1999 study published in the same journal showed that people who practiced meditation had lower blood pressure immediately after meditating than did the control group.
An article published in the American Heart Association journal Stroke in 2000 demonstrated the effects of teaching meditation to people suffering from atherosclerosis . Over a period of time, the meditators showed a marked decrease in the thickness of their artery walls. The improvement could potentially bring about an 11 percent decrease in the risk of heart attack and an 8 percent to 15 percent decrease in the risk of stroke.
In 2004, the American Journal of Hypertension featured the results of a study showing significant lowering of blood pressure in a group of meditators compared to a control group who didn’t meditate. The study also reported a 23% reduction in usage of antihypertensive drugs between the group of meditators and the other group.
Modern meditation methods, such as the MindSpa Meditation Machine mean that attaining a deep state of relaxation cam be easy and automatic and that means that you can quickly begin to achieve improvements in your health.
Find out more about meditation and how a MindSpa Meditation Machine can help you.
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