Benefits of Meditation

I’m a scientist at heart. That means, generally speaking, I value proven peer-reviewed evidence to make arguments for a topic. When I first was challenged to do meditation with the Miracle Morning, I balked at the idea. Meditation is for Buddhist monks in their quest for enlightenment or hippies that aren’t trying to accomplish anything but sit around, smoke weed and dream about life. Either way, it didn’t seem like a productive use of my time. I can’t be the only one who had this initial thought when meditation and mindfulness are brought up, right?

Meditation has grown to be a hot topic within the elite athletes, top performing business professionals and human biohackers a like.  The benefits these individuals claimed couldn’t help but raise skeptical eyebrows from the likes of me. In order for me to start spending my time meditating, I had to start with some research to put some science behind my efforts and allow myself to understand what the benefits truly were. The resulting research only confused me further and you want to know why? The mysteries of the brain have only recently begun to unfold.

President George H.W. Bush designated the 1990’s the “Decade of the Brain” and “enhanced public awareness to the benefits derived from brain research.” That proclamation leads to the creation of tools and research methods that laid the foundation for brain research in the future. Obama’s administration strengthened that endeavor with the BRAIN Initiative (Brain Research throughAdvancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) in 2013 with the goal of “revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain.”

It’s important to understand these limitations because practically every abstract that I read included stipulations that further research is needed once better tools and methods of research were discovered. That’s not to say they were not able to find some statistical correlations of possible benefits, however. I will (very briefly) outline those benefits and their paper’s here.

Increase Focus

Article: MacLean, K. A. et al. (2010) ‘Intensive Meditation Training Improves Perceptual Discrimination and Sustained Attention’, Psychological Science, 21(6), pp. 829–839. doi: 10.1177/0956797610371339.

Study: This study was completed by 13 researchers most from the University of California. It was lead by Dr. Katherine MacLean who now works at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine. They took 60 volunteers and had them pay for an intense meditation retreat at the Shambhala Mountain Center in Colorado. I’m serious when I mean intense, the retreat had volunteers meditating for 5+ hours a day. They had half of the volunteers wait to attend the retreat and used them as the control, aka they all wanted to meditate more and more effectively but only half of them actually were. The results were pretty clear. They had the volunteers put through a task of “sustained visual attention” where they had to focus on lines and determine if the lines were of different size or the same.

Results: The group that meditated produced improvements in “visual discrimination” that they attributed to “increases in perceptual sensitivity and improved vigilance.” Meditation can improve focus, although it might take a lot of it.

Builds Postive relationships

Article: Fredrickson, Barbara L et al. “Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources.” Journal of personality and social psychology vol. 95,5 (2008): 1045-1062. doi:10.1037/a0013262

Study: Study of 139 volunteers were split to randomly assigned groups, half of which participated in six 60-minute loving-kindness meditation group sessions where they were given instruction and a CD to perform at least 5 LKM at home a week. The theory was that positive emotions compound over time to build a variety of consequential personal resources, the broaden-and-build model from the studies author Barbara Fredrickson.

Results: Those that participated in this meditation practice proved to increase their “daily experiences of positive emotions, which, in turn, increases in a wide range of personal resources (e.g., increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, decreased illness symptoms). I think the most exciting piece of the study was that this resulted in “increase life satisfaction and reduced depressive symptoms. ”

Lowers Blood Pressure

Article: Dusek JA, Hibberd PL, Buczynski Bet al. Stress management versus lifestyle modification on systolic hypertension and medication elimination: A randomized trial. J Altern Complement Med. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18315510

Study: 122 volunteers were placed into 2 groups to determine if lifestyle changes plus relaxation response mediation had a significant difference in the elimination of antihypertensive medication versus just lifestyle changes alone. They were testing in how the relaxation response increased the formation of nitric oxide, which in the blood, helps open up the blood vessels.

Results: 44 of the 61 in the relaxation response group were eligible for “supervised medication elimination.” Which after controlling for “differences in characteristics at the start of medication elimination” proved a odds ratio of 4.3 times more likely to eliminate an antihypertensive medication. This was not a singular instance however, the meditation practice requires daily allocation of time in order to maintain the results. Amazingly in further study beyond this article is what that lowering of blood pressure can mean for overall health leading to better handling of stress and cardiovascular disease.

Increase the neural processing of information

Article: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00034/full

Studies: 100 subjects were split by age, handedness, and sex into 2 groups and given MRI scans. The 50 meditators had practiced their craft between 4 and 46 years for an average of 20 years. They then compared the two groups scans by calculating the “mean curvature across thousands of vertices on each individual central surface mesh modal.” Which I took as they knew what they were doing and to stop questioning the brain scientists methods.  They used that mean curvature to measure gyrification, which is the “folding of the cortex.” There are significant studies done to strengthen the theory that gyrification leads to faster information processing.

Results: They found significant differences between the two group with higher levels of gyrification (brain folding) in the meditators. The most interesting of the findings was the correlation between the increase gyrification and length of practice, however.

So begins my practice

Armed with the knowledge that I was looking at an increased focus, compounding positive experiences, lower blood pressure and increased neural processing I set out on my own meditation journey.

I started by using it in the morning as part of the miracle morning to get my mind prepared for the coming workday but quickly figured out that I enjoyed it better at the end of the night to calm my mind before bed. After repetitive meditation for months, before bed, I found that I enjoyed the quick switch it allowed me to have on my wondering, running work mind. It allowed me to turn it off and settle for bed. After falling in that habit I started adding a quick 5 min meditation after lunch. It allowed me to control my daily anxiety and stress that came with my work. I was calmer, making clearer decisions and not feeling the weight of the day. I truly felt a sense of control.

After 127 sessions I can confidently say I am hooked. It allows me to have an edge and gain control of my feelings, emotions, and intake of information. I encourage you to give it a try. I use headspace as my guide and have begun using it for my runs, to get to sleep and to take a mental break during the day. I believe that as a leader I must be able to lead with mindfulness. Harvard business review discusses how to incorporate mindfulness into your company because of its importance.

If you enjoyed this post please like it. I would love to hear from you also: what are some benefits that you have gained from beginning a meditation practice?