Exercising your body helps develop and strengthen your muscle plus improving your overall health. That is exactly what meditation do to your brain, meditation is you having more control over and improve the capacity of your brain plus other enormous health benefits. Since your brain controls all of you and your existence, exercising it once in a while is definitely good for your spiritual, emotional and emotional well being. In this post I will be sharing with you few of the many benefits of meditation and different studies to back it up.

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Why should you meditate?

It increases your brain size

• Just like working out can increase the size of your body, medication changes the size of your brain.
  A study conducted in havard, lead by Dr. Sara Lazer discovered that meditating for just two months brings about increases in your brain size in three different beneficial area which are ;

----- The part responsible for your learning ability and ability to retain information known as left hippocampus.

----- Posterior cingulate cortex which is responsible for your ability to control how your mind wanders.

----- And the part of your brain responsible for empathy and compassion known as temporo parietal junction.

It makes you stop feeling bad

• Medication decreases bad emotions and feelings. Also the same study and different other recent studies affirmed that there is decrease in amygdala which is the area responsible for bad feelings and emotions like stress, anxiety and fear.

One of those 'negative' emotions - stress was found to be beneficial when it is well controlled. Too much of stress can result in a serious health challenges. Medication helps in managing stress and reduces the negative side effect of stress

---According to research conducted by professor Willem Kuyken and published in Jama internal medicine. Kuyken found meditation to be

just as good as commonly prescribed anti-depressant drugs.

In addition to that , he also stated that people used in the study that meditates have 31% lesser chance of relapsing.

---Similarly, a study conducted in 2014 by Dr. Elizabeth Hoge conducted on people diagnosed with general anxiety disorder, she too discovered that meditating for 2 months reduces their anxiety symptoms dramatically.

---To crown it all up and confirm the efficacy of meditation in decreasing these negative emotions significantly, the researchers of John Hopkin published a study in Jama Internal Medicine revealing that over 19,000 studies on meditation was looked at and they also came to conclusion that medication helps ease drastically anxiety and depression.

It makes you more determined

• Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain responsible for willpower, meditation stimulate growth in this part of the brain.

---Dr. Sara Bowen in 2014 divided group of alcoholics into two smaller groups with one group performing mindfulness meditation while the other group followed the normal 12 step program. 8% of the first that performed mindfulness meditation relapsed after a year as compared to 20% of those that followed only the typical 12 steps program.

It increases concentration

• medication increases your ability to concentrate and makes you focus better.

---Dr. Catharine MacLean of the university of California, Davis gathered subjects and made them perform tasks such as spotting small differences in lines and pictures. The group of meditators also perform significantly better

---Another study conducted by professor Levy at the university of Washington, he found out that meditation increases the length of time workers were able to concentrate on a task

Enjoy Various health benefits

• it has also been found that meditation has numerous health benefits.

---A study was conducted on a group of elderly at the University of California, Los Angeles helped discovered that medication decreases the amount of c-reactive protein in the blood, this c-reactive protein is directly link with development of heart diseases. The study also found significant drop in inflammation in the body.

---Another one conducted at Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine in Boston looked at a group of hypertension patients, it was discovered that their blood pressures decreased drastically with meditation.

---The study that will probably blow your mind was the one conducted in 2010 by Nobel Prize Winner Elizabeth Blackburn who found out medication affects your body genetically. Meditation can protect the length of your telomeres (short telomeres are a marker for accelerated ageing). This translates to the fact that Meditation could have effect or slow down your ageing process.

A Source of Happiness

• The most significant and obvious benefit of meditation is that it makes you happier

---Richard Davidson in 2014 conducted a study by placing electrodes on the heads on monk who are practitioners of meditation for few years. he discovered those monks have 30 times the normal amount of gamma waves, gamma waves are linked with compassion, intelligence, self control, feeling of satisfaction and happiness in the brain.

---A study published in 2008 in Journals of Personality and Social Psychology by Professor Barbra Fredrickson stated that the

results showed that a meditation practice produced positive emotions that increased overtime as you practice on a daily basis.

There are many other benefits of meditation not researched and mentioned in this post, so it is no surprised many professionals and top performers such as professional athletes, executives, CEOs, entrepreneurs, consultants and many others are devoting their time to meditation. the benefit are enormous and I am a testifier.
So take few minutes out of your busy schedule to meditate and experience significant improvement in your brain capacity and mood among other benefits.
I will be sharing the simple techniques of meditation in the second part of the post.. watch this space.

Thank you for reading.

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