Meditation benefits physical and mental health in many ways. More than stress reduction, meditation can help you think better, feel happier, and live longer.
The human brain thinks thoughts. That’s what it does — to the tune of 50,000 per day. (1)
And for most people, around 70% of their mental conversation is negative. (2)
All this bad thinking isn’t doing us any good when it comes to our health or happiness.
The human brain’s endless chatter has given rise to the nickname “monkey mind.”
Gaining control of your thoughts has always been hard.
But our 24/7, multitasking, sensory-bombarding world makes it even harder.
The ancient practice of meditation can quiet your mind and help control negative thinking.
Meditation is often thought of as mainly a way to reduce stress.
And while it does an excellent job at that, it can do so much more.
Meditation can make you healthier, happier, and even help you live longer!
Let’s take a look at the evidence-based health benefits of meditation.
Then we’ll take a look at the most popular kinds of meditation and give you some tips to get you started.
Look Who’s Meditating — Meditation Goes Mainstream
A National Health Interview Survey revealed that some 20 million U.S. adults meditate for their health. (3)
Meditation has become a mainstream relaxation technique.
It’s been reported on favorably by prestigious medical institutions such as the Mayo Clinic, National Institutes of Health, Harvard Medical School, and Carnegie Mellon University (4, 5, 6, 7)
Corporations like Google, General Mills, Target, Apple, Nike, Procter & Gamble and AOL offer structured meditation programs for executives and encourage employees at all levels to do it. (8)
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Google invited the most renowned living Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, to launch their Mindful Lunches. (9)
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Athletes are always looking for ways to get an edge.
Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, and Derek Jeter are some of the more famous athletes who include meditation as a tool in their professional arsenal. (10)
Some entire teams are encouraged to meditate.
The Seattle Seahawks use meditation as one of their secret weapons that has made them one of the top NFL teams. (11, 12)
Even Washington DC is getting in on the benefits of meditation.
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Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan is a Catholic, football-playing guy from America’s heartland.
And he’s has written a book on meditation, A Mindful Nation: How a Simple Practice Can Help Us Reduce Stress, Improve Performance, and Recapture the American Spirit
Ryan finds “Starting the day with a little bit of quiet time changes the whole complexion of the rest of the day. It’s almost like warming up before you go into an athletic event.” (13)
The US Marines use meditation to help troops deal with stressful situations they face on the job and to overcome PTSD. (14, 15)
Some of the most successful people on the planet attribute their success in part to their regular meditation practice.
As you might expect, the entertainment field is loaded with people who meditate.
That Paul McCartney, Sting, Madonna, and Russell Brand meditate is no big surprise.
But you might not expect shock jock Howard Stern and tough guy Clint Eastwood to be fans of meditation.
Many extremely successful business people including Arianna Huffington, Oprah Winfrey, Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson find the time to meditate.
ABC news anchor Dan Harris, who famously had an anxiety attack on national TV, was originally a huge skeptic.
“Until recently, I thought of meditation as the exclusive province of bearded swamis, unwashed hippies, and fans of John Tesh music,” Dan Harris writes in his book 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works
Now he’s an outspoken proponent of meditation which was instrumental in his overcoming anxiety and panic attacks.
If you’ve never tried meditation or tried it without success, read our article on meditation for beginners.
How to Reduce Stress With Meditation
Of all the health benefits of meditation, stress reduction is probably the most widely known and readily accepted by both mainstream medicine and the general public.
Harvard Medical School teaches seminars on meditation for stress reduction. (16)
Before we look at how to reduce stress with meditation, let’s examine why stress is so bad for you anyway.
Once you understand how truly damaging stress is, we think you’ll be more motivated to change your relationship with it.
Stress Is a Killer
Stress puts you at greater risk for every major disease you hope you never get including cancer, heart disease, depression, Alzheimer’s, and even premature death. (17, 18)
Chronic stress leads to anxiety, poor decision making, insomnia, and memory loss.
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Stress can literally cause your brain to shrink.
And that’s as harmful as it sounds.
There are two fascinating mechanisms by which meditation stops the damage of stress in its tracks — by reducing the stress hormone cortisol and by increasing the anti-aging enzyme telomerase.
The Dangers of Cortisol
We’re all familiar with adrenaline.
This stress hormone is produced on an “as needed” basis in moments of extreme excitement or danger.
Cortisol, on the other hand, streams through your system all day long.
And that’s why it’s so dangerous.
Excess cortisol leads to a host of problems including anxiety, depression, digestive upset, heart disease, sleep disorders, obesity, and memory loss. (19)
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Cortisol creates a surplus of the neurotransmitter glutamate. (20)
Excess glutamate destroys cells in the hippocampus, the part of your brain that stores memories.
While stress is destroying your hippocampus, it is also building up the fear center of your brain, the amygdala.
Stress creates more neural connections in this part of your brain, which makes you more fearful causing a vicious cycle of MORE stress.
Meditation can stop the vicious stress cycle by reducing levels of cortisol. (21, 22)
Telomeres: How Stress Causes Disease and Aging
Stress actually leads to premature aging on a cellular level, causing cells in both your body and your brain to commit suicide prematurely.
To understand how this happens, we need to take a look at telomeres — endcaps on your chromosomes, similar to the plastic tips of shoelaces.
Every time a cell divides, the telomeres get a little shorter.
Telomeres act as a built-in clock with a suicide switch.
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When they reach a critically shortened length, they tell the cell to stop dividing and the cell dies.
Telomere length may be the most important indicator of biological age and disease risk. (23, 24)
It’s thought that if you could stop telomere shrinkage, you could you stop aging and avoid age-related diseases.
Meditation increases activity of the anti-aging enzyme telomerase which keeps telomere length long. (25, 26)
Other Proven Ways Meditation Enhances Your Life
Over 1,000 studies have been published proving the health benefits of meditation. (27)
Meditation can make you happier, smarter, and more resilient to life’s ups and downs.
Regular meditators experience improved focus and concentration, greater creativity, reduced stress, better sleep, improved immune function and resistance to diseases of all kinds.
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Meditation can even help you live longer.
Research shows it can actually decrease your biological age by 12 years. (28, 29)
If the drug companies could bottle the benefits of meditation, it would be their new best-selling drug.
Brain Benefits of Meditation
Meditation puts your brain in a desirable brainwave state which enhances your ability to learn, improves focus and concentration, inspires creativity, and puts you in a state of deep relaxation.
It enhances the brain’s ability to regenerate new brain cells and new neural connections.
Practiced over time, quieting the mind through meditation actually changes the structure of the brain.
People who meditate have stronger neural connections between different parts of the brain.
Their brains show less atrophy due to age and have more neural synapses.
It actually increases the size of the brain.
Here are some of the scientifically proven cognitive, emotional, and brain health benefits you can expect to experience when you meditate regularly.
Cognitive Benefits of Meditation
- Improved learning ability and memory (30)
- Increased focus and attention (31)
- Increased productivity (32)
- Increased intelligence (33, 34)
- Enhanced creativity (35, 36)
- Reduced feelings of distraction (37, 38)
- More efficient processing of information (39)
- Improved ability to multitask (40 41)
- Increased ability to solve problems creatively (42)
- Improved decision making (43)
- Increased levels of dopamine, the neurotransmitter responsible for focus and motivation (44)
- Increased willpower (45)
- Increased performance at work (46)
- Increased mental sharpness as you age (47)
Emotional Benefits of Meditation
- Increase in positive emotions (48, 49)
- Improved control over random unwanted thoughts (50)
- Increased self-compassion and compassion towards others (51, 52)
- Enhanced mood (53)
- Reduced stress and improved reaction to stress (54, 55)
- Reduction in feelings of anxiety (56)
- Decreased feelings of loneliness, especially in seniors (57)
- Increased feelings of being socially connected (58)
- Increased happiness due to elevated levels of serotonin, the “happy molecule” (59)
- Increased emotional stability (60, 61)
- Increased job satisfaction, better relationships with co-workers (62)
- Decreased tendency to worry (63)
- Increased mental well-being and happiness (64)
- Enhanced intimate relationships (65)
- Reduced anger and aggression (66, 67, 68)
- Reduced risk of suicide (69)
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Brain Health Benefits of Meditation
- Long-term reduction of symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and agoraphobia (70, 71)
- Reduced depression and rumination, even for those with lifelong mood disorders (72)
- Significant reduction in symptoms of adult ADHD (73)
- Protection against mental illness including depression (74, 75, 76)
- Increased blood flow to the brain (77)
- Reduced reaction to fears and phobias (78, 79)
- Reduced brain atrophy from aging (80)
- Slowed progression of Alzheimer’s disease (81)
- Improved connections in the brain (82)
- Improved ability to overcome addictive substances (drugs, alcohol, and nicotine) (83, 84)
- Increased brain volume, especially of gray matter (85)
- Increased size of the hippocampus, the seat of memory (86)
- Increased thickness of the cortex, the area of the brain associated with attention (87)
Proven Health Benefits of Meditation
We’ve pretty well covered the brain-related benefits of meditation.
Now let’s look at what meditation can do for the rest of you.
Anti-Aging & Longevity
One of the most exciting findings about meditation is that it can slow down the rate of cellular aging. (88)
It does this by increasing activity of the anti-aging enzyme called telomerase. (89)
The presence of telomerase keeps those protective endcaps on your telomeres long.
Another way meditation is anti-aging is by increasing levels of DHEA.
DHEA is a master hormone associated with youth and vigor — levels naturally decrease with age.
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However, DHEA supplements have not lived up to their anti-aging promise. (90)
Meditation can keep you young by increasing your body’s own levels of DHEA naturally. (91)
Cancer
Studies reveal that meditation can improve cancer patients’ quality of life.
It can relieve anxiety, stress, fatigue, and general mood and sleep disturbances. (92)
But besides improving mental well-being, there’s evidence that meditation can fight cancer at a cellular level by increasing telomere length and affecting gene expression. (93, 94)
Colds and Flu
The next time you feel a cold or the flu coming on, meditate!
Meditation can reduce the incidence, duration and severity of cold and flu symptoms. (95)
It boost your overall immune system and can help breathing in people with upper respiratory infections. (96, 97, 98)
Fatigue
Meditating can reduce fatigue even for those with chronic fatigue syndrome. (99)
Patients who use mind/body medicine practices such as meditation triple their chances of improvement over the next year, compared to patients who didn’t. (100)
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Fibromyalgia
Meditation significantly reduces perceived stress, sleep disturbance, and symptom severity in women with fibromyalgia. (101)
Heart Disease
Taking up meditation may be better at lowering your risk of heart disease than changing your diet!
By taking a meditation class, one group of subjects reduced their risk of heart attack, stroke and death by 48% over the group that changed their diet. (102)
The American Heart Associations’ official stance is that meditation is modestly successful at lowering blood pressure while other authorities cite significant reduction. (103, 104, 105)
HIV
By decreasing stress while increasing immune function, meditation can slow the progression of the HIV virus. (106)
Pain & Inflammation
Meditation has been found very effective at reducing pain.
One study found it’s more effective than morphine by almost two-fold. (107, 108)
It reduces inflammation, even down to the level of altering expression of pro-inflammatory genes. (109, 110, 111)
These genetic changes are measurable after only 8 hours of meditation in those who are experienced practitioners. (112)
Sleep
Insomnia is a huge issue affecting the health and well-being of millions.
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Lack of sleep can lead to a host of problems including memory loss, mood disorders, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. (113)
Meditation improves both quality and quantity of sleep. (114)
Benefits of Meditation: The Bottom Line
Deciding whether you should meditate is definitely a no brainer.
The evidence is clear — regular meditation can make you happier and healthier.
It can even help you live longer.
Some of the busiest and most successful people on the planet make meditation a top priority.
We hope you’ll decide to, too.
