How does Meditation Affect Your Brain?

Meditation is an ancient practice that encourages a heightened state of awareness and focused attention. The beautiful thing about meditation is that anyone can practice it, wherever you are and for however long you want.

It’s a very personal practice that you can adapt to suit you, with a range of different techniques to choose from. During meditation, the idea is to eliminate your stream of consciousness and chaotic thoughts that may be causing stress, resulting in a whole host of benefits.

Some of the most common benefits are:

• Gaining a new perspective on stressful situations

• Building skills to manage your stress

• Increasing self-awareness

• Focusing on the present

• Reducing negative emotions

• Increasing imagination and creativity

• Increasing patience and tolerance

The more popular mediation has become, the more research has been put into understanding the effects of meditation. Due to this research, we can now understand why and how meditation has such powerful outcomes.

So how does meditation directly affect the brain?

Meditation reduces activity in the brains ‘Me Centre’

The ‘Me Centre’ (aka, Default Mode Network) is active in the brain when we don’t have much to think about, so our minds are just wondering from thought to thought. Wandering thoughts are often about the past, future or hypothetical situations that we have no control over. Wandering thoughts are closely associated with being unhappy or stressed. Yale University conducted several studies that showed, people who practice mindfulness meditation on a regular basis, reduce the activity in the ‘Me Centre’ of the brain. Therefore, reducing these wandering thoughts. 

Meditation Helps Preserve the Ageing Brain

A study conducted by UCLA shows that, people who had been meditating consistently for 20 years had more grey matter throughout their brains than people who had not meditated. Although older participants had some volume loss of the brain than younger participants there was still a noticeable difference between the ageing brains of people that meditated and the ageing brains that hadn’t been practicing meditation. 

Meditation Could Lead to Volume Changes in the Brain

Sara Lazar at Harvard conducted a study investigating the effects of Mindfulness Meditation-Based Stress Reduction over an eight-week period. The results showed that the participants that had practiced this meditation had an increase in thickness of the Hippocampus. The Hippocampus is an area of the brain associated with learning, memory and emotion regulation. Not only this but there was actually a reduction in volume of the Amygdala, the area of the brain that controls fear, anxiety and stress.

As we can see the effects of meditation are extremely positive and we now have the evidence to show for post-meditation feeling. If you’ve been sceptical of meditation in the past, I hope that this encourages you to give it a go. Find what works for you, you might be surprised by the results!