6 unusual effects meditation has on your body
It doesn’t take much searching to find some of the more widely known benefits of meditation and becoming deeply connected on a spiritual level. But for those of you unfamiliar with it, meditation can help with a wide range of mental and physical health issues and is great for forming a deeper connection with yourself, those around you, and humanity at large.
I know I’m not going to go into details and this covers quite a wide range of topics but the sheer potential of being mentally healthy is enormous and a whole article could be written about each of these benefits so I’ll leave the details for today leave behind.
What I am trying to cover in this article are the lesser known benefits of being mentally healthy. You might call them the unsung benefits of connecting with your divine purpose.
1) Reduces the need to sleep
It is well known that meditation is great for helping to regulate sleep and whilst I am not promoting people to sleep less, it may well be the case that you need to sleep less as a result of meditation.
In a study conducted by the University of Kentucky, participants were tested under 4 conditions: Control, Nap, Meditation, and Sleep Deprivation plus Meditation.
The research showed that meditation produces at least a short-term cognitive improvement, even in novice meditators. In long-term practitioners, who spend a lot of time in meditation, there is a correlation with the need to sleep significantly less compared to people of the same demographic group who do not meditate.
This is not to say that meditation will replace sleep or compensate for a lack of sleep, but it is a possibility.
2) Improves your immune system
Many (most) diseases are born in the mind. This is not to say that most diseases are not real, but they are simply preventable. Stress, lack of sleep and poor emotional regulation all affect your body, not only on a psychological level, but also on a physical level.
A study from Harvard Medical School showed that practitioners of yoga and meditation had improved the production, consumption and resilience of mitochondria, improving your immune system and resilience to stress.
3) Improved sense of touch
Researchers from the Ruhr-University Bochum and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich conducted studies on experienced Zen monks that showed an improved sense of touch.
“To quantitatively assess the sense of touch, researchers measured the so-called ‘two-point discrimination threshold’. This marker indicates how far apart two stimuli must be to be distinguished as two separate sensations. After the finger meditation, performance improved on average by 17 percent. By comparison: the tactile acuity of visually impaired people is 15 to 25 percent higher than that of normally sighted people, because their sense of touch is used so intensively to compensate for the reduced visual information. Therefore, the changes brought about by meditation are comparable to the changes achieved by long-term intensive training.”
4) Improved breathing
This may seem obvious to some, but many people don’t understand how important it is to improve the quality of your breathing.
According to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you have the foundations of life that must be fulfilled in order to progress. These start with your physiological needs: food, water, sex, sleep, going to the toilet and of course breathing.
With most forms of meditation you consciously focus on your breathing, which causes your lungs to fill with air. The more you practice this, the more it becomes part of your unconscious mind, leading to better, deeper breathing patterns.
5) Higher pain threshold and resilience to disease
Meditation takes you to another place, but the practice alone is good. It’s just practice.
If you can take the conscious effort you show during your sessions into your life, it will have a major impact on their quality.
What this means in relation to pain is that when you have strong mental health, you are able to shift your conscious focus to other things when you experience pain.
A study from the University of Montreal exposed 13 experienced meditators and 13 non-meditators to equal levels of pain using heat while measuring their brain waves. What they found is that the experienced practitioners showed less pain.
The experienced meditators actually reported less pain than showed up on their scans, so even though their brains had received the same level of pain, they felt it less in their minds.
6) Helps you avoid overwhelm
There is a story that many people tell themselves: “I am a great multitasker.” In general this is not true. It’s actually very difficult to multitask unless you have a brain that is unusually constructed or damaged!
The purpose of meditation is to focus; you do this by focusing on your breathing or counting or whatever you are doing. This translates into a more purposeful approach to daily tasks, increasing productivity and preventing overwhelm.
Research from the University of Washington and the University of Arizona showed:
“Initial results from a study investigating whether training in meditation or relaxation can improve office workers’ ability to multitask on a computer more effectively and/or with less stress. HR staff received eight weeks of training in mindfulness meditation or body relaxation techniques, and were given a stressful multitasking test both before and after the training. (A third group, a control group, received no intervention during the eight-week period, but was tested both before and after this period.) The results indicate that total task time and errors did not differ significantly between the three groups. However, the meditation group reported lower stress levels and showed better memory for the tasks they performed; They also switched tasks less often and stayed focused on tasks longer.”
Thanks for reading, let me know what you think by leaving a comment below, and if you think your friends, social media followers or subscribers could benefit from it, go ahead and share!
References:
1. http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/mindfulness
2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC
3. https://hms.harvard.edu/news/genetics/
4. http://aktuell.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/pm
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hie
6. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3