Meditation for the Mental Health

Do you like to meditate? It makes you feel at ease and you are convinced that the sense of calm it produces helps you control the daily challenges of your life. There can be some instances, that you don't keep your daily practice of sitting quietly for 10 or 15 minutes. Anyhow these are the times in your life when you experience more stress.

Stress affects all of us. Is there any single person who doesn't get stressed? But unfortunately, it is a big reason for the illness. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in fact, up to 90 percent of doctor visits in the U.S. may be stress related. Meditation is an antitoxin to stress, just as aspirin can lose a headache. Regular practice can be a major boost to health.

It calms the nervous system. It's good for the immune system and also good for your heart; it helps to produce nitric oxide that's good for your laughing in the arteries, dilating them, and reducing blood pressure. It also levels up the heart rhythms.

But thanks to some brain research we now know that it also physically impacts our gray matter.

One study led by scientists at the Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience at Aarhus University in Denmark. Comparing MRI scans of the brains of meditators with the brains of non-meditators. It revealed that meditation causes real physical changes in the gray matter of the lower brain stem. Meditation increases the gray matter.

In another study, scientists Giuseppe Pagoni and Milos Cekic, from the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, compared the volume of gray matter in the brains of people doing Zen meditations with another group who did not meditate.

The quantity of our gray matter normally reduces as we become older and this is what scientists found among the non-meditators. But for the meditators, their gray matter hadn't lost at all with age. According to scientists, meditation had a 'neuroprotective' effect on the meditators: It protected the brain from some of the effects of aging.

We know the stories of people under extreme stress whose hair turns white. We know that stress can speed up aging. So why should it be a surprise? There is a technique to slow aging?

Several areas of the brain are active when we meditate, but the most pronounced is in the prefrontal cortex because when we meditate we are focusing our attention on something -- it can be the body, our breathing, a word, a candle, or even a spiritual ideal. When this area is active, just like a muscle being exercised, it grows.

Neuroscientists use this analogy to describe the methods of changing the brain. When we exercise a muscle it becomes larger and heavy with muscle mass. Equally, when we exercise any part of the brain, which we do when we meditate, it becomes larger and denser with neural mass -- gray matter. The occurrence is known as neuroplasticity and describes how the brain actually changes throughout life.

But this analogy has since been deserted. We now know that we never put the dough in the oven. Our gray matter changes as we experience life; when we learn, walk, run, dance, and when concentrate, and meditate.

Our gray matter is changing until the last seconds of our life. It grows even with our last breath.