When considering activities to add to your fitness regimen, you probably haven’t given meditation much thought. However, the simple act of meditating can provide monumental benefits to your overall wellbeing.
1. Pain Relief: According to wellness expert Jeanna Bryner, ‘Though your back or other body part may be feeling the aches, part of that pain may actually be in your head. In fact, a study published in the April 6, 2011, issue of the Journal of Neuroscience found just 80 minutes of meditation training could cut pain perception nearly in half. In the study, volunteers were given a pain test before and after the meditation training; brain scans using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of pain-reception regions revealed significant changes before and after meditation, too. Another study, this one published in 2010 in the journal Pain, found that people who regularly meditated found pain less unpleasant. The reason? Apparently their brains are busy focusing on the present and so anticipate the pain less, blunting its emotional impact.’
2. Better Sex: ‘Research published in 2011 in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine found that mindfulness meditation training, in which a person learns how to bring thoughts into the present moment, can enhance a woman’s sexual experience,’ Bryner details. ‘How, you ask? By getting them out of their heads. Turns out, self-judgmental chatter often fills a gal’s mind during sex, keeping her from the full sexual experience. In the new study, college women who meditated were quicker to become aroused when viewing erotic photos compared with non-meditating women.’
3. Getting You Out of a Rut: Bryner notes, ‘Doing the same thing in the same way doesn’t always work, whether it be trying to get out of a bout of depression or solve a dispute with a friend or colleague. Turns out, mindfulness meditation can help a person to steer clear of such mental traps that drag out problem solving, suggests a study published online May 15, 2012, in the journal PLoS ONE. After just a few weeks of mindfulness training, volunteers were better at switching strategies for problem-solving than volunteers who were not taught the technique.’ Study researcher Jonathan Greenberg, of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, explains, ‘This difficulty of letting go of old, habitual and non-adaptive ways of responding for the sake of better ones may underlie many of our everyday difficulties…Clinicians may be better able to offer new ways of looking at a clinical situation. Negotiators may be better at finding novel ways to settle disputes. Managers may be better able to think “out of the box” and replace existing non-adaptive procedures with new and improved ones.’
4. Mental Toughness: ‘Meditation can protect a person from the debilitating effects of some emotional events, like going off to war, researchers reported in February 2010 in the journal Emotion,’ says Bryner. ‘In the study, US marines preparing for deployment spent two hours each week practicing mindfulness meditation training for eight weeks. Compared with the marines who didn’t meditate, those who did showed improved moods and working memory, which allows for short-term retrieval and storage of information. The training seems to allow individuals to stay alert and in the moment without becoming emotional, giving them a kind of “mental armour.”’
5. Focus: Bryner comments, ‘With cellphones, iPads, laptop computers and the ability to essentially contact anyone at any time, distractions abound today. How to stay focused? You got it, Buddhist meditation may do the trick, according to a study published in Psychological Science in 2010. Study participants, relatively experienced meditators, were better able to make fine visual distinctions and sustain visual attention during a demanding, yet tedious, computer task after Buddhist meditation training. The seemingly nonsensical Zen practice of “thinking about not thinking” may also boost your attention span by freeing the mind of distractions.’
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