‘Meditation’ is being heard ‘everywhere’ by ‘everyone’ and many people find it helpful in many ways. It is an age-old practice in Indian culture. Over the years, it has become a habit and part of life due to the enormous beneficial effects it has on the mind and overall well-being. Does it really help? If so, how and in which ways does meditation benefit us? Let us read more about it.
Introduction
Meditation means ‘to mediate between the body and mind. It is an age-old method to connect your mind with your body, which is being practiced more for spiritual well-being rather than for religious purposes. In addition to the three determinants of health as defined by WHO, over the years many experts opined to fit the ’spiritual’ determinant in the current definition. Human happiness should also be a priority for a good state of overall health. Practicing ‘meditation’ also falls under the umbrella of spiritual health, but it is not necessarily related to a religious belief or tradition.
Meditation, in simple terms, means concentration on the breath to redirect the thoughts and train the mind towards relaxation, more organized focus, and help one to generate more awareness of themselves. There are many ways to practice meditation, but most are organized based on the techniques or methods.
Most of these methods are classified as, open-monitoring (mindfulness: awareness of self) and focus meditation (such as pranayama in yoga, concentration on breath, imagining a picture, focusing the center of the forehead, or by use of a letter or word or mantra) (Tracy et al., 2019, Jindal et al., 2013).
Furthermore, there are studies that address the effects of meditation on mental health, showing changes in brain functions which in turn lead to better regulation of metabolic factors by decreasing stress, anxiety, depression, and pain (Brandmeyer et al., 2019). There are ongoing studies being conducted to understand the effects of meditation on other body systems.
Lately, where stress is overtaking people with their busy schedules in life, everyone is leaning more towards alternative techniques that can help them relieve stress-related outcomes such as anxiety, loss of focus and depression. Any form of meditation can be effective towards achieving a stress-free mind, a positive attitude and mental health.
Also read:
What is Contemplative Meditation?
Benefits of Meditation
With the increasing practice of these methods, it is important to understand the benefits for various lifestyle factors based on the evidence. Of all, there is an increasing preference for yoga and mindfulness-based practices, with which many are finding help in improving their overall health state.
Meditation and Mental Health
The first thought of practicing meditation comes with an effort to reduce the foremost factor, that is, Stress, which helps with dealing with a variety of mental health symptoms such as anxiety, emotions, self-awareness, attention, and memory etc. With the increasing stress, there would be an increase in the secretions of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH).
This means more cortisol is secreted leading to disruptions of feedback mechanisms in the body. This in turn results in multiple physiological changes (Image 1) causing the onset of various diseases and negatively affecting your mental wellbeing (Pascoe et al., 2020).
Studies have shown that when meditation was practiced with a concentration on breathing for a long period of time, there was a moderate change in the physiological stressors of people who experienced symptoms of anxiety and depression (Pascoe et al., 2016).
Sleep is also disturbed by stress as it impacts the quality of sleep. Melatonin is the hormone that promotes sleep. It was found that meditation increased the levels of serum melatonin, which promoted sleep and calmness and reduced the perception of pain (Tooley et al., 2000). A meta-analysis (Heather et al., 2019) conducted to evaluate the effect of meditation on sleep quality showed preliminary moderate evidence that mindfulness meditation may be effective in reducing sleep disturbances.
More research is still needed to understand the positive impact of meditation on mental health, which is quite challenging due to various limitations.
Chronic stress also leads to finding solace in consuming more food, leading to obesity. A systematic review (Wanden-Berghe et al., 2010) of small sample sizes showed mindfulness meditation may be useful in reducing or treating eating disorders such as bulimia, anorexia and binge-eating disorder (Image 2)
Meditation and the Endocrine System
The endocrine system is involved in the regulation of stress through hormones that are secreted from various glands, hence understanding the effects of meditation on the neuroendocrine pathways is being studied extensively. Various neurotransmitters could promote proper regulation of the hormones secreted by endocrine glands like the pituitary, thyroid, hypothalamus etc. With a long period of meditation, the TSH is found to be in more normal range than the increased TSH resistance with the onset of aging (Jindal et al., 2013).
A meta-analysis (Pascoe et al., 2017) of randomized control trials (RCT) conducted with a variety of meditation techniques showed decreased blood pressure, heart rate, cortisol and cytokine levels, but most of the studies were performed on a few people.
Meditation and Immune System
The immune system contains the terms – immunity, inflammation, infection, cytokines and so on. Open monitoring meditation (such as mindfulness) found a small effect on the c-reactive protein (inflammatory protein) and decreased interleukin-6 (more IL-6 leads to inflammation).
A review of over 20 RCTs (David et al., 2016), has reported the levels of various immune system biomarkers which indicated that mindfulness-based intervention or meditation might be a promising method for improvement of immune function parameters.
Though not very exhilarating, more future research is required to find the association between mindfulness meditation and the immune system.
Studies are not limited to what is presented in this article. More studies are being conducted on how meditation techniques help with other disorders/diseases such as migraine, drug addiction, substance abuse etc.
Take Away
There is still a need to understand the effect of various types of meditation on specific health outcomes as the effect size in most studies is small (Sabrina et al., 2019). The level of positive effect is very much subjective and depends on the period of time it is being practiced. But since there are no side effects of practicing any form of meditation, one can take advantage of the positive effects of meditation and practice it as a daily habit/chore.
Any habit leading to a better lifestyle is most advised than any pill.
Author: Praveena Kuchipudi (INFS Faculty)
Reference articles:
- Rose, S., Zell, E. and Strickhouser, J.E., 2020. The effect of meditation on health: A metasynthesis of randomized controlled trials. Mindfulness, 11(2), pp.507-516.
- Pascoe, M.C., Thompson, D.R. and Ski, C.F., 2020. Meditation and endocrine health and wellbeing. Trends in Endocrinology & Metabolism, 31(7), pp.469-477.
- Brandmeyer, T., Delorme, A. and Wahbeh, H., 2019. The neuroscience of meditation: classification, phenomenology, correlates, and mechanisms. Progress in brain research, 244, pp.1-29.
- Pascoe, M.C., Thompson, D.R., Jenkins, Z.M. and Ski, C.F., 2017. Mindfulness mediates the physiological markers of stress: systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of psychiatric research, 95, pp.156-178.
- Sojcher, R., Fogerite, S.G. and Perlman, A., 2012. Evidence and potential mechanisms for mindfulness practices and energy psychology for obesity and binge-eating disorder. Explore, 8(5), pp.271-276.
- Wanden-Berghe, R.G., Sanz-Valero, J. and Wanden-Berghe, C., 2010. The application of mindfulness to eating disorders treatment: a systematic review. Eating disorders, 19(1), pp.34-48.
- Black, D.S. and Slavich, G.M., 2016. Mindfulness meditation and the immune system: a systematic review of randomized controlled trials. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1373(1), p.13.
- Rusch, H.L., Rosario, M., Levison, L.M., Olivera, A., Livingston, W.S., Wu, T. and Gill, J.M., 2019. The effect of mindfulness meditation on sleep quality: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1445(1), p.5.
- Jindal, V., Gupta, S. and Das, R., 2013. Molecular mechanisms of meditation. Molecular neurobiology, 48(3), pp.808-811.
- Tooley, G.A., Armstrong, S.M., Norman, T.R. and Sali, A., 2000. Acute increases in night-time plasma melatonin levels following a period of meditation. Biological Psychology, 53(1), pp.69-78
