Mouthing ‘Om’ by sitting idle with eyes closed and palms in the front is not only for religious persons. This effective meditation technique can be practised by every one of you to feel relaxed after a stressful working day. Start meditating from today, as the health benefits of meditation can make you get shocked. There is no need to enchant ‘Om’ for meditation. You can pronounce any word matched with your religion while meditating. In order to keep you stay young and fit, here are the seven health benefits of meditation.
Health benefits of meditation
- Enhance your concentration
- Support to get relaxed from the pain
- Enhance your sex life
- Makes you mentally tough
- Clear mental blocks
- Help you stay cool
- Bulk up the brain
1. Enhance your concentration
Your cool and calm mind makes you able to concentrate better. And better concentration means improved memory. Through meditation, you can attain the ability to concentrate for longer hours and increase your creativity. Regular meditation will enhance your performance at work and the ability to plan your daily activities.
2. Support to get relaxed from the pain
The pain you experience in your body suppresses and reaches your brain. This makes you feel difficulty from that pain. Meditation supports you cool down. According to a report published in the Journal of Neuroscience, meditation training for 80 minutes cuts half of the pain perception. Another study suggests that people meditating daily have less trouble from their pain.
3. Enhance your sex life
That’s right. A little mindfulness can go a long way in bed. Recent researches suggested that mindful meditation training (in which a person learns how to bring thoughts into the present moment) can enhance a woman’s sexual experience. Turns out, self-judgmental chatter often fills a woman’s mind during sex, keeping her from the full sexual experience. In another study, college girls who meditated were quicker to become aroused when viewing erotic photos compared with non-meditating women.
4. Makes you mentally tough
Meditation can protect a person from the debilitating effects of some emotional events. In a study, US marines preparing for deployment spent two hours each week practising mindfulness meditation training for eight weeks. Compared with the marines who didn’t meditate, those who did showed improved moods and working memory (allows for short-term retrieval and storage of information). The training seems to allow individuals to stay alert and at the moment without becoming emotional, equipping them with a mental armour.
5. Clear mental blocks
Whether you are trying to get out of a bout of depression or solve a dispute with a friend, doing the same thing, in the same way, doesn’t always work. Meditation can help a person avoid mental traps that drag out problem-solving. 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.
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. A married couple that repeatedly gets into the same quarrels and arguments may be able to break the cycle and look at things in a fresh perspective. 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.
6. Help you stay cool
Both novice and experienced mediators in the study practised compassion meditation (widely practised by Tibetan leaders), which involves focusing on loved ones and directing loving-kindness toward them, and then extending that goodwill to all beings indiscriminately. When participants heard emotional sounds, such as a distressed woman crying or a baby laughing, they showed more brain activity in brain regions linked to empathy while meditating than when not meditating.
A few Om chants may make you smarter, suggests research on the effects of meditation on the brain. A study found that long-term meditators (who practised various techniques, including Samatha, Vipassana, and Zen) have larger amounts of folding, of the brain’s cortex than people who don’t meditate. The extra folds may allow the meditators to process information faster than others.
Another study found that people who meditate also have stronger connections between brain regions and show less age-related brain shrinkage. The bulking-up in white matter was seen throughout the brain, the researchers said.