Meditating

If you haven’t yet caught on to the fact that health benefits of meditation are backed by science, it’s time to pay attention. Meditation is not some tricky mind game to avoid, it’s basically just a way to help you decompress and relax, which in turn does all kinds of nice things for your brain and your body. Here are some the real, proven, health benefits of meditation.

Meditation Increases Your Immunity

In one study that was done at Ohio State University, relaxation exercises were found to cut down on the rate of reoccurrence of breast cancer. In a separate study at the same place, they found that deep relaxation increased the amount of cells in the body that naturally go to fight against the bad intruders, therefore increases immunity. Additionally, meditation has been shown to reduce levels of the marker C-reactive protein which has been associated with increased risks of developing heart disease.

Meditation Lowers Your Blood Pressure

Even if you don’t have chronic high blood pressure, you’re probably spiking it fairly often with all that coffee topped off with work stress. Good news, meditation can lower your blood pressure by making the body less responsive to stress hormones. That’s sort of the same way that some blood pressure medications work, except that meditation free and totally risk free. Meditation also encourages the body to create more of the gas nitric oxide, which then flows through the blood vessels expanding them as it goes. Better flowing blood vessels means less work for your heart.

Meditation Reduces Inflammation

Inflammation in the body is basically just created by stress, whether it’s your road rage, polluted city, or happy hour habits that are contributing to it. Chronic inflammation means that the body can’t use its defense systems to the best of its ability.

But meditation has the ability to reduce the stress responses in the body, which is basically the closest thing that you can get to wearing an invisible stress filter. In addition to making your skin look better and increasing your immune system response, reducing inflammation can also cut down on inflammatory issues such as psoriasis, asthma, heart disease, and even arthritis.

Meditation Can Make You Happier

Simply reducing your stress levels through meditation can make you happier, but meditating can also help to restructure how you go through your thought processes by actually altering the state of your brain. Our brain has neuroplasticity, meaning that the cells are neurons are constantly making new connections as they are getting rid of old ones. We experience stress in the part of the brain called the amygdala, and when we meditate the amygdala actually loses density. Changing your brain structure for real.

Meditation has also been associated with increased empathy, self reflection, and creativity, which all can make you a cooler person all around. So basically when you train your brain to embrace those calmer states, it can learn to carry them into the rest of your life like when your girlfriend is yelling at you. And what’s happier than inner peace?

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