Just two weeks of mindfulness meditation results in positive changes in your brain. Quite literally, sustained meditation leads to something called neuroplasticity, which is defined as the brain’s ability to change, structurally and functionally, on the basis of environmental input. For much of the last century, scientists believed that the brain essentially stopped changing after adulthood. Today we know that mindfulness meditation techniques like the self hypnosis that I teach you at Seattle hypnosis and Bainbridge Island hypnosis increases the number of signaling connections in the brain.
Mindfulness Meditation Linked With Positive Brain Changes, Study Suggests
The researchers found that after two weeks of practicing this kind of meditation, the study participants had an increase in the number of signaling connections in the brain, called axonal density.
And after a month of practicing the meditation — which comes out to about 11 hours of meditation — the researchers found that there were even more increases in brain signaling connections, as well as an increase in protective tissue (called myelin) around the axons in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulate region. The study participants also had better moods after practicing the meditation.
“This dynamic pattern of white matter change involving the anterior cingulate cortex, a part of the brain network related to self-regulation, could provide a means for intervention to improve or prevent mental disorders,” the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study.
A 2005 study on American men and women who meditated a mere 40 minutes a day showed that they had thicker cortical walls than non-meditators. What this meant is that their brains were aging at a slower rate. Cortical thickness is also associated with decision making, attention and memory.
In 2008, Dr. Randy Zusman, a doctor at the Massachusetts General Hospital, asked patients suffering from high blood pressure to try a meditation-based relaxation program for three months. These were patients whose blood pressure had not been controlled with medication.
After meditating regularly for three months, 40 of the 60 patients showed significant drops in blood pressure levels and were able to reduce some of their medication. The reason? Relaxation results in the formation of nitric oxide which opens up your blood vessels.
Meditation’s Pain Relieving Properties Beat Morphine: Earlier this year, a study conducted by Wake Forest Baptist University found that meditation could reduce pain intensity by 40 percent and pain unpleasantness by 57 percent. Morphine and other pain-relieving drugs typically show a pain reduction of 25 percent.
Meditation works by reducing activity in the somatosensory cortex and increasing activity in other areas of the brain.
Read Mindfulness Meditation Linked With
Positive Brain Changes, Study Suggests
Self hypnosis is one of the mindfulness meditation techniques that you can learn to improve your health and to achieve your goals. Learn how you can make positive changes in your brain with hypnosis.
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