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What Are the Benefits of Meditation?
Hello I'm Chris Brooks from High Performance Learning. We teach
people the skills they need to be able to excel at their education. We encourage
our clients to learn meditation so they get used to observing what's going on in
their minds. This makes it easier for us to teach them how to develop and monitor
their thinking and learning processes. Meditation also improves concentration
and increases people's motivation to do well. I've made a series of recorded
guided meditations that are available from our website: www.highperformancelearning.com
I hope this video encourages you to try meditation. I’m sure you’ll get a lot out of it,
it may even change your life completely like it did for me.
The Scientifically Proven Benefits of Meditation
Since the 1950s there have been hundreds of studies on meditation most of them
reporting a variety of positive benefits of meditation. Personally, I'm not
prepared to endorse any scientific studies on meditation, not because I
don't agree with their findings, but because I'm a behavioral scientist. I
have a university degree in psychology and I specialized in research methods
and mathematics so I've looked at many psychological studies, but I can't say
any of them have proved things conclusively. Psychological experiments
usually rely on subjective information so they cannot prove things objectively
like physics or chemistry experiments can. Even brain studies are not a lot of
help. The brain does enable thinking to happen, but measuring chemical and
electrical changes in the brain does not measure what is going on in the mind.
The mind is not a physical object even though the mind somehow resides in our
brains. Even though computers were modeled on
our brains, the thinking that computers do is nothing like the thinking we do. A
better analogy for one brain would be the whole of the internet, except that
one brain works in a much more complex way than all the computers attached to
the internet at the same time. On the internet pieces of information go
directly from one computer to another computer but our brains are made up of
trillions of brain cells each of which sends messages to, and receives messages
from, many other brain cells at the same time. It's not even possible to define
what a mind is except in simplistic terms.
Even the concept of thought is difficult to define. Try looking up the words mind
and thought in the dictionary and you'll see that their definitions are circular.
It's impossible to do conclusive scientific studies about things we don't
understand and can't even define clearly, but there are lots of things in our
lives that we can't prove scientifically - that doesn't mean we stop doing them.
If you would like to find out about scientific research into meditation a
good starting point would be the article in Wikipedia called
'Research on 'Meditation.
The Commonly Claimed Benefits of Meditation
Meditation is free, and you are in control of what you do, or don't do, with
your meditation, so if you want to try meditation I will outline some of the
claimed possible benefits you may be able to enjoy, and give you my personal
take on them. To place my comments in context I am a
long-term meditator. Meditation has helped me transform my life and make it
immeasurably better than it was before. As an educator I encourage my clients to
meditate and have produced a number of guided meditations to help them learn
how to meditate easily. Claim One: Meditation Aids in Stress
Reduction There is quite a lot of support for this
in the literature including benefits such as lowering psychological stress,
helping managing anxiety, and reducing depression symptoms. Meditation was also
found to be helpful in treating substance abuse and eating disorders.
Mindfulness meditation helps us become more aware of what's going on in our
minds so we can consciously notice the nature of the thoughts that go through
our minds. Worry is frequent repetition of negative thoughts. Worry raises the
level of stress hormones, such as adrenaline, in our blood which makes us
feel stressed. Once we're aware of the unnecessary
repetition of these negative thoughts we are able to get control over them, and
instead, use our mind to find solutions to the problems. If we decide there is
nothing we can do about a problem, then we can instruct our mind to let it go.
Claim Two: Meditation builds a more coherent sense of self and identity.
The literature suggests that meditators take more responsibility for their actions, are
more authentic, have more compassion for others, have higher levels of
self-acceptance, and have a more coherent and clearly defined character and
personality.
Mindfulness meditation requires you to set aside part of your mind to monitor
what the rest of your mind is doing. It's like creating a new self. This new self
then works with the rational part of your mind to analyze what's going on in
the automatic part of your mind, and is then in a position to make non-emotional
decisions about how you use your mind, how to take responsibility for your
emotions, and what you do with your life. Claim Three: Meditation increases the
ability to separate thoughts from emotions.
Most of the time thoughts and emotions flow through people's minds without
being examined. Research suggests meditation leads to a more controlled
response to emotional events and less over-analysis or worry about thoughts
and emotions which lead to maladaptive ego defense mechanisms such as denial,
distortion, transference, projection, and so on.
Apart from meditators and people who keep a diary,
most people don't usually set aside regular periods of time to think about
their thoughts and emotions in a detached and analytical way, so it's no
surprise that their minds will use unconscious mental tricks to protect
themselves from needless worry. Meditators, on the other hand, become
aware of damaging thought patterns and can decide to do something about them,
sometimes using formal meditation techniques such as focused contemplation
of the problem. Meditation makes you a lot better at
managing unwanted thoughts than taking drugs or using technology and addictions
to escape from your overactive mind. Claim Four:
Meditation improves attention and focus. More stable and sustained attention, less
distractibility, better task completion, and higher executive control over
attention, are all commonly found in the research.
Meditation is an exercise in controlling your attention so it's no surprise that
you become more efficient and effective in the tasks you undertake
Claimed Five: Meditation changes the brain.
The research is pretty conclusive about meditation causing short-term and
long-term physical changes in the brain such as significant increases in the
amount of gray matter in the precuneus. The precuneus appears to be the part of
the brain where we store mental imagery about the self, including
self-consciousness and self-awareness. It is also linked to episodic memory and
visuo-spatial imagery. I am quite skeptical about modern neuro-
technological studies into the mind which measure and map brain activity.
Noticing that one part of your brain becomes a bit more active when thinking
certain thoughts does not give us meaningful information about how Minds
work. In conclusion, meditation is not
difficult to do, so research meditation by trying it out for yourself for a
while.
The easiest and most effective way to learn how to meditate is to use guided
meditations. I've produced a series of guided meditations suitable for
beginners and experienced meditators. These guided meditations are available
from our website www.highperformancelearning.com
Why don't you give them a try!