Understand How Mindfulness Improves Health

Mindfulness Improves Health – Richard Davidson, a leader of research on the neuroscience of well-being and specifically how meditation can physically change the brain says that the data demonstrates that:

bi-directional brain body highways are clear

A newly published study in Biological Psychiatry explains in part HOW these changes occur – and that the changes are based in reduced inflammation. Chronic inflammation is connected to a host of issues – depression, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and obesity, just to name a few.

We think that these brain changes provide a neurobiological marker for improved executive control and stress resilience, such that mindfulness meditation training improves your brain’s ability to help you manage stress, and these changes improve a broad range of stress-related health outcomes, such as your inflammatory health

The participants who completed the mindfulness meditation program also had reduced interleukin-6 levels, a biomarker of systemic inflammation. This is consistent with previous research in the field of epigenetics which has demonstrated that mindfulness training has the power to influence gene expression and increase the length of telomeres (telomerase activity is thought to be linked to psychological stress and physical health)

The brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation training increased the functional connectivity of the participants’ resting default mode network in areas important to attention and executive control, namely the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

We already know that practicing mindfulness increases the areas of our brain that are associated with empathy and compassion and decrease the areas of our brain associated with stress. We know that certain types of meditation improve heat rate variability –  a primary health marker. We know that people who are not distracted when they are performing a task are happier.

There is ever increasing evidence that this life skill has transformational potential for our well-being and really the question is not whether we will embrace this in all parts of our lives but when …. and how.

Read the full study here