Six years meditating… (Part One)

It’s been more than six years that I’ve been meditating daily and from what I have realized, this practice has changed my life and has been the best thing that recently happened to me. That prompted more research on my part to understand what scientific studies had found on the subject. 

What I’ve been able to find is that studies on the effects of meditation over 5 to 10 years move us away from the "feel-good" temporary benefits of the practice and into the domain of permanent structural and biological changes. 

Because it’s jstf to keep a control group from meditating for a decade, most research in this time span is cross-sectional (comparing "expert" meditators with 5–10+ years of experience against "novices"). However, the results are remarkably consistent across various peer-reviewed studies.

Beginning with the physical brain structural neuroplasticity, the most significant finding is that meditation "thickens" the brain in areas responsible for attention and sensory processing, while "shrinking" the areas responsible for stress. 

A landmark study by Dr. Sara Lazar (Harvard/MIT) found that long-term meditators (average 7–9 years of practice) had increased gray matter thickness in the prefrontal cortex—the area responsible for decision-making and executive function. Most importantly, Lazar found that 50-year-old long-term meditators had the same cortical thickness as 25-year-old non-meditators. Meditation appeared to offset the natural thinning of the brain that occurs with age. 

There’s even more to this and I’ll share it with you tomorrow...