By Philip Sarpong
The art of meditation is a practice that has risen in western culture in the last century but has been fluent and influential in the eastern world since 1500 BCE. The use of mindfulness techniques has popularized itself throughout social media and the public. Some people doubt its usefulness and relevance, yet, the recent scientific data behind meditation has confirmed incredible physical, emotional, and spiritual benefits from meditation practice.
What is meditation?
Meditation is a practice where a person uses some technique to go deeper into their subconscious. Whether it may be through mindfulness, thinking intentionally about a subject, perhaps a thought, a written word, or focusing on training the mind to be attentive and aware of the emotion and feelings that a person is experiencing at that moment.
The heart of the practice is to gauge deeper into oneself and connect to the mind, whether emotionally or spiritually. The idea is to be in a positive and conscious state. It feels like we’re riding the passenger seat in our minds often in our lives and not driving the vehicle. And often, the decisions we make impulsively can frustrate us, cause us anxiety, or just an overwhelming amount of negative emotion.
There are historical contexts to which explain the origins of meditation and its influence on culture today. Much recently, there have been widespread scientific research data for the impact of meditation on the mind, even related to medical practice.
Studies show that meditation practice can significantly positively impact individuals with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and protect people who are inclined to experience some dementia in their lives.
So how does meditation influence the body to produce these results?
Another way to describe meditation is a wakeful form of intentional consciousness. Most people feel incredibly relaxed during meditation yet experience heightened senses of alertness, awareness, and focus.
This mental state can physiologically compare to exercise. When you think of exercise, there are many components in the body fighting towards homeostasis. A physical body’s goal is always to bring the body back to a state of balance. So when the internal body temperature rises, as an example, due to running, the body cools itself by releasing moisture from the surface of the skin as sweat to bring the body back to homeostasis and lower the internal temperature of the body.
When running, the heart is way more active in pumping a significant amount of blood that can give oxygen to your muscle tissues. Simultaneously, your smooth muscle arterioles are dilating (relaxing) to make more room for the blood to flow sufficiently to those muscles. In other words, you have both sympathetic (constricting) and parasympathetic (dilation) features of the body taking place at the same time during an exercise.
Also, your blood pressure acts in a way where it resets itself to the new physical activity that you are performing. Therefore, it’s higher relative to if you were not performing any physical activity, but reasonable when exercising.
Scientists are beginning to see this give and take even mentally during meditation. Stilling the body and the mind in a relaxed but intentional state can lead to a higher cognition mode, alertness, and attentiveness.
There are numerous ways to meditate, but most methods share common characteristics focusing on cognition with breathing regulation. Physiologically when a person concentrates on breathing, it is automatically a beneficial process for the body.
Another way to look at meditation is to see it from a mental initiative to control the physical state.
Mental cognition on breathing allows the body to take in more oxygen. More oxygen in the lungs is always good, as that oxygen can diffuse plentifully into the pulmonary circulation and transport to various organs and tissues of the body. Effectively breathing in and breathing out also allows the body to rid itself of wastes like CO2 and other harmful substances.
Some forms of meditation even use diaphragmatic breathing. The diagram is the use of abdominal muscles responsible for initiating inspiration. These muscles work much harder during exercise to take in additional air for the activity. These muscles are much more passive when at rest, but a person intentionally using more abdominal muscles to breathe at rest can be highly beneficial.
Again it goes back to homeostasis for the body. A physical body does not need deep breathing diaphragmatic muscles firing when at rest. It is required only for exercise. But the feelings of homeostasis that that type of breathing would typically give to an individual exercising can provide positive physical emotions at rest.
Benefits of diaphragmatic breathing.
- It lowers the body’s heart rate and blood pressure, which causes the body to relax overall.
- It lowers cortisol (known as the stress hormone). Cortisol is active during high levels of stress. Unfortunately, for many individuals, this hormone doesn’t turn off at rest—a reason why many people feel stressed even when relaxing. Lowering cortisol could be beneficial for people that have post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Overall it improves core function. Developing the core will lead to better breathing in general, especially during exercise. The feelings of discomfort when running escape when abdominals are solid and stable—allowing the efficiency of oxygen exchange when working to open up the lungs.
- All these benefits lead to stored physical energy. This energy is what many people utilize as they meditate.
Think of it as if the body already has numerous things to control and regulate. If a person has high blood pressure, stress, and anxiety, then there is less energy flowing in the body to utilize for their personal use effectively. It’s like a sleep-deprived person; the body will shut down if not given enough time to recover that energy. When a person has more stored energy due to reduced stress levels, anxiety, lower blood pressure, then they have more power they can utilize for other beneficial needs.
Meditation is a form of mental recovery that is utilizing physiological components of energy. The attention-based meditation process is a possible explanation of why people who struggle with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) or dementia can have beneficial effects due to the focus on cognition and concentration.
The science of meditation is simply that. People change their physical state to a state that they prefer by using mental consciousness to drive that energy and produce calm and alertness. One can begin to see how the practice can be beneficial. Although it is certainly not easy, just like with many things, it takes time to master the art of mindfulness.
A few proven methods are focused meditation and mindfulness meditation.
- Focused meditation is focusing on a single object or thought for a certain amount of time. It is impossible for the mind to not drift away at a certain point, but even recognizing this drifting can cause one to come back to a state of consciousness. Like driving a car, a person can sense when the vehicle starts to drift off the side of the road and can place their hand on the steering wheel to move it back in the right direction.
- Mindfulness meditation focuses on the experience, the feeling, or sense of any particular concept or theory. This practice is more abstract, more flexible in thoughts and cognition, but still intentional of how those thoughts interact with a person’s reality and perception.
The Neuroscience of Meditation
Neurologically, meditation is building more reliable neural signals in several areas of the brain. These neural signals assist higher cognitive processes that control areas such as the prefrontal cortex, the temporal and parietal lobe regions by increasing cortical thickness.
The prefrontal cortex is a brain region known for attention, alertness, and self-control. Utilizing meditation improves these neural circuits, explaining why there are beneficial effects for those who have ADHD or are at risk for dementia.
Evidence of scientific meditation presented research trials where there was an 8-week meditation course. The control group had no meditation training, while the experts trained the meditation group to measure cognition, attention, and awareness. At the end of the experiment, the meditation group performed better than the control group during cognitive analysis. This finding used electrophysiological modulations such as EEG to investigate the neural synchrony of the neurons. The outcome seemed to analyze that working relationships with neurons were building higher synchrony levels over frontal-parietal regions, which increased during meditation.
So how does meditation affect the brain?
The brain measures specific types of signals that are called event-related potentials. An ERP is a measured brain response directly tied to a stimulus relating to sensory, cognitive, or motor. It is essentially an electrophysiological response to a stimulus.
Interestingly enough, the group that had practiced meditation for a duration of time had a reduction in ERP. This effect means that the environmental stimulus that usually distracts people from thought or concentration does not affect them in the same way as the control group. They were not receiving as much neurological activity; instead, the neurological signals attributed to increased attentional resources. Simultaneously, there was greater activation of frontal-parietal, cerebellar, and temporal regions of the brain. In other words, less neurological activity, meaning concentrated and more robust neurological signaling, causing higher brain functioning regions to be activated. It’s like when someone uses their collective brain energy to focus on one task. There are specific sequences of neurons that are helping them complete that task. This same form of neural activity happens when people meditate. They have built a concentration pattern, and it is easier for them to concentrate for more extended periods.
So what can the power of meditation do?
Swami Rama, a Yogi from the Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science, accomplished some incredible tasks with the power of meditation. An American psychologist named Gardner Murphy investigated Swami’s abilities by taking him through a series of tests. Remarkably, Swami could accomplish some complex tasks that most people usually would not have voluntary control over.
He could produce different brain waves when commanded, like alpha, delta, theta, and gamma waves. These waves can attribute to the depths of meditation. In other words, he could control the level of deep meditation patterns that he wanted in a short amount of time.
This control allowed him to alter his heartbeat to as fast as 300 beats per minute for 16 seconds and ultimately stop it from beating for a few seconds. He could also maintain consciousness of his surrounding environment while his brain was in a deep sleep cycle. Lastly, he could also control his internal body temperature to make himself feel cold or warm at room temperature.
These are functions of the body generally under involuntary control. When a person exercises, they don’t have to raise their heart rate; their body does it for them. Swami was able to use meditation in a way where he could control what usually would be involuntary controls of the body.
This evidence is pretty remarkable stuff. Swami has been using meditation for a long time and has mastered certain principles that allow him to do these things.
It may be ambitious for someone that has never meditated to have hopes of having this much control and precision of the mind, but it’s never too late to start. If you’re looking to start meditation, here are seven ways to focus your consciousness today.
- Just focus on your breathing for one minute.
- Next, start with a thought, a word, visualization, object, or a phrase. Meditate on that concept for 5-10 minutes.
- Try transcendental meditation, which involves repeating a phrase or a sound for 5-15 minutes.
- Vipassana meditation is the meditation awareness of your surroundings and environment.
- The body scan is another form of meditation where you focus on your body parts, starting from your head to your toes.
- Noting meditation is a great way to focus on the distractions that pull your mind away from concentration.
- You can meditate based on people, colors, themes, emotions, ideas, reflections, or just awareness.
These are just a few ways to meditate to get you started. The idea is to start small, get consistent, and build upon other complex forms of meditation. Some may work for you; some may not. The duration and consistency are different for everyone, but the idea is to commit and give it a try. You may find additional peace, pleasure, comfort, serenity, and power that comes from this practice, and it all starts in your mind. Whatever begins in your mind can also lead to positive progressions in life.
So “Keep Calm and Meditate On!”
Sources
Biegler, Kelly A., et al. “Cancer, Cognitive Impairment, and Meditation.” Acta Oncologica, vol. 48, no. 1, 2009, pp. 18–26., doi:10.1080/02841860802415535.
“The History and Origin of Meditation.” PositivePsychology.com, 17 Jan. 2020, positivepsychology.com/history-of-meditation/.
Jewell, Tim. “What Is Diaphragmatic Breathing?” What Is Diaphragmatic Breathing?, Sept. 2018, www.healthline.com/health/diaphragmatic-breathing#steps-to-do.
Smith, Jeremy Adam, et al. “10 Things We Know About the Science of Meditation.” Mindful, 12 Nov. 2018, www.mindful.org/10-things-we-know-about-the-science-of-meditation/.
“What Are All the Types of Meditation & Which One Is Best?” Headspace, www.headspace.com/meditation/techniques.