What's All The Fuss About?

Most people today know what it takes to have a healthy body:  good food and water, sufficient sleep, exercise, and a fairly low stress level.  Your brain is part of your body so it needs all of that too.  But, what does it take to have a healthy mind?  In fact, what is a healhty mind?  Is your's healthy?  What about mine?  How would you know?

Daniel Levinson, a meditation researcher graduate student thinks that a healthy mind is one that is able to use all of its mental resource.  Not a bad definition.  He asserts that letting your mind wander from time to time gives it a rest from overthinking, and that meditation may effectively restore the mental balance of a wandering mind.

Meditation is an ancient practice found in many traditions.  Does it do it any good?  Here are the results from a few research studies:

• Pain control -- Meditators reported a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percernt reduction in the unpleasantness of their pain.  Note that Morphine is reported to reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent . . . meditation wins.
• Brain atrophy and dementia -- Meditators exhibited range of brain areas with stronger neural connections than did a control group of non-meditators.
• Depression relapse -- Both meditators and antidepressant users in an 18 month study had a relapse rate of about 30 percent compared to a control group on placebos who had a 70 percent relapse rate.
• Brain structure -- Participants in a meditation program showed increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus and in structures associated with self-awareness, compassion and introspection.  Members of a non-meditator control group did not show the same changes.

Don't know about you, but I like to increase the density of my gray-matter.  Stay tuned for more about how to meditate.

To your health . . .

Reference

Boyce, B.  (2012).  Taking the Measure of Mind.  Shambhala Sun.  March, 2012: 43-49, 81-82.