Does it come as a surprise to anyone that meditation can significantly slow down your mind’s aging? Think about it for a minute. How do you slow down the rate of your muscular degeneration? By exercising, of course. Regularly spending dedicated time to exercise and train your muscles not only improves their health in that moment, but makes them better able to deal with the daily challenges that they will have to meet.
The same holds true for meditation, which can be thought of as a method of mental training. When you meditate you improve the strength, health and clarity of your brain in the moment, and you make it better able to meet the mental challenges of your daily life. To put it simply, meditating will make your daily mental challenges that much easier, resulting in less stress, resulting in slower brain aging.
Recent research corroborates this long-understood benefit of meditation. In a study conducted by Sara Lazar and colleagues, it was found that regularly entering into a meditative state can be associated with an increase in cortical thickness (brain thickness, roughly speaking). As you age, it is natural that you will experience significant cortical thinning- provided you don’t do anything to slow this thinning down. While there are a number of factors that result in cortical thinning, age is probably the biggest of these.
In their study, they found that middle aged people who meditated were likely to have the same level of cortical thickness as individuals who were 20 to 30 years younger than them. The data suggests “regular practice of meditation may slow the rate of neural degeneration…”
Meditation has been used for thousands of years to both increase focus and mental clarity in the moment, and to retain those mental faculties for a lifetime. Medical science is now proving these deep understandings to be true, giving an extra level of validity to this ancient practice.
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