Meditation has been the focus of thousands of studies

over the past 50 years. Today we're going

to take a look at the top six benefits

adopting a meditation habit can have for you.

The first benefit is that it

physically changes your brain. A study

conducted in 2011 at Harvard, led by a

dr. Sarah Lazar, found that meditating

for just eight weeks increases your

brain size in three crucial areas.

The left hippocampus, which is responsible

for your ability to learn as well as

your ability to retain information, the

posterior cingulate, which is involved in

your ability to control where your mind

wanders, and the temporal parental junction,

which is responsible for empathy and

compassion. Meditation doesn't only grow

the good parts of your brain. The same

study found that after eight weeks of

meditation, there were also decreases in

cell volume in the amygdala, which is the

area of your brain that is responsible

for fear, anxiety and stress. The second

benefit of meditation is that it reduces

bad feelings. To further expand on the

last point made they have been numerous

studies that looks only at the effects

of meditation on emotions such as stress

depression and anxiety. Now stress isn't

inherently bad for you in fact the

little stress is actually healthy for

you.

However there are many people who

stressed too much and this can cause

serious health problems.

A study in 2004 found that meditation

can help you better manage as well as

dramatically decreased the negative side

effects of stress.

A recent study published on JAMA

internal medicine by Professor Willem Kuyken

worked with people who suffer from

depression. Kuyken found mindfulness

meditation helped people quote just as

much as commonly prescribed

antidepressant drugs and quote people

undergoing to study had a thirty-one

percent less of a chance of relapsing.

A similar study in 2014 managed by a dr.

Elizabeth Hoge worked with people

diagnosed with general anxiety disorder.

She found that meditating for just eight

weeks dramatically reduce the anxiety

symptoms. And if all these studies still

aren't enough to convince you that

meditation reduces bad feelings,

researchers of John Hopkins published a

paper on JAMA internal medicine in which

they reviewed over 19,000 meditation

studies. And they came to the conclusion

that meditation helps ease depression

and anxiety.

The third benefit of meditation

is that it helps you overcome bad habits.

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is

the part of your brain that is

responsible for willpower. A study

conducted in 2015 found that meditation

stimulates growth in this part of your

brain. A study in 2014 conducted by a dr.

Sarah Bowen separated a large group of

alcoholics into two smaller groups. One

group was taught mindfulness meditation

while the other followed your typical

12-step program. They found that only

eight percent of participants in the

mindfulness meditation program reported

relapsing a year later. As compared to

twenty percent of participants in the

12-step program reported relapsing a year later.

The fourth benefit of

meditation is that it increases your

ability to concentrate and focus.

A study in 2010 conducted by a dr. Catherine

MacLean of the university of California

Davis had subjects perform extremely

boring tasks such as looking for small

differences in lines. She found that the

group who underwent meditation during

the course of the study performed

significantly better. Suggesting that

meditation increases your ability to

concentrate. Another study conducted at

the University of Washington by a

professor dr. Levy found that meditation

increase the length of which workers

were able to concentrate on a single task.

The fifth benefit of meditation is

that it is extremely healthy. A study

conducted on older adults at the

university of california los angeles

found that meditation decreased amount

of c-reactive protein in the blood, which

directly correlates with the development

of heart disease. This same study found a

drop in inflammation in the body.

Another study conducted at the Benson

Henry Institute for mind-body medicine

in Boston looked at a group of

hypertension patients. They discovered

with just three months of meditation

practice, the patients were able to

drastically decrease their blood

pressure. The most mind-blowing of all

was a study conducted in 2010 by Nobel

prize winner, Elizabeth Blackburn.

She found that

meditation had the effect on your body

and a genetic level. They found that

meditation could protect the length of

your telomeres. For those of you who

don't know what telomeres are, short

telomeres are a marker for accelerated

aging. This is evidence that meditation

may slow down the process of aging.

And finally but definitely not least, the sixth

benefit of meditation is

that makes you happier. In a famous study

conducted in 2004 by a dr. Richard

Davidson, he placed electrodes on the

heads of monks, who are practitioners of

meditation for years. He discovered that

the monks had 30 times the normal amount

of gamma waves, which are associated with

intelligence, compassion, self-control and

feelings of happiness in the brain.

Another study published in 2008 in the

journal of personality and social

psychology by Professor Barbara

Fredrickson, stated that the results show

that a meditation practice produce

positive emotions that increased over

time as you practiced it on a daily

basis. So it's no surprise why some of

the top performers of the world today

like CEOs, sports teams and entrepreneurs

are all jumping on the meditation

bandwagon.

There's just so many positive benefits.

In our next video we're going to talk

about exactly how to meditate, so you can

reap all of these benefits. So if you

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