Imagine your brain could speak and grow some little arms and legs. What would it say to you? We are confident it would jump out of your head, cross its little arms and say something along these lines:
“Dude, I’ve had enough now; let’s meditate for 10 minutes instead of watching yet another TikTok of cats sitting in a taped square on the floor… AND don’t even get me started on your Twitter habits!”.
We completely agree with your brain here #teambrain! Your brain gets stimulated with a sickening degree of information day in and out. So be a team player and give that wobbly friend between your ears a break once a day.
The Amazing Benefits Of Meditating
Meditation Can Help With Anxiety, Social Anxiety, Depression And Addiction
Research at Johns Hopkins found that meditation’s effectiveness or “effect size” for mental health issues was moderate, at 0.3. This might sound low, but the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, so that is pretty impressive.
Additionally, several studies have shown that meditation can be very effective in helping people recover from various addictions (*cough* watching cat videos on TikTok *cough*), given its impact on the self-control areas of the brain.
Improvement Of Concentration And Attention
Having problems concentrating isn’t just a “you thing” — it affects millions of other people. Just a few weeks of meditation can boost focus and memory.
Meditation can thicken the pre-frontal cortex. This brain centre operates higher-order brain processes, like increased awareness, concentration, and decision making. Changes in the brain show that higher-order functions become more robust with meditation. So in plain English, you can train your brain with meditation!
It Helps To Maintain Brain Health As You Age
People who frequently meditate as they age usually have “younger” brains than people who do not. Participants who had been meditating for roughly 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain. Although older people still had some volume loss compared to younger participants, it wasn’t as pronounced as the non-meditators.
It Helps To Reduce Activity In The Brain’s “Me Centre”
Meditation helps you to be in the present moment, which increases happiness.
Mindfulness meditation reduces activity in the default mode network — a.k.a. “monkey mind.” The default mode network (DMN) is a network of interacting brain regions that is active when a person is not focused on the outside world. Your brain will wander less, and even when it starts to wander, you are better at snapping back out of it because of the new connections formed.
Operating your monkey mind through daily meditation is an easy first line of defence for persistent modern-day distractions.
It Can Improve Your Brain Structure
Only eight weeks of meditation can change the shape of your brain, including the gain in grey matter volume. Grey matter is located in your central nervous system and makes up most of your brain’s neuronal cell bodies. This kind of tissue is especially significant in areas responsible for muscle control, sensory perception, emotion, memory, decision-making, and self-control.
You can create and improve the connections between neurons as you alter the density of grey matter; this means you can effectively change your brain in just a few minutes a day.
Summing things up, we think you still should watch cat videos, but maybe after you meditate as a reward or even better, adopt a cat from a shelter, buy some tape and create your own video. Don’t forget to tag us in it if you do post it somewhere (our PEAK brains just unanimously rolled their eyes)!
