Meditation: Effective for Treating Stress

Nicole Beland draws on her own time spent meditating to make a case that the practice can push back against depression and stress. She points to newer scientific work suggesting that meditation lowers stress, aids healing, strengthens immunity, and may even sharpen the mind. One figure from Healthline puts it starkly: roughly 1 in 10 people will deal with depression at some stage of life. Those low periods tend to surface during hard stretches, the death of someone close, a health scare, money trouble, or a layoff.

The scale is worth sitting with. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that about 6.7 percent of American adults, roughly 14.8 million people, live with major depression. Anxiety disorders reach further still. Around 18.1 percent of adults, close to 42 million people, contend with conditions like panic disorder, OCD, PTSD, generalized anxiety, and various phobias. Plenty of medical problems also carry high stress along with them.

The practice itself asks for very little equipment. Settle into a seat where you feel at ease. Bring your attention to the breath, drawing air deep into the lungs, in through the nose and out through the mouth. Thoughts will show up. When one does, just notice that it came, then slide your focus back to breathing. If something anxious or negative creeps in, set it to the side and come back again to the present.

Beland also went through studies on what meditation does to the brain, which point toward an organ that grows stronger and runs more efficiently, with some evidence hinting it can undo a bit of what aging takes away. She cites Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who found that seasoned meditators generate more gamma brain waves. Gamma activity goes hand in hand with clear, intense thinking and tighter coordination across brain regions. If brain waves were fuel, as she frames it, gamma would be the top-grade stuff. And the elevated gamma levels didn't switch off once the meditating stopped, a sign the subjects' brains had been trained to perform better all day long.

A second study she describes came from Sara Lazar, Ph.D., a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Lazar ran MRI scans on 20 people who had meditated an average of 40 minutes a day over 9 years. Their prefrontal cortexes, the region tied to attention and sensory perception, had not thinned in the way that usually comes with age. As she put it, the part of the brain linked to motor skills runs thicker in athletes, and in the same way the part tied to attention and sensory perception runs thicker in meditators.

There's a physical angle here too. Chronic stress keeps the body pumping out cortisol, and sustained high cortisol tracks with poor sleep, weight gain, and a run-down immune system. Easing stress through meditation chips away at that chain, so the payoff reaches past mood into the body. Getting genuinely good at it takes repetition, yet some of the benefits turn up fast.

What helps most, in my view, is trying out the different styles rather than locking into one. We're each wired a little differently, so a technique that clicks for one person may fall flat for another, and sampling a few is the quickest way to find yours. Daily practice matters too. It can feel awkward early on. Stay with it and it starts to run on its own, something you can lean on to steady yourself anywhere, in almost any rough moment. (Based on the work of Nicole Beland, "Meditation: Fight Depression and Stress," 2006.)