Meditation: Reducing Stress and Improving Your Health

Stress is nearly universal. The National Health Interview Survey puts the figure at roughly 75 percent of people feeling some level of it every couple of weeks. In a Forbes piece titled "Just A Few Minutes Of Meditation May Reduce Stress, Study Finds," writer Alice G. Walton laid out how far the practice reaches: depression, anxiety, general stress, eating disorders, PTSD, addiction, and the mental machinery behind memory, reasoning, and problem solving. Meditation has also been tied to a stronger immune response, steadier blood pressure, relief from chronic pain, better cellular production, and lower levels of cortisol, the hormone your body pumps out under pressure.

So what is physically happening? The short version: meditation changes how your brain works. Your brain is built from billions of cells and the chemical messengers between them, and those connections form, dissolve, and reroute depending on what you expose them to. Scientists call this neuroplasticity. Meditation acts on the brain's neural circuits, and that shift feeds into how you respond to whatever life throws at you.

It also reshapes the physical structure of the organ. Certain regions grow denser while others thin out. Picture a single neuron as a hand, with thousands of tiny fingers reaching off the end. Each finger stands for a link to another neuron. The count of those links isn't fixed. It rises and falls, and stress (conflict, grief, illness, emotional strain) is one of the things that moves the number.

Below are several of the documented benefits.

Pain. One study on mindfulness therapy and pain reported that the techniques changed both how people perceived pain and the way neurons actually fired in response to it (Melnick, 2013). Dr. Joseph Grant ran his own research on meditation and pain and found it gave relief to people dealing with chronic and moderate-to-severe discomfort. Those same people handled stress-driven pain more easily.

Stress itself. The negative emotions tied to stress get processed in the amygdala. Under chronic strain that region thickens and grows denser. People who meditate regularly, by contrast, show a drop in amygdala activity and a gradual thinning of that density when things get hard. Meditation changes both the brain's reaction to stress and its physical makeup. A smoking-cessation study using mindfulness techniques found that participants reported lower stress over the course of the research (Melnick, 2013).

Immunity. Research on meditation and immune function in older adults found that the practice helped quiet the genes that trigger inflammation. Rather than letting the immune system run hot, meditation appeared to shut that reaction down at the genetic level.

Blood pressure. At the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, participants with hypertension were able to cut back on their blood pressure medication after three months of daily practice. Their readings fell noticeably too. Part of the mechanism is nitric oxide, a gas that widens blood vessels so blood can move through them without obstruction. Wider vessels, freer flow, lower pressure.

Memory. Two regions called the hippocampi also react to stress. Where the amygdala thickens under pressure, the hippocampi shrink and thin. A study on mindfulness-based response training and memory found that meditators showed less grey matter in the hippocampi. Since a heavy concentration of grey matter there can accompany memory loss, that reduction read as a gain for memory, not a loss.

Heart disease. Research on older adults looking at meditation and cardiac risk found that the practice lowered C-reactive protein, a marker associated with heart disease.

- Dr. R. Y. Langham

A reader's note: meditation does not have to mean the formal, transcendental kind. Even pausing for a moment and taking a few slow breaths can cut into the stressors that wear us down. I believe the old line that stress kills, because I've fought my own rounds with stress, anxiety, and the conditions they bring on, and more than once I've beaten them back or at least held them in remission. About three months before I turned 30, I felt a twinge in the upper right side of my chest. Not real pain, just a mild, noticeable ache. It never dropped me, never felt like an elephant on my chest or any of the textbook heart-attack signs. I had "I'm too young for this" loaded and ready. I let it ride for a few days, then called my doctor from the car on my way to work. His nurse told me, "Sir, we aren't set up to treat a heart attack here. Go straight to the emergency room, and we'll call ahead so they're expecting you." After a two-day hospital stay full of tests, the cardiologist said I'd had a stress-induced episode. The options were medication or learning to manage the stress. I did both. Inside six months I was off everything and living differently, and if I had to name one thing that carried the most weight, it was meditation. I picked meditation over medication. You can do it almost anywhere, anytime. I even do it in the car, eyes open, of course. Maybe that's the whole metaphor: keep your eyes open and keep finding the options that lead somewhere healthier.

- Bergen

Sources: Melnick, M. (2013). Meditation health benefits: What the practice does to your body. Huffington Post. The National Health Interview Survey. (2014). Stress statistics. Our Stressful Lives. Walton, A. G. (2014). Just a few minutes of meditation may reduce stress, study finds. Forbes.