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and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which makes the effect of meditation sound pretty good. Meditation is, after all an active form of brain training.“ A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing,” says Goyal.“ But that’ s not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.” Meditation isn’ t a magic bullet for depression, as no treatment is, but it’ s one of the tools that may help manage symptoms.
Meditation May Lead to Volume Changes in Key Areas of the Brain In 2011, Sara Lazar, PhD and her team at Harvard found that mindfulness meditation can actually change the structure of the brain: Eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction( MBSR) was found to increase cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory, and in certain areas of the brain that play roles in emotion regulation and self-referential processing. There were also decreases in brain cell volume in the amygdala, which is responsible for fear, anxiety, and stress – and these changes matched the participants’ self-reports of their stress levels, indicating that meditation not only changes the brain, but it changes our subjective perception and feelings as well. In fact, a follow-up study by Lazar’ s team found that after meditation training, changes in brain areas linked to mood and arousal were also linked to improvements in how participants said they felt— i. e., their psychological well-being. So, for anyone who says that activated blobs in the brain don’ t necessarily mean anything, our subjective experience – improved mood and well-being – does indeed seem to be shifted through meditation as well.
Meditation Reduces Anxiety and Social Anxiety A lot of people start meditating for its benefits in stress reduction, and there’ s lots of good evidence to support this rationale. Research has shown that mindfulness meditation, in contrast to attending to the breath only, can reduce anxiety – and that these changes seem to be mediated through the brain regions associated with those self-referential(“ me-centered”) thoughts. There is still a lot we don’ t know, but what we do know is that longterm engagement in mindfulness meditation may enhance cognitive performance in older adults, that with persistent practice, these benefits may be sustained.
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Worth a Try? Meditation is not a panacea, but there’ s certainly a lot of evidence that it may do some good for those both young and older who practice it regularly and integrate it into their schedules. Its benefits seem to be felt after a relatively short amount of practice. Meditation is free & painless and you can do it anywhere so if you could do something to help protect your brain as you age, wouldn’ t you? If you have a few minutes during the day, rather than turning on your phone or going online, see what happens if you try quieting down your mind, or at least paying attention to your thoughts and letting them go without reacting to them. If the research is right, just a few minutes of meditation may make a big difference.
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