Benefits of meditation.
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 parietal 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 there have been numerous studies that look only at the effects of meditation on emotions such as stress depression and anxiety.
