It has been heralded as the life-changing remedy for all
mental, emotional and physical conditions. Yet for many of us, its benefits
remain out of reach. Why?
Is it because it’s too hard?
Because we’re just not doing it right?
Or because the benefits aren’t as big as “they” said?
Here we explore the proven benefits of meditation along with
the challenges that you may find in practising it.
What meditation CAN do
Meditation, along with its offshoot mindfulness, is proven
to boost your mental and physical health.
Thousands of studies suggest it can help you reduce stress,
improve sleep, increase focus and improve anxiety, depression and insomnia, and
even reduce blood pressure.
There are too many studies to go into here, but let’s focus
on some of the most popular benefits:
Meditation is scientifically proven to reduce stress within
eight weeks of regular practice.
Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School,
found that meditating can change your brain, particularly the parts of the
brain linked with stress.
She conducted a study of people who had never meditated
before, and put one group through an eight-week mindfulness-based stress
reduction program. In the group who learned meditation, she found differences
in five areas of the brain, including the parts involved in mind-wandering, in
learning, cognition, memory and emotional regulation; in empathy and compassion
and in the amygdala, the part for anxiety, fear and stress.
Meditation is proven to help you improve your focus, and in
today’s “attention economy”, that’s something of a superpower.
Researchers from the University of Washington studied the
impact of an eight-week course on mindfulness-based meditation on a group of
knowledge workers. They found those who trained in meditation stayed on tasks
longer and made fewer task switches as well as reporting less negative emotion
afterwards.
- Anxiety, depression, and insomnia
A 2014 literature review of 47 trials in 3,515 participants
suggests that mindfulness meditation programs show moderate evidence of
improving anxiety and depression.
Another 2012 review of 36 trials found that 25 of them
reported better outcomes for symptoms of anxiety in the meditation groups compared
to control groups.
What meditation CAN’T do
While meditation and mindfulness are proven to help deal
with the challenges of life, they’re not a cure-all.
One of the reasons people give up or get frustrated with
meditation is the expectation that it will solve all your problems and
transform your life.
Recently, numerous psychotherapists and meditation teachers
have voiced concern about the commercialisation of mindfulness.
Dr Nicholas Van Dam, Senior Lecturer in Psychological
Sciences at the University of Melbourne, was a co-author of a paper called Mind
the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on
Mindfulness and Meditation. Along with psychiatrists, psychologists, and
mindfulness experts from 15 different institutions, he says we need to be wary
of people over-selling the benefits of mediation.
“I think the biggest concern among my co-authors and I is
that people will give up on mindfulness and/or meditation because they try it
and it doesn’t work as promised,” says Dr Van Dam.
Another concern is that when people are told they can, and
should, ease their stress with mindfulness, it can imply that our stress is
caused by us and our inability to control our minds, not by the inequalities of
the system we live in.