Meditation helps you achieve the highest level of mental awareness and focus. Meditation and mindfulness have also been known to relieve stress, manage anxiety, improve memory, as well as increase attention and reduce inflammation. You will enjoy many benefits through meditation, as it will keep you physically and mentally fit. In recent years, the doctors of different specialities have suggested meditation to improve focus and to ensure the complete wellbeing of a person in addition to prescribing medications.
7 Meditation Techniques That Help Your Brain to Improve Focus
1. Meditation Preserves Brain-Function despite Aging
UCLA recently performed a study on the brain function of a few participants by measuring the volume of grey matter in the brain. Grey matter is tissue in the brain that helps regulate speech, hearing, emotions, sight, and memory. The study revealed that the individuals who have meditated for months or years have been able to preserve their brain function better than others.
- The ‘grey matter’ volume is higher overall in the brains of participants who have been meditating for 20 years or more.
- Some volume loss was evidenced in older people who have practised meditation in comparison to the younger meditating people. However, it was not as severe as the volume loss in people who have never meditated.
This study revealed the extensive effect of meditation on the human brain, as it affected all the regions.
2. Dial Down Activity of DMN through Meditation
The Default Mode Network or DMN is a collection of brain regions that give away strong low-frequency oscillations. They become activated when someone focuses on internal mental-state processes, such as introspection, thinking about the future, memory retrieval or self-referential processing.
Your mind will wander off when the DMN is active and you will think about nothing in particular. The wandering of the brain is often associated with being less happy or worrying about the past/future. Hence, it is essential to minimize the activity of DMN as much as possible. Meditation has a quieting effect. The more you practice meditation, the more you can prevent your mind from wandering and the easier it will be to control your thoughts.
3. Meditation to Manage Depression/Anxiety
Dr Madhav Goyal of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine said that they were observing consistent positive effects in healing anxiety/depression with a little 2.5-hour meditation!
So we can say, meditation can be used to soothe your depression and anxiety which let your mind be calm and ignore all the chaos.
Mindful meditation is a process of training the mind to improve awareness and concentration. It’s not like you sit down, meditate and magically it treats or heals your depression/ anxiety. So, it is important to remember that practicing mindfulness is merely a tool to control or relieve or soothe your symptoms.
4. Volume Changes in Different Areas of Brain through Meditation
In 2011, research was performed by Sara Lazar and her team at Harvard which lasted for eight weeks. The objective of this research was to find out if mindfulness meditation can alter a brain’s structure and it was found that meditation can increase the cortical thickness in the brain’s hippocampus region. This area controls the memory and the learning capacity.
The outcome of this research also showed that meditation can strengthen certain areas of the brain that regulate emotions and self-referential processing. Furthermore, meditation was found to reduce the brain-cell volume in the amygdala (a collection of cells near the base of the brain). These cells are responsible for causing fear, stress and anxiety. The participants of this research also reported noticing improvements in their stress level.
This research also indicated that meditation changed subjective perception and feelings in addition to changing brain function. Sara Lazar also conducted a follow-up study and discovered changes in some areas of the brain that are linked to mood and arousal after meditation training. Thus, meditation can improve the overall psychological well-being of individuals.
5. Improved Focus & Concentration with a Few Days of Brain Training
You will notice an improvement in focus and concentration through meditation. A short research study was conducted on a group of participants who were taking the Graduate Record Exams (GRE). The participants of this research study were found to have improved focus and memory during the ‘Verbal Reasoning’ measure of GRE and the improvement in score was equivalent to 16 percentile points for some participants. Continue reading the full blog and explore all the meditation techniques to improve your focus.
