Amy as been trying to get this into stroke survivor rehab for years. If your doctor and stroke hospital has none they are totally fucking incompetent and irresponsible. I have never been able to mediate, I do use forest bathing in the woods for that purpose.
Meditation and Physical Therapy by Amy Elder
The latest here:
Neuroscience Reveals 50-Year-Olds Can Have the Brains of 25-Year-Olds If They Do This 1 Thing - Meditation
Neuroscientist Sara Lazar, of Mass General and Harvard Medical School, started studying meditation
by accident. She sustained running injuries training for the Boston
Marathon, and her physical therapist told her to stretch. So Lazar took
up yoga.
"The yoga teacher
made all sorts of claims, that yoga would increase your compassion and
open your heart," said Lazar. "And I'd think, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm
here to stretch.' But I started noticing that I was calmer. I was better
able to handle more difficult situations. I was more compassionate and
open hearted, and able to see things from others' points of view."
Eventually,
she looked up the scientific literature on mindfulness meditation (a
category into which yoga can fall). She found the ever-increasing body
of evidence that shows that meditation decreases stress, depression, and
anxiety, reduces pain and insomnia, and increases quality of life.
So she started doing some neuroscience research of her own.
In her first study,
she looked at long-term meditators (those with seven to nine years of
experience) versus a control group. The results showed that those with a
strong meditation background had increased gray matter in several areas
of the brain, including the auditory and sensory cortex, as well as
insula and sensory regions.
This
makes sense, since mindfulness meditation has you slow down and become
aware of the present moment, including physical sensations such as your
breathing and the sounds around you.
However,
the neuroscientists also found that the meditators had more gray matter
in another brain region, this time linked to decision-making and
working memory: the frontal cortex. In fact, while most people see their
cortexes shrink as they age, 50-year-old meditators in the study had
the same amount of gray matter as those half their age.
That's remarkable.
Lazar
and her team wanted to make sure this wasn't because the long-term
meditators had more gray matter to begin with, so they conducted a second study. In it, they put people with no experience with meditation into an eight-week mindfulness program.
The
results? Even just eight weeks of meditation changed people's brains
for the better. There was thickening in several regions of the brain,
including the left hippocampus (involved in learning, memory, and
emotional regulation); the TPJ (involved in empathy and the ability to
take multiple perspectives); and a part of the brainstem called the pons
(where regulatory neurotransmitters are generated).
Plus,
the brains of the new meditators saw shrinkage of the amygdala, a
region of the brain associated with fear, anxiety, and aggression. This
reduction in size of the amygdala correlated to reduced stress levels in
those participants.
How
long do you have to meditate to see such results? Well, in the study,
participants were told to meditate for 40 minutes a day, but the average
ended up being 27 minutes a day. Several other studies suggest that you can see significant positive changes in just 15 to 20 minutes a day.
As
for Lazar's own meditation practice, she says it's "highly variable.
Some days 40 minutes. Some days five minutes. Some days, not at all.
It's a lot like exercise. Exercising three times a week is great. But if
all you can do is just a little bit every day, that's a good thing,
too."
Turns out meditating can give you the brain of a 25-year-old. Too bad it can't also give you the body of one.
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