Ashok Gupta discusses evidence that regular meditation reduces brain reactivity (notably in the amygdala), shifts prefrontal activity from right (linked to anxiety/depression) toward left (linked to rationality/awareness), and improves attention, sleep, and pain management. He cites a large Harvard study of ~4,400 people reporting nearly a 50% reduction in medical facility usage after learning meditation, and recommends at least 20 minutes daily for health benefits.
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And in fact, once we regularly meditate, a lot of the neurological studies have shown that it actually calms down the overall reactivity of the brain. So you may have heard me talk about a brain structure called the amygdala, which is often our emotional part of the brain that reacts to the external environment when we experience danger or anger. And we know that regular meditators have a less reactive amygdala. We also know that regular meditators have less activity in the right prefrontal cortex. So when we have more activity in this front part of the brain here, it's associated more with anxiety and depression and worry and negativity. But there's a shift away from that to an increase in the left prefrontal cortex, which is associated more with rationality and awareness. We know that our attention span increases, our ability to focus and concentrate, increases lots of benefits that come from calming the system. And that's because our defensive systems are designed to be stimulated for a few minutes, then come back to balance, stimulate the immune system, come back to balance, stimulate the fight or flight response for a few minutes, come back to balance. But if our system is over triggered all the time, we're losing our ability to think clearly, we're losing the energy in the body, it's leaking. We lose far more energy worrying than we do walking a mile. And so with regular meditation, we're able to bring the system more back to its balance. A recent Harvard study showed that people who learnt meditation and practiced it, compared to before meditation, they had almost a 50% drop their usage of medical facilities. Now, isn't that amazing? Let's just become aware of that fact for a moment. Because it was on five, it was from 4400 people. So this wasn't a small study, this was a large, clinically significant, highly significant study. So we're talking about healthcare costs increasing around the world, and yet we know that meditation could halve the usage of medical facilities. It would be a miracle drug. If someone came up with a miracle drug that could halve the usage of medical facilities, they would be the richest person in the world. And yet we have it here, it's available, it's free, has no side effects, and yet it just requires that 20 minutes of our time a day. And 20 minutes tends to be the sweet spot, or at least a minimum of 20 minutes. So the benefits are that it reduces our immune system triggering, reduces inflammation, calms down our heart rate and blood pressure, and, and most importantly, for a lot of these conditions, it gets our sleep cycles back to normal. So I'm sure you may notice that you find it perhaps difficult to stay asleep or get to sleep, or you don't feel refreshed in the morning. So regular meditation is known to get our sleep cycles back to normal. And for those of you suffering from pain, fibromyalgia. We know that there are two things that really help pain. One is calming down the reactivity of the brain, especially meditation. And secondly, when the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is focused on other activities. So engaged distraction in other things can also help pain as well. And most importantly of all, it just makes us feel calmer, happier, less reactive, less a slave to all those negative thoughts that run around in our minds. Sam.
