History

People in high-stress occupations are turning more and more to meditation. Taking out just 10 minutes of your day to meditate can significantly improve many aspects of your life. Here are the psychological benefits of meditation.

“Meditation is like a gym in which you develop the powerful mental muscles of calm and insight.” – Ajahn Brahm

1. It can significantly improve your self-esteem.

* Nystul and Garde (1977) reported that meditators had significantly more positive self-concepts than non-meditators.

* Meditation helps to increase positive social emotions and decrease social isolation (Cendri et al., 2008).

2. It can enhance your memory and intelligence.

* Hall (1999) assigned undergraduate students to a meditation or no meditation group. The meditation group was instructed to meditate before and after studying, and before exams. Significantly higher grades were found in the experimental group than in the control group.

* There’s also evidence that the improvements in memory and academic performance associated with meditation apply across the lifespan.

3. It literally changes your brain’s physical structure.

* Luders et al. (2009) found that meditation increases volume in areas related to emotion regulation, positive emotions & self-control.

* Brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing were thicker in meditation participants than matched controls, including the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula (Lazar, 2006).

4. It increases your focus & attention.

* Training in meditation or relaxation can improve office workers’ abilities to remain focused on tasks for longer (Levy, 2011).

* Meditation can improve performance on a novel task that requires the trained attentional abilities (Slagter, 2007).

5. It can supercharge your creativity.

* Cowger and Torrence (1982) found that meditators attained statistically significant gains in creativity as defined by heightened conscientiousness of problems, perceived change, invention, humour and fantasy.

6. It increases your pain tolerance.

* Meditation engages multiple brain mechanisms that alter the construction of the subjectively available pain experience (Zeidan, 2011).

7. It can alter negative personality traits.

* Van den Burg and Mulder (1976) reported that meditators showed significant reductions in physical and social inadequacy, neuroticism, depression and rigidity.

8. We can get to know our true selves.

* It’s easy to have blind spots when examining our own selves and personalities. Having insight into how others perceive you and acknowledging your flaws can attenuate the negativity of others’

impressions. Mindfulness mediation makes it easier for us to judge ourselves in an objective manner (Carlson, 2013).

9. It can result in faster information processing.

* Luders (2012) took MRI scans of 100 people — half meditators and half non-meditators. They found that long-time meditators showed higher levels of gyrification (a folding of the cerebral cortex that may be associated with faster information processing).