Preventing the Aging Diseases
The importance of meditation
The medical benefits of daily meditation are well documented and include sleep improvement, blood pressure reduction, pain relief, stress and anxiety reduction, and a decrease in depressive symptoms.
Daily meditation reverses the cytokine pattern seen in stress-induced depression. Cytokines are small proteins involved in inflammatory and other types of cell signalling.
Preventing the Aging Diseases
The science behind meditation
Genes related to inflammation become less active in people practicing meditation. A key protein that acts as an inflammation on-switch and increases amyloid production -called nuclear factor kappa B (NFkB) is downregulated in people who meditate. This is the opposite of the effects of chronic stress on gene expression and suggests that daily meditation practice may lead to a reduced risk of inflammation related diseases. IMPORTANTLY, meditation improves cognition, executive functioning, working memory, attention, and processing speed.
There are numerous studies demonstrating that meditation changes brain imaging. Meditation improves white matter connectivity and cortical thickness and grey matter concentrations in multiple brain regions.