Does Meditation Really Improve Your Mental Health?

It's not a new concept, in fact, meditation has been practiced for more than 3 millennia. But does it really help as much as we're led to believe?

At some point, I think we'll all have heard, been encouraged to, or seen adverts about meditation, and whilst it's a highly popular part of day-to-day life in many Eastern cultures - many religions including Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, incorporate meditation or self-reflection in some form - it hasn't as readily been taken up in the Western world.

Studies in the USA [1] and the UK [2] found that only approximately 15% of the population use this method of self reflection on a regular basis, with men less likely to practice it than women.

So we set out to answer the question... Is meditation just a fad, or a is there genuine benefit to be gained by building it into your daily routine?

There is some research to suggest that practicing meditation can help with managing negative emotions, including stress, anger and fear.

Anger

Consciousness and Cognition published a small study in their journal in which just one session of meditation helped people to cope with anger. [3] 

Examining 15 people who were new to meditation and 12 who were experienced practitioners, participants were asked to relive experiences that made them angry.

The experienced practitioners showed minimal physical reaction to the exercise, meanwhile, those who had never practiced meditation before experienced an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate.

As a follow on to this, those who had never meditated before did so for 20 minutes. When asked to relive the anger-inducing episode again, they had much less of a physical response than they did the first time around.

Negative Emotions

Another study, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, found that meditation helped people manage negative emotions. [4]

For the experiment, one group listened to guided meditation, while another control group listened to a language-learning presentation.

After these sessions, participants were shown photos of disturbing scenes. Researchers recorded their brain activity and found that those who participated in the meditation session had a quicker recovery in the emotional response in their brains after seeing the photos, suggesting meditation helped them to manage their negative emotions.

Stress

Moving on to stress, it's no secret that this cortisol-induced reaction can be the cause of an array of physical and emotional issues, including an increased risk of headaches, muscle tension, fatigue, changes in sex drive, gastrointestinal symptoms, anxiety, and sleep difficulty to name but a few.

Uncontrollable stress can also increase the risk of chronic health problems, like heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes. (5)

A study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology studied two groups: one that participated in three consecutive days of 25-minute mindful meditation training, and another that was taught to analyse poetry as a method to improve critical thinking skills. (6)

Following the training, the participants were faced with the high-stress task of completing speech and math tests in front of evaluators. Those who had undergone the mindfulness training sessions reported feeling less stress than the poetry group.

Whilst these studies are on small snapshots, there's no doubt that meditation can have a significant effect in one way or another, be it on emotional wellbeing or physical ailments, and oftentimes it's about making situations more manageable.

One thing is for certain though; taking 20 minutes to yourself to just breathe and reflect is never going to be a bad thing for your mental health.

If you want to find out more about how to meditate, check out this article here where we go through the basics of how to start meditating.