Healthy Aging: Benefits of Meditation
Mental and emotional pain, poor sleep quality and limited social connections can all be symptoms of aging. A growing body of evidence shows how mindfulness meditation may be an effective solution to alleviate these issues and enhance overall wellness.
Mindfulness meditation is an ancient practice that teaches you to recognize when your attention wanders and bring it back into the present moment. Being more attentive helps reduce stress, improve sleep quality and anxiety levels, bring peace and serenity into life more fully, as well as enjoying it more fully.
Loving-Kindness meditation aims at cultivating feelings of kindness and charity towards yourself and others. Additionally, this type of practice strengthens empathy while improving relationships; which all play an essential part in healthy aging.
Meditation has the ability to reduce blood pressure and alleviate symptoms associated with chronic conditions, like arthritis. Furthermore, it can strengthen your immune system so you are better protected against illness and disease.
Studies have demonstrated that meditation can have profoundly positive impacts on cognitive functions and memory, including verbal fluency, processing speed, overall cognitive flexibility, conflict monitoring, creative thinking and creative problem-solving. Furthermore, it can increase telomerase activity which helps protect cells against cell aging processes.
Many of the factors contributing to healthy aging–physical, mental/cognitive and social/emotional well-being–are interdependent. Achieve overall wellbeing requires exercising regularly, eating nutritiously and maintaining positive relationships; meditation may have positive ramifications as well.