This Is What Happens To Your Brain

When You Meditate

Spoiler: It literally changes. LITERALLY.
Do you practice meditation?

Studies have proved that meditation provides a lot of benefits to the brain and
improves the quality of life for people who practice it.

You can start with 5 minutes per day listening to this track while you relax and
practice deep breathing.
These 9 things happen to your brain when you meditate, check them out!
1.Meditation is hardly a new topic of
conversation. But, there’s still plenty that
remains unknown to most about the
practice of training the mind, including the
effect it can have on the brain.
While many people still associate meditation with the art of “thinking about nothing”
it is actually the opposite, according to Dr. Craig Hassed, a senior lecturer at Monash
Medical Faculty.
“All meditation practices involve training attention but also training the attitude of
acceptance and non-reactivity, as well as attention on the breath and the body,”
Hassed tells BuzzFeed Life.

So, rather than thinking about nothing, real meditation practice is about properly
acknowledging all of our thoughts, training our brain out of its default setting of
letting life pass by.
And if you practice meditation regularly, researchers believe that it can have
wonderful effects on your brain. Here’s what might happen:
2. First, you should understand: Your brain
can change and grow throughout your life.
This is called neuro-plasticity, and it’s a relatively new buzzword in the field of
neuroscience.

“The way that scientists used to think about the brain, until recent times, was that the
brain wires itself in early development and early childhood, then after that, the only
thing that happens to the brain is that it loses cells as we get older,” Hassed says.

But recent research has poked big holes in that theory. Neuroscientists now know
that you actually can teach an old brain new tricks.
“Today we know that our brains are changing all the time. Most changes take place on
the micro-anatomical level and are very short-lived — so it is harder to measure them
— but some changes even take place on the macro-anatomical level and can be
captured by modern imaging technologies, such as MRI,” Eileen Luders, Ph.D,
Assistant Professor at UCLA School of Medicine Department of Neurology, tells
BuzzFeed Life.
3. Some research shows that meditation is
associated with a change to the amount of
grey matter in the brain, which is a pretty
big deal.
But, what even is grey matter — and why is it so impressive that it can change?

“When people talk about grey matter, they’re talking about cells — the brain cells that
connect to each other,” Hassed says. “When a person learns a particular skill — like
meditation — they’re exercising those areas of grey matter, whose job it is to form
that skill.” Like you notice muscle gain after physical exercise, research shows
that meditation may stimulate the growth of new brain cells — which means more
measurable grey matter in certain areas of the brain.
Beyond reported differences in grey matter between meditators and people who don’t
practice, meditation has alsobeen associated with a slowdown in the natural loss of
grey matter, which occurs with aging. “In our latest study, we extended our focus of
research by looking at the potential impact of aging on the brain, specifically the
impact of aging on the brain’s grey matter. Again, our analysis revealed a striking
difference between meditators and controls: meditators’ brains seem to be much less
affected by the normal, natural age-related gray matter decline,” Luders says.
What this means: People who meditate regularly may slow down their brain’s aging
process. Go meditation!

4. Meditation has also been linked to

changes in the hippocampus, the part of the
brain responsible for forming memories
and spatial awareness.
A 2011 study compared the brains of people who meditated for about 40 minutes each
day with the brains of demographically-matched people who didn’t meditate at all.
Brain scans revealed that there were some areas of the meditator’s brains with more
grey matter — and one of these areas was the hippocampus.

5. The same study also compared the brains

of non-meditators to those who had just
undergone an eight week meditation
program, finding the same results.
This area of the brain, responsible for converting short-term memories into long-term
memories, is pretty important — so extra grey matter in the area is something to get
excited about.

Here’s a guess as to why meditation may impact the hippocampus in this way: “When
we’re not paying attention, the memory centre is offline, so we don’t remember
things,” Hassed says. “When a person is continually and regularly paying attention to
what is going on around them (read: bring mindful through meditation) the
hippocampus is being engaged, so in the long-term a healthier memory centre is the
result.”

What? One part of the brain gets smaller when you

meditate? Find out next page!