Twenty minutes to Nirvana!
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science, saying… Namaste!
Mindfulness meditation is about training your mind to accept your feelings without judging or changing them. And like good gym habits, the perks of meditation grow with time. So, do only superstar monks benefit from the practice?
Hedy Kober and researchers from Yale, Columbia and Dartmouth put mindfulness to the test.
Around twenty adults with ZERO meditation experience volunteered. Subjects learned a twenty minute mindfulness practice designed to help deal with stress. During the experiment, subjects were instructed to react either normally or mindfully.
To trigger stress, researchers poked the volunteers with hot objects and showed them CREEPY images of spiders and snakes! The team took brain scans to observe the effects on their brains.
Results? Those subjects who practiced mindfulness reported feeling less pain! AND brain areas that detect pain were LESS active!
This shows that you don’t have to be a guru to reap the benefits of meditation! A single session can help dial back stress.
Umm, time for my twenty minute meditation break!