How Meditation Changes People

Meditation is a practice of “thoughtless awareness,” a state of consciousness where the mind is calm and silent, free from distraction and able to concentrate longer and focus more clearly. It can transform your outlook on the world and your place in it. Different kinds of meditation can also have specific physical and mental effects, which combine to help you leave stress behind and enhance your sense of well-being.

Effects on the Brain

Learning to meditate teaches you to focus steadily on one thing, so that the usual rush of distracting thoughts settles down and your mind feels clear and calm. Doing this regularly affects the structure of the brain, according to health psychologist Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D. Neuroscientists have used magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, or EEG, to show how training in meditation increases brain mass in appropriate sections and changes patterns of brain-cell activity. For example, EEG tests show how well-practiced meditators can concentrate with less effort while noticing more going on around them. They are also able to respond calmly to negative stimuli that normally cause brain-cell agitation and corresponding emotional distress because they have learned to observe in a detached, non-judgmental way.

Physical Effects

Meditation appears to influence the parasympathetic nervous system, which normally governs autonomic operations such as the heart rate, breathing and digestive processes. In meditation you achieve deep physical relaxation. Your pulse rate and blood pressure drop. You lose the tension that causes muscle pain and headache and aggravates digestive disorders. The cells of the immune system become more active in healing wounds, stopping infection and fighting diseases.

Mental Effects

You can use various meditative techniques to resolve fears and anxieties and gain self-confidence. It can help you emerge from depression and cope with the wearying effects of chronic illness. By stimulating areas of the brain that counter the “fight or flight” response to perceived risk, it can defuse much of the stress in daily life. Because meditation teaches you to observe detachedly, without judgment, it offers a way to escape habitual anxieties or phobias.

Feeling for Others

Practicing "loving-kindness meditation" where you learn to focus first on love for someone then on love in its own right, makes you more readily aware of being connected to other people, whether they are friends, strangers or family members. You feel a deeper sense of compassion and empathy, and with it comes the conviction that you have your own worthwhile place and purpose in life. According to McGonigal, psychology professor Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina and colleagues have studied this type of meditation, finding that a seven-week course in loving-kindness meditation helped participants feel a reduction of symptoms of illness and depression while gaining in life satisfaction. A study of psychiatric patients published in the "Journal of Clinical Psychology" in May 2009 found that some of those who experienced negative symptoms of schizophrenia benefitted from this type of meditation by building their ability to feel warm about others, good about themselves, more trusting and more confident in forming relationships.