A lot of us are familiar with the concept of meditation, but how many of us have actually tried it? Odds are, not very many. And if we have tried it, there’s a good chance that we haven’t made it into a daily habit.
It turns out, this might be a bad move. Meditation might have some very strong benefits when it comes to both mental and physical health.
It can be easy to have a negative view of meditation, especially if you have a religious background. Meditation is often tied to Eastern religions like Buddhism, but it is not exclusive to these belief systems. In fact, even Christianity implores believers to meditate on different ideas. Meditation is not exclusive to Eastern thought, and it can be helpful for anyone, regardless of their religious background.
In fact, meditation can be a powerful tool even for those that are of a less religious, or even atheistic, world view. What’s more, it also has some noticeable effects when it comes to improving cardiovascular health. A survey that was led by the Veterans Affairs Research Communications branch found that individuals that practiced meditation on a daily basis were more likely to be healthy when it came to cardiovascular health. While this link has been noticed for several years, why it occurs is more of a grey area. The purpose of this study was to find out why this link occurs.
They published their findings at the end of June in the American Journal of Cardiology.
What they found was that people who meditated were less likely to suffer from diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and stroke. They also found that the impact of meditation was most profound when it came to coronary heart disease. People who meditate are about 51 percent less likely to have coronary heart disease than those that do not meditate.
Researchers looked at data for 61,000 people and controlled for factors like sex, cigarette and tobacco use, age, body mass index, and income levels. Even after all of these things were accounted for, meditation seems to still have an impact.
It seems that meditation itself is helpful in the fight for better health. There are a lot of different types of meditation, as mentioned above, and the study did not look at the subtle differences between these types, but rather the fact that it was present. This is good news because it means that we can each incorporate meditation into our daily lives in a way that works for us and aligns with our beliefs. If you’d like to learn more about meditation, there are a lot of really good sources on the web.
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