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Meditation is Medication - Tyrone Reyes |
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Meditating on a daily basis may be the closest thing to an antidote to the ills of a stressful lifestyle. |
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It sounds too good to be true: Less stress, deep relaxation, better health, plus emotional and spiritual well-being – all risk-free and cost-free – just by sitting for 20 minutes a day. That’s the promise of the ancient practice of meditation, and a rapidly growing number of people around the world – including medical scientists, believe it delivers. |
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Meditation is an age-old religious practice, an end in itself or a path toward spiritual benefits for many who practice it, as well as a way to free the mind from the problems of daily life. It can also induce potentially such changes as lower blood pressure and reduced heart rate. It has been shown that accomplished practitioners can lower their oxygen consumption and body temperature, too. Thus, meditation is sometimes recommended to people with heart disease or other medical problems, as well as to anybody who’s trying to control emotional stress. |
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Herbert Benson, MD, founder of Harvard’s Mind-Body Medical Institute, first showed in the late 1960s that meditation counteracts stress by generating what he termed a "relaxation response," decreasing heart rate, blood pressure and muscle tension. Since then, numerous studies have confirmed that the simple act of sitting, relaxing the body, and quieting the mind, can be immediately beneficial – and experts say that meditating on a daily basis may be the closest thing to an antidote to the ills of a stressful lifestyle. |
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Calming Body and Mind: When we’re stressed, our body responds with "fight-or-flight" response: The body pumps out adrenaline, increasing our heart rate and blood pressure (readying us to fight) and sending more blood to our muscles (so we can flee). Meditation quiets that response, decreasing the arousal of the autonomic nervous system, which controls heart rate, respiration, digestion and other bodily functions. Using real-time brain imaging (called functional magnetic resonance imaging or FMRI), Harvard researchers have actually shown that meditation activates structures in the brain involved in controlling attention and the automatic nervous system. |
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