Top Benefits Of Regular Meditation – Alea Corinne Skwara University of California, Davis, USA Anna-Lisa Schuler Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Germany
This article is part of the Psychiatry 2022 Research Topic Review: Social Neuroscience View all 4 articles
Top Benefits Of Regular Meditation
Research over the past decade has revealed a variety of beneficial effects of meditation practice. These beneficial effects include levels of health and well-being, cognition, emotion, and social behavior. At the same time, sociologists have shown that symptoms and effects at the individual level have the potential to spread to society at three or more levels. This means, for example, that a change can spread from one person to another, or even to another person. Here, we suggest that meditation-induced changes may spread through the social networks of meditators. Such diffusion can be achieved by effectively influencing others through social activities, improving cognitive functioning, and increasing positive affect. Well-affected states and their physical associations can be shared verbatim. We believe that spreading the positive effects of meditation can provide a basis for a collective response to the pressing issues facing our time and society, and we invite future meditation research to explore this.
Benefits Of Meditation (& How To Do It) // Four Wellness Co.
Modern society has made great strides in improving health, technology, and general education. After these major advances, the limitations of modern society became all too clear. We are facing a catastrophic economic and environmental crisis, unprecedented mental stress and many related diseases. Many of the negative side effects of modern lifestyles, including loneliness and drug addiction, have been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic (1). State meditation has emerged as a potential therapy to better cope with the challenges of our time (2). Interventions such as the Eight-Week Stress Reduction Program (3) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (4) aimed at promoting resilience and promoting health and well-being have strong reputations in mainstream clinical and educational settings. 2). The popularity of mindfulness dates back to John Kabat-Zinn’s initiative in the 1970s to make Buddhist meditation accessible to a global audience. Mindfulness, as defined by Kabat-Zinn, is “the awareness that comes from being mindful, intentional, present, and nonjudgmental” (5). Recently, there has been increasing interest in empathy-based interventions (6). Programs such as Compassion-Focused Therapy (7) and Mindful Self-Care (8) promote positive affect and encourage social interaction.
There is a steadily growing body of literature demonstrating the positive effects of meditation practice on the active learner’s brain structure and function, cognition, affect, social behavior, and peripheral physiology [(e.g., 9-13)]. However, long-time Buddhist practitioners and meditation teachers suggest another level of change. They suggest that the positive effects of meditation may extend from the individual level to societal change, thereby providing a framework for integrated responses to the personal, social, and environmental challenges we face (14, 15).
It may seem like a bold idea, but the spread of stories through social media is nothing new. Basic research from observational and experimental data sets suggests that many characteristics and outcomes are similar in social networks, often spanning three degrees of distance between network members [ie, from one person to another; (16)]. For factors as diverse as obesity, smoking, alcohol and food consumption, sleep, drug use, happiness, loneliness, depression, divorce, and controlled laboratory experiments, causal effects of one trait in one person on the same trait in others have been proposed. cooperative behavior and political mobilization (16) . Another clear example of event diffusion comes from workplace research. Here, it has been shown that ethical leadership, defined as the manifestation of general behavior and the promotion of such behavior in followers, depends on additional efforts and help from followers, especially at high levels of behavior and memory (17).
Our understanding of “diffusion” in this article means that there must be a causal process whereby an effect produced by meditation on one person causes an effect on another person (also called the recipient). However, there is no condition that the two effects are isomorphic (that is, they have the same form). In the following sections, we summarize the positive effects of meditation practice on the practitioner, including changes in a) social behavior, (b) cognitive functioning, and (c) emotional functioning and stress anxiety. In each section, we think about the ways in which these effects can spread to other people. As a basic tool, we offer recipients to easily benefit from the effects of meditation. In response to this help, they may adjust their behavior, cognitions, or emotions. In the true sense of the word diffusion, the affective states of the practitioner and the underlying relationship can be isomorphically separated (see Figure 1 for a diagrammatic representation). Our transference performance shares many of the characteristics of what Kirby and colleagues describe as an empathic “flow” (18). The authors emphasize that compassion should be understood in a social context rather than statically (19), where it can be “excited.” In other words, if one is empathetic towards another, this can ensure that the other in turn is empathetic towards oneself and others (19–21). We conclude this article with a discussion of future research on how the effects of meditation may spread through social networks.
3 Holistic Benefits Of Guided Mindfulness Meditation
Figure 1. Schematic representation of the ways in which the effects of meditation spread to others. As a primary tool, recipients can easily benefit from meditation’s effects on professional behavior, cognitive functioning, and emotional functioning. They can also regulate their behavior, cognition or emotions. In the true sense of the term diffusion, the practitioner’s affective states and underlying relationship may be directly shared.
Another way in which the effects of meditation can spread and improve the lives of others is through social behavior. If we learn to have positive feelings for others, we will surely treat them with more respect and be more intentional about reaching out to those in need. The field has approached the subject of socialization with a variety of intervention programs and interventions. For example, after extensive training for up to nine months, Beauclair and colleagues (22) showed that empathic practice increased self-motivated, prosocial behavior. Surprisingly, very brief interventions in kindness or mindfulness [(e.g., 23–25)] lead to more prosocial behavior, even when meditative participants did it for only a few minutes (26, 27).
Despite differences in the way meditation training is delivered, both face-to-face and purely online instruction increase prosocial behavior (28, 29). Because a one-on-one program was not realistic for most nine-month participants, this finding is important when scaling up the intervention to larger groups. Regarding interventions to promote intergroup relations and cooperation, growing evidence suggests that both compassionate thinking and meditation can have a positive effect on intergroup relations [reviewed in (30)], suggesting that it is also useful for reducing intergroup discrimination. youth living in ethnic conflicts and violence (31).
An important issue in evaluating the effects of meditation interventions on socialization is the question of how it is evaluated. Research on the social effects of meditation-based interventions has used a variety of methods, from self-report to economic games to real-world behavior. Self-report is more sensitive to intervention and shows improvement regardless of the type of meditation trained, but there is evidence that it does not correspond to actual behavior changes assessed with various economic games (22). The advantage of such widely used economic games is that they allow measuring communicative behavior (25, 32). However, they are too easily criticized, and few concrete experiments have been conducted to support them. For example, after three weeks of app-based cognitive training, participants were able to help a stranger with their pain (29). Other real-world improvements include punishing criminals (33) and helping disadvantaged people (26, 27). Despite differences in experimental methods, there is consistency in the positive effects of meditation practice on sociability. A recent call by Mascaro and colleagues calls for a better integration of definitions and methods to make empathy research “more accurate, reliable, and transferable” and to promote the integration of knowledge within and across disciplines (34) .
Here Are The Benefits Of Mindfulness Meditation Practice!
A meta-analysis confirms the positive effect of meditation-based cognitive training on social behavior (35, 36). Furthermore, they highlight the need for future research to focus on factors that moderate these outcomes. Three main groups of mutations are discussed (37). First, although global psychological programs have greatly contributed to the success of construction in the West, it has been suggested that incorporating moral principles into psychological interventions may enhance their impact on socialization (38). Despite the evidence for this hypothesis (39), meta-data analysis clearly shows that the consequences of prosocial behavior occur without ethical training.
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