Although many people think that it can take years in order to truly see the benefits from practicing meditation, the truth is that most experience significant changes to their mental health and physical well being within weeks, if not just a few sittings. Results, of course, depend upon who you are and your level of stress. The point is that meditation is an easily accessible and effective tool that a person can use to help manage and deal with the rigorous demands of life.
Rick Nauert takes a look at the positive effects of short-term meditation in this recent Psych Central post. According to Nauert, who references an upcoming study to be published in Psychological Science, researchers using an EEG to measure the brain’s electrical activity found that participants who practiced meditation an average of 7 hours over the course of 5 weeks showed greater activity in the left frontal region of the brain. The lesson? Practicing meditation for even short amounts of time can have profound effect on a person’s brain.
People who had done the meditation training showed greater activity in the left frontal region of the brain in response to subsequent attempts to meditate. Other research has found that this pattern of brain activity is associated with positive moods.
The shift in brain activity “was clearly evident even with a small number of subjects,” said Christopher Moyer, Ph.D., one of Anderson’s coauthors at the University of Wisconsin-Stout.
“If someone is thinking about trying meditation and they were thinking, ‘It’s too big of a commitment, it’s going to take too much rigorous training before it has an effect on my mind,’ this research suggests that’s not the case.” For those people, meditation might be worth a try, he said. “It can’t hurt and it might do you a lot of good.”
Read more from Nauert on this meditation study here.