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Written By: Editorial Team | Published : May 19, 2014 7:26 PM IST
Mindfulness training - a combination of meditation and body awareness exercises - can help help soldiers prepare for and recover from stressful combat situations, a study showed. Incorporating meditative practices into pre-deployment training might be a way to help military personnel reduce rates of stress-related health conditions, including post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety, the study suggested.
'Mindfulness helps the body optimise its response to stress by helping the body interpret stressful events as bodily sensations,' said Martin Paulus, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego in the US. 'The brain adds less emotional affect to experiences and this helps with stress recovery,' Paulus explained. Scientists describe mindfulness as a mental state characterised by 'full attention to the present moment without elaboration, judgment or emotional reactivity'. (Read: The 10-step meditation guide for beginners)
Mindfulness training, traditionally practiced through sitting meditation, attempts to cultivate this mental state by quieting the mind of extraneous thoughts. In the study, 147 marine infantrymen took an eight-week course in mindfulness, tailored for individuals operating in highly stressful environments. The course included classroom instruction on meditation and homework exercises, as well as training on interoception - the ability to help the body regulate its overall physical equilibrium (homeostasis) by becoming aware of bodily sensations, such as tightness in the stomach, heart rate and tingling of the skin. (Read: Meditation actually affects your genes!)
Participating marines, along with others who had not undergone mindfulness training, then spent a day in mock immersive combat at a 32,000-square-foot training facility staged to resemble a rural middle eastern village. The scientists found that the heart and breathing rates of those who had received mindfulness training returned to their normal, baseline levels faster than those who had not received the mindfulness training; and they experienced improved immune function, as well. Magnetic resonance imaging scans revealed that the mindfulness-trained marines had reduced activity patterns in regions of the brain responsible for integrating emotional reactivity, cognition and 'interoception'.
The study appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
What are the health benefits of meditation?
Meditation makes you more liberal!
Besides conferring health benefits, meditation also fosters liberal attitudes immediately after a session, say Canadian researchers. 'There's great overlap between religious beliefs and political orientations,' says psychology researcher Jordan Peterson of University of Toronto. 'Inducing a spiritual experience through a guided meditation exercise led both liberals and conservatives to endorse more liberal political attitudes,' adds Peterson, a study co-author. 'While religiousness is characterised by devotion to a specific tradition, set of principles, or code of conduct, spirituality is associated with the direct experience of self-transcendence and the feeling that we're all connected,' says Jacob Hirsh of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, who led the study. Read more
Meditation makes you smarter!
Meditation does make the brain smarter, allowing it to process information faster and improve decision making, according to the latest study. Eileen Luders, assistant professor at the University of California Los Angeles Lab of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues have found that long-term meditators have larger amounts of gyrification (folding of the cortex, which may allow the brain to act faster, with a host of benefits) than non-meditators. (Read: Beat stress with mindful meditation)
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