Brainstorm!: MEDITATION - HOW TO COPE WITH STRESS IN 2017

Whether it’s because of socioeconomic status, relationships, politics, or any other anxiety-inducing factors, we often find ourselves in periods of stress. As college students, this stress is heightened and potentially becomes chronic due to classes, labs, exams, extracurriculars, work, research, sports – I feel stressed just writing this list! The best solution I can offer for temporary and chronic stress is meditation,* and here’s why.

From a biological standpoint, meditation helps regulate breathing and heart rate. This is important because a major impact of stress on the body is that it disrupts normal breathing patterns and the heart’s basal rhythm. Stress causes activation of the amygdala within the brain, which sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus, in turn, signals the adrenal medulla to release epinephrine, a hormone that activates the sympathetic nervous system and the well-known ‘fight or flight’ response. In doing so, stress induces the body to quicken breath and increase the heart rate. If stress continues – even at a low level – this physiological effect is prolonged by release of the stress hormone cortisol. Meditation combats these effects of stress by activating the parasympathetic system of the brain, which functions to lower heart rate and slow breathing. Numerous studies have found a decrease in heart rate and respiratory rate, and even reduced cortisol levels in experimental groups who meditate compared with control groups. Furthermore, meditation has been directly correlated with improved multitasking and reduced negative emotional response to stressful situations. One study even found that mindfulness training improved GRE accuracy equivalent to an average increase of 16 percentile points on the test!

Secondly, meditation strengthens the brain and mind. This notion is analogous to how exercise strengthens the body. When we are mentally tired and weak, stress has a larger impact on our psychological state. Meditation can alleviate and even prevent mental exhaustion. A Harvard study found that mindfulness meditation leads to increased cortical thickness in the hippocampus, a structure that is central to long term memory. The scientists also noted decreases in brain cell volume of the amygdala, a structure implicated in stress, as mentioned above. The Harvard team went on to find that these changes were positively correlated with test subjects’ levels of stress and psychological well-being. Another study at UCLA found long-term meditators had less age-related brain gray matter atrophy compared with control subjects in many regions of the brain. Therefore, meditation is linked with reduced loss of brain tissue!

We live in a fast-paced world where stressors are omnipresent. The sad truth is that often times, we cannot change or remove these stressors from our lives. Instead, we must learn to manipulate the way in which the stressors manifest themselves within us and appropriately handle the stress that inevitably comes with life. I urge you to utilize meditation to do this. Whether or not you believe in the spiritual basis of meditation, at least recognize the neurological significance it has. At the very least, try it out for yourself, and see how you feel after a couple of weeks of meditating. After all, you are the experimenter, you are the experiment, and you are the result.

* I started meditating in the morning before starting the day and at night before bed for about ten minutes, gradually increasing that time as I was able. To learn proper techniques to mindfulness meditation, use this link: http://www.mindful.org/meditation-for-beginners-video/