What Does Meditation Actually Do?
The scientific world’s increasing fascination with meditation has led to some pretty interesting discoveries. Meditation can lead to better organ functioning, lower resting heart rate, improved digestion, and a whole host of other benefits.
But through all of this research, the question still remains: why? What does meditation actually do that causes this effect?
There have been a few wild ideas about alpha waves and the human spirit, but there’s a much simpler culprit out that aligns with everything we already know about the body: meditating helps us worry less.
What about worrying?
The mechanism of worrying and its effect on adrenaline were explored in a previous article, but I’ll quickly sum them up here. Throughout the day, our brain constantly produces thoughts like “what if I embarass myself in front of my coworkers today,” or “what if this symptom turns out to be a sign of a serious illness” - thoughts that may come with a strong urge to worry. Sometimes, we dismiss these thoughts and urges, then choose to focus on something else, but more often, we choose to worry about them.
We imagine our coworkers judging us or our significant other rushing us to the hospital. This worrying leads our body to create stress hormones, which causes our organs to over-function, our heart rate to increase, and our digestion to speed up.
Meditation is a way to combat this behavior. When we sit down in complete silence and close our eyes, we have no choice but to directly confront these thoughts and the urges that come with them. Meditation methods like focusing on a certain image help us dismiss these urges rather than follow up on them - to allow thoughts to pop into our head like usual, but to choose to dismiss them rather than worrying about them.
When we stop worrying, we take our foot off the gas pedal - our body stops producing stress hormones for a brief moment, causing our heart rate to get lower and our digestion to slow down.
When done regularly, meditating acts as a kind of training. It helps us dismiss urges to worry more consistently even when we’re not meditating. This allows our body to further decrease its production of adrenaline and leads to further improvement in bodily functions.
When talking about the practical, tangible benefits of meditation, this is the clear answer - meditation helps us reduce how much we worry, leading these symptoms of worrying to lighten.
The drawback
The one downside of modern meditation is that there are so many misconceptions about how to do it, so many of us have trouble doing it often and don’t get to reap the benefits. We’re told meditation is all about “clearing your mind” and “shutting off your thoughts,” two things which are physically impossible. Then we’re told it feels relaxing and refreshing, something any experienced meditator will strongly disagree with.
If we want to actually benefit from meditation, we have to use methods that work with our biology rather than against it, a concept I discuss at length in my book. If you’re interested in this topic, or anything else related to anxiety and our body’s stress response, you can check it out on Amazon.
For now, I wish you luck on your journey with anxiety, and hope you have a speedy recovery.