What have we learned about mindfulness?

By Moris Beracha
The amount of benefits found by scientists and mindfulness practitioners has been increasingly popular. The Huffington Post reveals the most important findings.
We have discovered how mindfulness improves health. Carnegie Mellon University published a study suggesting that ‘mindfulness’ positively influences health via stress reduction pathways.
Scientists developed a model to demonstrate that Mindfulness increases activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is responsible for deliberation and planning and which can regulate the biological stress response.
Meditation keeps the brain young. According to studies, Mindfulness practice is not limited to making practitioners feel good, but can keep them young.
A study from the University of California, found that meditators’ brains seem to age at a slower pace than those of other people. Meditators showed less age-related reduction of gray matter volume. Gray matter is a layer of tissue critical to cognition and memory storage.
Mindfulness is an effective treatment for insomnia. Before you turn to sleeping pills to treat insomnia, give mindfulness a try. A team of psychologists at the University of California administered a six-week course of mindfulness meditation to a group of older adults with sleep troubles.
At the end of the six weeks, the participants were falling asleep faster, waking up less during the night, and experience less daytime sleepiness.
Mindfulness is good for kids. Mindfulness interventions can be a powerful way to combat stress among underprivileged students at public schools. Johns Hopkins University researchers evaluated the effects of an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction program among low-income students.
Compared to a control group, students in the stress reduction program had significantly reduced levels of somatization, depression, negative mood, poor coping and other negative symptoms.
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