How To Boost Your Brain Power, No Matter Your Age

By Author: Smart Dhyana
Total Articles: 18
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For years science has been exploring the relationship between meditation and the mind. Recent research has proven there is some weight to the ancient claim of meditation having a positive effect on the brain. Apart from direct physiological benefits such as reduced stress, better memory, and more compassion we now know definitively that meditation doesn’t just exercise the brain it changes it permanently.
Long term meditation or mindfulness is shown to lead to more grey matter density within the hippocampus. This is the area associated with learning, memory, and emotion. The structural changes caused due to long-term mindfulness practice in this area lead to greater concentration, a more optimistic outlook, and sustained emotional stability.
Studies show that just 25 minutes of daily mindfulness meditation helps you reduce knee-jerk emotional responses and train your mind to focus its conscious processing power on what you choose. The practice of mindfulness is particularly useful for training your brain to reduce the processing of nonessential information. It helps free up cognitive capacity for your personal ...
... goals.
Furthermore, research has also shown that within 8 weeks of daily mindfulness practice the size of the amygdala within the brain reduces. The amygdala is the part of the brain which controls anxiety and stress. These are permanent measurable changes proving that mindfulness practice helps you evolve your brain towards efficiency and mental stability.

Mindfulness is more than just mere mental work-out
The analogy that meditation or mindfulness is like a gym for the mind is a rather poor comparison that doesn’t do justice to its transformative capacity. If you stop working out you no longer gain its benefits. But mindfulness creates structural changes within your brain that are permanent. These last much longer than diet fads these do not reverse themselves if you stop practicing mindfulness. Mindfulness benefits are permanent and they compound over time. Mindfulness benefits are permanent and they compound over time.
It’s not just that mindfulness helps grow more grey matter within the brain this growth plays many crucial roles. Mindfulness helps the brain regenerate brain cells and learn how to repair itself organically. Its effect resonates within the entire brain. During a mindfulness session, the brain generates feelings of calmness. These then lead to signals of a state of bliss that are sent by the brain to the entire body. The entire body then responds by shifting itself into a restful and stress-free state of being. The benefits of being in this state for prolonged periods include increased creativity, improved learning ability, and optimal executive function. Mindfulness is more than just a stress-relieving tool it’s a path to growing and accessing more of your own brainpower.

Age is no longer a barrier to brain development
Most people believe that the younger years are the most important ones in our lives. That is when the brain is developing and growing and we should make the most of them. As we grow older this growth stagnates. Mindfulness challenges this notion head-on. Brain structure and growth are no longer stagnant in the later years. Mindfulness practice proves that neuroplasticity (enabling change in the brain) and neurogenesis (grey matter growth) are possible at any age. While these changes might not be as large as those occurring in childhood, they are still significant. With daily long-term mindfulness practice, we now have the ability to grow our brains at any age.

Calming the monkey mind
A Yale University study has shown that mindfulness decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN). This is the neural network responsible for mind-wandering aka “monkey mind”. When our mind simply wanders from thought to thought and we’re unable to focus that’s our monkey mind at work. Mindfulness helps reduce this and because of the structural changes, it causes even when our mind does wander it can snap itself out of it much quicker.

People often attest to the quote, “The mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master.” Mindfulness helps us ensure that we use our minds and not the other way around. Its daily practice ensures that your mind focuses on things that matter most to you, it becomes empowered to cut down on internal noise and is overall calmer and more relaxed.

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