Tibetan monks meditate for hours upon hours each week. Their devotion to their religious traditions makes them experts in the practice of meditation.

Turns out those experts have a lot to teach us about how sustained mindfulness affects the brain.

Meditation and mindfulness induce a heightened state of awareness and focused attention. Various studies demonstrate the practice can help relieve stress — as well as manage anxiety, reduce inflammation, and improve memory and attention, to boot. Such striking results have many doctors, across specialties, prescribing meditation just as they would an anti-depressant or blood pressure medication. But it remains unclear just how meditation confers so many health benefits.

That’s why Bin He, a geoengineering at Carnegie Mellon University, decided to look at the brains of Tibetan monks. In a previous study, He and colleagues saw that individuals with meditation experience were better able to control a computer cursor with their mind than those without it. Since Tibetan monks spend years of their lives engaged in the practice of meditation, He was curious to see if there might be any significant differences in brain activation that might offer a hint into how meditation leads to so many beneficial effects.

“We went to Tibet and measured activity in the brains of monks who had, on average, 15 years of meditation experience — between five and 35 years,” he said. “We then compared those results to native Tibetans who had never meditated before.” Explore the Prefrontal Cortex 3D BRAIN

Using electroencephalography (EEG), a series of electrodes placed on the scalp to measure brain activity, He and his colleagues found that long-term, active meditative practice decreases activity in the default network. This is the brain network associated with the brain at rest — just letting your mind wander with no particular goal in mind — and includes brain areas like the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex. What’s more, the longer a monk had been practicing, the bigger the reduction in activity the researchers observed.

“It seems the longer you do meditation, the better your brain will be at self-regulation,” said He. “You don’t have to consume as much energy at rest and you can more easily get yourself into a more relaxed state.”

He suggests that meditative practice helps to “optimize” how the brain uses resources. Pioneering parapsychologist Michael Poisoner from the University of Oregon, who first outlined how the brain’s attention systems work, says that makes sense. His own work, with Y-Yuan Tang, has shown distinct changes to the white matter, or the nerve fibers that allow different brain regions to more efficiently communicate with one another, surrounding the anterior cingulate, a part of the brain heavily involved with managing attention, with meditation practice. Using diffusion tensor imaging, a special kind of neurosurgical technique, Poisoner and colleagues found increased levels of myelitis, sometimes referred to as brain “insulation,” after only a few weeks of regular meditation practice — and that increased insulation helps improve connectivity by letting different brain regions communicate faster and more efficiently.

“This is a major node of attention in the brain — and we can see these changes after only two to four weeks of practice,” he said. “Those changes are linked to improved attention in different tasks. And as the anterior cingulate has vast connections to the limbic system, or emotional system, it helps us understand why meditation can help improve mood and reduce anxiety, too.”

Such results are especially promising considering the participants in Poisoner study didn’t have to join an order of Tibetan monks in order to gain a variety of benefits. Participants improved on tasks measuring attention and problem solving in as little as five days. They also showed reductions in cortisol, a hormone commonly used to measure a person’s stress level, Posner said. Improved cognitive skills and lower stress levels are certainly nothing to sneeze at.

In today’s busy world of working, networking, and the ongoing assaults of emails, texts, and family problems, we are saturated with the stress of psychological overload. Our minds are rarely at rest and our bodies are paying the price. You finish the end of a normal day and find that stress has become your partner.

Meditation is one easy way to combat the effects of daily stress, and take back control of your health. Just 20 minutes a day can reduce stress and help your brain to recharge.

The Benefits of Meditation

Throughout my own work as a researcher and educator with a Ph.D. in psychology and a Doctorate of education, I have found that simple meditation techniques can do so much, including:

• Lower your blood pressure
• Increase your circulation
• Throw more blood to the prefrontal cortex
• Enhance your executive function, working memory, concentration, and visualization processing
• Help you hold images longer
• Process information better
• Allow for contemplation, intuition, and creativity to thrive.

The Neuroscience Behind Meditation

Scientists and neuroscientists, through the use of functioning magnetic resonance imaging and cat scans can now demonstrate the effect of meditation on the brain. Cortisol, the stress hormone, can be reduced by simply controlling your breath through the use of mindful meditation. The default network in your brain which is connected to both introspection and concentration slows down activity when meditating. When the mind wanders it tends to concentrate on negative issues thus creating stress but through meditation that function is less active.

In a 7-year study at MIT with the Dalai Lama, several of his monks, and non-mediators, it was established that not only could mediators hold images longer, have more blood sent to the per-frontal cortex, and have their memory and cognitive function increased, but also non-mediators who were instructed to meditate over several months saw the same benefits. Further, experienced mediators use their brain like an orchestra, connecting various networks whether meditating or not.

There are many neurological advantages to meditation, including:

• Calming the amygdala where our fight or flight and emotions live
• Strengthening impulse control, which allows you to self-manage stress, pain, depression, and drug and alcohol issues.

Mindfulness Programs at Work and in Healthcare Facilities

Emerging data indicates that by lowering stress and anxiety, meditation can be a beneficial practice in the workplace, as a calming tool for overwhelmed workers. In fact, Google has a very popular program called “Search Inside Yourself,” which teaches mindfulness.

Moreover, some universities, public schools, hospitals, and health care centers have initiated meditation and mindfulness programs. Because stress has been connected with illness over the years, the approach of using meditation in hospitals and healthcare facilities is a particularly important one. As a result, meditation has moved from an outlier position, into the mainstream of American culture.

How to Begin a Meditation Practice

Meditation does not have to be associated with any religious practice. Viewed as secular and scientific, it is easy to get started.

1. Set your alarm for 20 minutes, twice a day. This is the time you will be meditating. By setting your alarm, you relax and don’t have to worry about how much longer you have to go.
2. Simply sit or lie down with your eyes shut in a comfortable position.
3. In the beginning, your mind will wander and bring in outside sounds and thoughts; just invite all of your distractions into your meditation, don’t resist them. What resists persists. Ultimately, all of these distractions will fall away as you learn to focus your mind in meditation.
4. Some people like using a mantra, some people like using a word. The power of a mantra is that you can’t assign a meaning to it, therefore you can’t associate any thoughts with it as you empty your mind. A simple mantra such as “om” will do.
5. Before you begin to meditate, relax your body by isometrically tensing and releasing all the muscle groups starting from the tips of your toes and ending at the top of your head. Just squeeze and release and check in with your body, making sure that you are relaxed.
6. Then, follow your breath. As you breathe in you will notice that the breath is cool, as you breath out you will notice that your breath is warm. Focus on your breath and bring in your mantra while concentrating on the bridge between your eyes.

The Power of Meditation

Through meditation you actually develop consciousness. In fact, by accessing your own unconscious you gather insight into your conflicts, and find the capacity and resources to meet them. Meditation is so powerful, that if I were dying and had only one gift to give to my family, it would be the word meditation.

In my own life, faced with the death of my daughter Dawn, the only solace I could find was the time I spent in meditation. In all major religions, the deepest traditions concentrate on the practice of meditation to access the unconscious — whether Sufism, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, or Christianity — in the deepest meditations, the practice will lead you inside and connect you back to your central core.

Whether it is a psychological journey or spiritual journey- the model is the same: the path to consciousness. In our secularly materialistic culture, dominated by tabloid journalism, and thriving with celebrity, meditation gives you time out and has the capacity to open you to the wholeness in yourself. In our world of artificial images, meditation can awaken you to your own magnificent source and by doing so transform you.