<![CDATA[Positive Meditation: Happiness Skills for Life - Blog]]>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 07:32:24 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[How Meditation Helps You Sleep]]>Wed, 16 May 2018 19:36:00 GMThttps://www.positivemeditation.com/blog/how-meditation-helps-you-sleepThough sleep is a necessary biological function, for some people, it can be elusive. Stress, medications, family and work obligations, or even staying up late to binge watch TV can all get in the way of getting a full seven to eight hours of sleep. Meditation has been shown to help treat the symptoms of insomnia and help practitioners sleep the amount they need for optimal health.  

Anytime you get less than seven hours of sleep you’re falling into a state of sleep deprivation. In this state, the mind and body slow down and change how they function. Neurons in the brain slow, which causes changes in reaction times, reasoning abilities, and decision-making skills. The effectiveness of your immune system gets compromised, making you more vulnerable illness. Without adequate sleep, the body releases more hunger hormones and fewer satiety hormones. These changes make overeating and unwanted weight gain far more likely. Chronic sleep deprivation has been linked to conditions and illnesses such as diabetes, stroke, heart disease, dementia, depression, anxiety, and heart attacks just to name a few.

But there are effective methods for getting more high-quality sleep and among them—meditation. Scientists have begun to study meditation and in an attempt to pinpoint how it affects the human body. While the changes are many, they seem to start in the brain.

Mindfulness meditation is the one most frequently used meditation methods for better sleep. This method triggers the body’s relaxation response wherein the heart rate and blood pressure decrease. Mindfulness meditation brings awareness to thoughts that appear in your mind and teaches practitioners to focus on the present. In this way, meditators learn to let go of past or future events that lead to the opposite of relaxation—fight or flight, in other words, stress.

Long-term practice of meditation methods like this lead to physical changes in the body that relieve stress and contribute better sleep. The amygdala, or emotional center of the brain, becomes more sensitive to negative stimuli when you’re sleep deprived. Meditation reduces the size of this part of the brain while thickening the reasoning and logic portion of the brain, called the prefrontal cortex. As negative thoughts arise, the strong connection between emotions and reason allows the practitioner to let go of negative emotions and maintain a present focus.  

Meditation also reduces the amount of cortisol, a stress hormone, released in the body. A study done at the University of California - Davis used two groups, one that practiced meditation and one that did not to determine how meditation affected cortisol levels. Using their saliva, they found that the better the person was able to focus their thoughts on present sensations, the lower their cortisol levels.

Meditations ability to reduce stress provides a valuable tool in our fast-paced world. But, mindfulness meditation isn’t the only method that aids sleep. A 2006 study found that practitioners of Vipassana meditation spent longer amounts of time in slow wave and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. As we age, we tend to spend less time in these sleep stages. Meditation can make the sleep quality of a middle-aged person equal that of someone much younger.

Whether you need better stress relief or help reaching the deepest levels of sleep, meditation can improve the quantity and quality of your sleep. If you’re looking for a simple way to add meditation into your schedule, try using it as part of a bedtime routine. It can even be done while lying in bed. Experts have often said to only use the bed for sleep and sex, but meditating in bed can be a peaceful way to slip into a rejuvenating sleep.


]]><![CDATA[The benefits of making time each day to meditate...]]>Thu, 22 Jun 2017 13:29:13 GMThttps://www.positivemeditation.com/blog/the-benefits-of-making-time-each-day-to-meditateWe define mindfulness as a moment-to-moment awareness of one's experience without judgment. 

Several disciplines and practices can cultivate mindfulness, such as yoga, tai chi and qigong, but most of the literature has focused on mindfulness that is developed through mindfulness meditation — those self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being and specific capacities such as calmness, clarity and concentration (Walsh & Shapiro, 2006).

More specifically, research on mindfulness has identified these benefits:

Reduced rumination. Several studies have shown that mindfulness reduces rumination. In one study, for example, Chambers et al. (2008) asked 20 novice meditators to participate in a 10-day intensive mindfulness meditation retreat. After the retreat, the meditation group had significantly higher self-reported mindfulness and a decreased negative affect compared with a control group. They also experienced fewer depressive symptoms and less rumination. In addition, the meditators had significantly better working memory capacity and were better able to sustain attention during a performance task compared with the control group.

Stress reduction. Many studies show that practicing mindfulness reduces stress. In 2010, Hoffman et al. conducted a meta-analysis of 39 studies that explored the use of mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. The researchers concluded that mindfulness-based therapy may be useful in altering affective and cognitive processes that underlie multiple clinical issues.

Boosts to working memory. Improvements to working memory appear to be another benefit of mindfulness, research finds. A 2010 study by Jha et al., for example, documented the benefits of mindfulness meditation among a military group who participated in an eight-week mindfulness training, a nonmeditating military group and a group of nonmeditating civilians. Both military groups were in a highly stressful period before deployment. The researchers found that the nonmeditating military group had decreased working memory capacity over time, whereas working memory capacity among nonmeditating civilians was stable across time. Within the meditating military group, however, working memory capacity increased with meditation practice. In addition, meditation practice was directly related to self-reported positive affect and inversely related to self-reported negative affect.

Focus. Another study examined how mindfulness meditation affected participants' ability to focus attention and suppress distracting information. The researchers compared a group of experienced mindfulness meditators with a control group that had no meditation experience. They found that the meditation group had significantly better performance on all measures of attention and had higher self-reported mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation practice and self-reported mindfulness were correlated directly with cognitive flexibility and attentional functioning (Moore and Malinowski, 2009).

Less emotional reactivity. Research also supports the notion that mindfulness meditation decreases emotional reactivity. In a study of people who had anywhere from one month to 29 years of mindfulness meditation practice, researchers found that mindfulness meditation practice helped people disengage from emotionally upsetting pictures and enabled them to focus better on a cognitive task as compared with people who saw the pictures but did not meditate (Ortner et al., 2007).

More cognitive flexibility. Another line of research suggests that in addition to helping people become less reactive, mindfulness meditation may also give them greater cognitive flexibility. One study found that people who practice mindfulness meditation appear to develop the skill of self-observation, which neurologically disengages the automatic pathways that were created by prior learning and enables present-moment input to be integrated in a new way (Siegel, 2007a). Meditation also activates the brain region associated with more adaptive responses to stressful or negative situations (Cahn & Polich, 2006; Davidson et al., 2003). Activation of this region corresponds with faster recovery to baseline after being negatively provoked (Davidson, 2000; Davidson, Jackson, & Kalin, 2000).

Relationship satisfaction. Several studies find that a person's ability to be mindful can help predict relationship satisfaction — the ability to respond well to relationship stress and the skill in communicating one's emotions to a partner. Empirical evidence suggests that mindfulness protects against the emotionally stressful effects of relationship conflict (Barnes et al., 2007), is positively associated with the ability to express oneself in various social situations (Dekeyser el al., 2008) and predicts relationship satisfaction (Barnes et al., 2007; Wachs & Cordova, 2007).
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Other benefits. Mindfulness has been shown to enhance self-insight, morality, intuition and fear modulation, all functions associated with the brain's middle prefrontal lobe area. Evidence also suggests that mindfulness meditation has numerous health benefits, including increased immune functioning (Davidson et al., 2003; see Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Walach, 2004 for a review of physical health benefits), improvement to well-being (Carmody & Baer, 2008) and reduction in psychological distress (Coffey & Hartman, 2008; Ostafin et al., 2006). In addition, mindfulness meditation practice appears to increase information processing speed (Moore & Malinowski, 2009), as well as decrease task effort and having thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand (Lutz et al., 2009).

​Source: APA

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]]><![CDATA[Learning to Love]]>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 19:18:23 GMThttps://www.positivemeditation.com/blog/learning-to-loveThe importance of love for our own survival is illustrated in this beautiful talk from a beautiful man at the recent Future Now conference in Bristol. 
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