Benefits of Meditation on Growth, Attention, Concussion Recovery, Athletic Performance, Weight & Anxiety

A life worth living is one that embraces the desire for infinite growth to enhance the authentic self. Write that down.

Most of us have been there multiple times in our lives - the recognition of the necessity for inner growth and the importance of taking personal inventory to do so, having an open heart to begin making the necessary changes, feeling the inevitable plateau, and then…that growth spurt hits you. You’ve just leveled up. Each of us finds it differently and it feels amazing when you know it’s happened. What was the catalyst for you to start your journey of growth and transformation - loss, trauma, social rejection, conflict, a serious injury or illness? And then what served as your lifeline? Mine was beginning to practice meditation and read up on (basic) Eastern philosophy.

Meditation is one of the most common forms of complementary and alternative medicine in the United States. However, I would recommend to anyone to introduce meditation into their lives on a regular basis regardless of if there is actually something that needs to be “treated” or not. Why? Because of the many evidence-based benefits people from all over the world, past and present, have been gifted from practicing the discipline.

In no way am I a trained expert or can even categorize meditation under my own professional scope of practice. I will share however, my own experience with it, some rookie tips, and discuss some of the most current peer-reviewed research literature discussing just some of the many benefits meditation has on our physical, mental, and emotional well being.

Basics

First off. Learning to meditate is extremely frustrating. It’s incredibly difficult to remain present, undistracted by your thoughts, inner dialogue, and from external stimuli. But. This is what meditation is though! It’s allowing yourself, judgement free, to bring yourself back to your present awareness, to your breath, every time you become distracted. You will become distracted dozens of times. It’s ok. Keep going because it becomes easier, I promise. One day you will find yourself finally flowing. It’s pretty cool. I’ve struggled with (no medication) ADHD symptoms and rumination tendencies my entire life. If I can meditate (and pretty darn well now), you certainly can too. Give it AT LEAST a week, every day. I started with 5 minutes. That was incredibly hard. I hated it but kept going, (because I love a good ol’ uphill battle!) Titrate up as it feels right to you. And be proud of your progress.

You can use what is called guided meditation to help focus you at first. A voice talks calmly the whole time to help guide you through remaining present. Visual imagery guidance is another option. Some of my favorite apps (I have no disclosures or financial ties to these companies) include Breathe, Insight Timer, Calm, and Headspace. You can also choose to meditate in silence, free from any apps. Another option is to meditate to something ambient or with some kind of lesson. Ones that I’ve dug are Sam Harris’ Waking up and through the (Deepak) Chopra Center. These are just some methods to get you there. Another great way is meditation’s cousin, mindfulness. Just eating, walking, thinking, breathing, pooping, showering, just being, in the present moment without any kind of judgment.

So, here are some of the many cool benefits:

Inner growth

What the average person doesn’t realize, something I too didn’t realize until I literally felt it happening to me, is that meditation benefits don’t just happen when you’re meditating. The magic happens when you’re NOT meditating. The meditation practice benefits transfer and generalize into our day to day lives in vast, amazing ways. The things that I have personally felt that have naturally woven into my life are my ability to be more observant, calm, comfortable being uncomfortable, being a little more ok with not having answers. I find myself less reactive, impulsive, and angry. More tolerant, more accepting of my own shortcomings. I have a sense of inner peace and calm that I have never felt before. I have been able to make sense and find clarity in things that I recently once struggled with. I carry with me more love and compassion towards myself, others, and situations that had once negatively impacted me. I attribute these transformations not only to my willingness and discipline to grow, but mostly to the practice of meditation. Again, this is my own personal journey of inner growth. I invite you to find your own and embrace it!

Attention and memory

The very essence of meditation requires one to remain focused and aware in the moment. Paying attention. An ADHD’s worst nightmare. But, when one is able to push through the inevitable struggle of Greif in his 2019 study on college kids, showed findings to include increases in state mindfulness and decreases in state anxiety, which appeared to vary by level of trait mindfulness. Better attention performance correlated with greater increases in state mindfulness. In other words, with less anxiety, we can pay attention more. If you’re able to use meditation to help strengthen your ability to stay present in the moment, you will increase your ability to focus and concentrate.

A study by Ziegler et al (2019) also showed attention benefits as a result of meditation. After six weeks of engagement with a meditation-inspired, closed-loop software program (MediTrain) delivered on mobile devices, gains were shown in both sustained attention and working memory in healthy young adults. They summarized their findings to suggest that, “the utility of delivering aspects of the ancient practice of focused-attention meditation in a modern, technology-based approach and its benefits on enhancing sustained attention.”

So what about the memory part? Well, when you pay attention, when you’re clear headed, you’ll remember what you’re paying attention to. Cool? Great, so moving on.

Concussions and structural brain changes

One of my first training specialties I obtained while in graduate school was working with and treating veterans with traumatic brain injuries (TBI’s, or concussions). An amazing population might I add. The post-concussive symptom sequela varies a bit depending on severity, time frame of loss of consciousness (LOC), location in the brain that received the brunt of the impact, previous TBI history, age, etc. But, aside from increased fatigue, irritability, tearfulness, dizziness, insomnia, headaches, light and noise sensitivity, symptoms after a head injury also include difficulties with attention and memory. The healing process is frustrating.

Concussions require rest for healing. Luckily, meditation enhances restfulness and as aforementioned, has also shown to improve attention. I wish this was something that was more prevalent back when I was treating my veterans, however, more research has since emerged, and biofeedback just began back then and continues to be a great method to help as an adjunct to concussion treatment. Among other things, biofeedback training in this medium for TBI’s essentially helps improve staying in the moment, paying attention to your brain functions, and focusing. This is close to meditation because of the mental capacities both require. You will get your attention abilities back. Meditation can help speed this process along.

Be patient with your healing. Seriously, chill out. You will not be 100% for a while. Meditation will enhance your patience through the healing process, with others and yourself. Your brain heals the most the first 30 days, and after about a year, the majority of the healing essentially stops. A lot of elasticity in the brain will get you far, especially the younger you are. Having said that, mindfulness meditation training has been shown to increase resting state functional connectivity between nodes of the frontoparietal executive control network and the default mode network. In human being, this means, meditation changes your brain structure. It literally changes brain physiology and enhances elasticity. But for god’s sake, rest! Your new found risk of developing dementia now depends on it, so don’t be a hero. …I say that with love.

To further touch on the importance of rest and how meditation can provide this as complimentary concussion healing, Simon Mantell, an English Olympic field hockey player shared his experience of benefiting from meditation as part of his healing from a sustained TBI. The most powerful recovery tool to recover from a concussion is REST. Mantell described in an article from Headspace, “I felt, especially during the later stages of the recovery, meditation was essentially a way of getting some more rest for my brain in the same way you’d rest any other sort of injury.” Mediation forces you to stop, slow down, calm your body and your thoughts to just. be. This is an extremely effective way to rest your mind and body, especially post concussion.

Athletic Performance

I was recently talking with a good friend of mine who is a well known CrossFit Games athlete (shout out to Margaux!), about meditation practice and how it benefits athletic performance. About the necessity to remain focused in the moment of competition and performance and how it is much easier said than done, but separates one from those who are unable to reach their performance potential while in the spotlight and under pressure. Mediation can vastly improve this ability because of the inner calm and focus it provides.

Ideal athletic performance is a rather complex mechanism. In addition to the obvious factors that help the athlete deliver, the ability to remain free of distraction and stay in tune with their inner execution plan, focus and sense of calm within the “external storm” is perhaps just as or most important. This storm needing to be effectively endured can consist of: the opposite team’s spectators behaviors, noises, minor mistakes the athlete just made, difficult climate/weather, current emotional stressors within the athlete’s personal life, other teammates, physical discomfort, fatigue, frustration or anger, lack of confidence, self doubt, criticism, etc. The list goes on. It’s a lot, right? Anybody who has participated in organized sports can relate to some of these. There is an an entire field of psychology that is dedicated to sports.

An interesting side note on meditation and pain tolerance in athletes - A study by Mohammad and his team in 2018 demonstrated an increase in pain tolerance and increase in mindful awareness for injured college athletes as a result of an 8-week mindfulness meditation (one 90-min session/week).

Weight loss

There is a significant health crisis with rates of obesity continuing to increase despite research and clinical standard behavioral weight loss programs. Let me make this clear. The practice of meditation itself does not actually magically cause your body to lose weight, per se. It’s the secondary mechanisms that come from the practice that cause this. Think of it this way - when correctly applied, meditation is a way of being that transfers into our every day way of being. Including the new choices we just find ourselves organically making as a result. Like nourishing our body with healthy food choices over previous behaviors of overindulging, emotional eating as a way of coping with emotional discomfort, or just plain outright unhealthy food. Why? Mostly because of disinhibition and restraint gained through meditation. I personally feel it is also because of the lifestyle inherent in the practice, of self love.

I’ll spare the lit details, but, many a research articles have cited and found statistically significant evidence showing the effects of meditation on weight loss. Including Sampaio, C., Magnavita, G., & Ladeia, A. (2019), who concluded that healing meditation in addition to standard weight loss treatment reduced weight and waist circumference over a short period in overweight or obese women.

A study earlier this year from Lattimore showed changes in emotional eating which then secondarily caused weight loss as a result of being more in the present, being more mindful of emotions and the urge to want to eats. He concluded, “mindfulness training before weight loss is attempted has the potential to change psychological factors that underpin overeating and undermine weight loss efforts.”

One of my favorite blog websites on social media right now is Tiny Buddha. Jennifer Marut wrote a great piece on the experience of beginning her journey learning how to meditate and how life transforming it was for her, including the unexpected achievement of losing weight, 30 pounds incidentally, because she found herself naturally making lifestyle changes that just made sense to her. Check it out.

Anxiety and hypertension

By learning and practicing awareness for your mental and physical state of anxiety in the moment, it allows for more of an adaptive reaction to difficult situations, including your response to anxiety (and anger). It also rewires your brain cells (neurons) circuitry, forming new neural pathways that are more adaptive in responding to difficult emotions.

A single example of the evidence based research showing this - Last month, a study came out by Klimes-Dougan and the gang (2019) that found that a form of mediation called Transcendental meditation had lowered hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal Axis activity (the HPA axis). Basically, meditation chilled people and their body’s stress response out. There are an abundance of data in the field that essentially show the same results. And intuitively this decrease in anxiety makes sense though, right? You’re breathing calmly, you’re (ideally) doing this on a regular, you’re discovering your inner self and inner calm, you’re still. This transfers to the rest of your day. This is also why studies have shown, in part, why meditation has shown to decrease hypertension.

My last point here, is to be patient with this process of strengthening your ability to meditate. Nothing good comes easy. Like any new practice, you literally have to do that - practice. Be consistent. If you are a patient observer with an open mind, you will be witness to the many attributes this practice will gift you.

~ You’ve got this!

References

Greif, T.R., Kaufman, D.A.S. (2019). Immediate effects of mediation in college students: A pilot study examining the role of baseline attention performance and trait mindfulness. Journal of American College Health. 2019 Sep 3:1-9.

https://www.headspace.com/blog/2017/03/27/simon-mantell/.

https://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-i-lost-30-pounds-by-meditating-and-all-the-things-i-gained/.

Klimes-Dougan, B., et al. (2019). Transcendental meditation and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functioning: A pilot, randomized controlled trial with young adults. The International Journal of the Biology of Stress.https://doi.org/10.1080/10253890.2019.1656714.

Lattimore, P. (2019). Mindfulness-based emotional eating awareness training: taking the emotional out of eating.Eat Weight Disord. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40519-019-00667-y

Mohammad, W.A., Pappous, A., Sharma, D. Front. Psychol., 15 May 2018 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00722.

Ziegler, D.A., et al (2019). Closed-loop digital meditation improves sustained attention in young adults. Nature Human Behavior, volume 3,746–757.