Mindfulness meditation, the practice of paying more attention to the present moment, helps lower stress hormones and decreases inflammation in the body, scientists have proven for the first time

The training has been growing in popularity in recent years, with the NHS recommends mindfulness as a way to reduce stress and anxiety. Studies have shown that mindfulness can decrease self-reported stress levels and make people feel calmer, but until now it was unknown if it was having a biological impact on the body. Now scientists have shown that an eight week course of mindfulness, involving daily classes can help lower inflammatory molecules and stress hormones by around 15%. The therapy was shown to work better than non-meditation stress management course. “Mindfulness meditation training is a relatively inexpensive and low-stigma treatment approach, and these findings strengthen the case that it can improve resilience to stress,” said lead author Dr Elizabeth Hoge, associate professor in Georgetown University Medical Center’s Department of Psychiatry. “The study adds to evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness meditation in treating anxiety.” The study included 89 patients with anxiety disorder, a condition if chronic and excessive worrying which is thought to affect around three million people in Britain. The participants were divided into two groups, with one taking an eight-week mindfulness course and the other taking a stress management course over the same period. Before and after the training course, participants underwent the Trier Social Stress Test, a standard technique for inducing a stress response, in which the participants are asked at short notice to give a speech before an audience, and are given other anxiety-inducing instructions. “We were testing the patients’ resilience because that’s really the ultimate question—can we make people handle stress better?" added Dr Hoge. During the stress test, the team monitored blood-based markers of subjects’ stress responses, including levels of the stress hormone cortisol and the inflammatory proteins IL-6 and TNF-α, which usually ramp up when the body is fighting illness. The control group who took the stress management course showed a modest rise in markers on the second test compared to the first, suggesting a worsening of their anxiety from having to endure the test again. By contrast, the meditation group showed big drops in these markers on the second test, suggesting that the meditation training had helped them cope. The team also found that the meditation group patients, compared to controls, experienced significantly greater reductions in self-reported measures of stress after their course. Hoge now wants to test whether mindfulness-related treatments can help other psychiatric conditions, and to compare treatments to standard psychiatric drug therapies.

Practicing transcendental meditation technique for 20 minutes twice a day can significantly reduce trauma symptoms such as unwanted thoughts and help female prisoners find inner peace, a study has found

Transcendental meditation is a technique for detaching oneself from anxiety and promoting harmony and self-realization by meditation, repetition of a mantra, and other yogic practices. The results showed that after four months of practicing the meditation technique, the women inmates had significant reductions in total trauma symptoms, including intrusive thoughts and hyperarousal. They also felt less stressed and experienced a greater sense of inner freedom and resilience, the researchers said. "The study shows a natural and effortless alternative approach to reducing trauma symptoms in women's mental health," said lead author Sanford Nidich, Director of the Center for Social and Emotional Health at Maharishi University of Management in Iowa. Practising the meditation technique allows the mind to transcend to quieter levels and has very specific effects on the body - effects that are the opposite of the body's hyperaroused state known as the flight-or-fight response. The system involved in this arousal, known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, is significantly decreased in its activity, thus helping people not to get affected by stress. Apart from acting as a stress management tool, the meditation technique can also provide other benefits such as reduced recidivism to improved cardiovascular health, the researchers stated. For the study, the team encouraged prison inmates to practice transcendental meditation individually in their prison cells twice daily and encouraged them to attend 30-40 minutes group meditation sessions, supervised by a teacher, twice a week over the four-month study period. The participants reported that transcendental meditation helped them reduce their obsessive-compulsive behavior, social introversion, anxiety and neuroticism as well as rates of recidivism and increased positive social relations and improved sleep.

University of Warwick research indicates that eating more fruit and vegetables can substantially increase people's later happiness levels

The study is one of the first major scientific attempts to explore psychological well-being beyond the traditional finding that fruit and vegetables can reduce risk of cancer and heart attacks. Happiness benefits were detected for each extra daily portion of fruit and vegetables up to 8 portions per day. The researchers concluded that people who changed from almost no fruit and veg to eight portions of fruit and veg a day would experience an increase in life satisfaction equivalent to moving from unemployment to employment. The well-being improvements occurred within 24 months. The study followed more than 12,000 randomly selected people. These subjects kept food diaries and had their psychological well-being measured. The authors found large positive psychological benefits within two years of an improved diet. Professor Andrew Oswald said: "Eating fruit and vegetables apparently boosts our happiness far more quickly than it improves human health. People's motivation to eat healthy food is weakened by the fact that physical-health benefits, such as protecting against cancer, accrue decades later. However, well-being improvements from increased consumption of fruit and vegetables are closer to immediate." The work is a collaboration between the University of Warwick, England and the University of Queensland, Australia. The researchers found that happiness increased incrementally for each extra daily portion of fruit and vegetables up to eight portions per day. The study has policy implications, particularly in the developed world where the typical citizen eats an unhealthy diet. The findings could be used by health professionals to persuade people to consume more fruits and vegetables. The academics think it may be possible eventually to link this study to current research into antioxidants which suggests a connection between optimism and carotenoid in the blood. However they argue that further research is needed in this area.

A weekly routine of yoga and meditation may strengthen thinking skills and help to stave off aging-related mental decline, according to a new study of older adults with early signs of memory problems

Some weakening in mental function appears to be inevitable as we age. But emerging science suggests that we might be able to slow and mitigate the decline by whether and how we move our bodies. Past studies have found that people who run, weight train, dance, practice tai chi, or regularly garden have a lower risk of developing dementia than people who are not physically active at all. In a new study, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, divided volunteers into two groups. One began a well-established brain-training program that involves an hour a week of classroom time and a series of mental exercises designed to bolster their memory that volunteers were asked to practice at home for about 15 minutes a day. The others took up yoga and meditation for the same amount of time each week for 12 weeks. All of the men and women were able to perform significantly better on most tests of their thinking. But only those who had practiced yoga and meditation showed improvements in their moods, and they performed much better on a test of visuospatial memory, a type of remembering that is important for balance, depth perception and the ability to recognize objects and navigate the world.

New research suggests that yoga and meditation may not only give you a flexible body and inner peace but a combination of the two could also help improve cognitive function

The study, led by a team of researchers from UCLA and Australia's University of Adelaide, is the first to compare yoga and meditation against memory training, which has often been considered the best way to manage mild cognitive impairment. The team followed a group of 25 participants all aged 55 and over during a three-month course of either yoga and meditation or memory training. Participants had all shown signs of mild cognitive impairment, reporting problems with their memory such as easily misplacing things, or forgetting names, faces or appointments. Participants were split into two groups. Eleven participants attended memory enhancement training and practiced memory exercises daily, while the other 14 participants attended classes of Kundalini yoga and practiced 20 minutes of Kirtan Kriya meditation daily, which involves chanting, hand movements and visualization of light, and has already has been practiced in India for hundreds of years as a way to prevent cognitive decline in older adults. All participants received brain scans and completed memory tests at both the beginning and end of the three months. The results showed that although all participants demonstrated similar improvements in verbal memory skills, the skills that are needed for remembering names, it was the participants in the group who practiced yoga and meditation that showed better improvements in visual-spatial memory skills, which help with recalling locations and navigating. In addition, participants in the yoga and meditation group also showed bigger improvements in levels of depression, anxiety, coping skills and resilience to stress, all of which are especially important when coming to terms with the onset of cognitive impairment. Commenting on the significance of the results Harris Eyre, the study's lead author, said, "Historically and anecdotally, yoga has been thought to be beneficial in aging well, but this is the scientific demonstration of that benefit. We're converting historical wisdom into the high level of evidence required for doctors to recommend therapy to their patients." Senior author Helen Lavretsky added, "If you or your relatives are trying to improve your memory or offset the risk for developing memory loss or dementia, a regular practice of yoga and meditation could be a simple, safe and low-cost solution to improving your brain fitness."

Over the past decade, mindfulness meditation has been shown to improve a broad range of health and disease outcomes, such as slowing HIV progression and improving healthy aging

Yet, little is known about the brain changes that produce these beneficial health effects. New research from Carnegie Mellon University provides a window into the brain changes that link mindfulness meditation training with health in stressed adults. The study shows that mindfulness meditation training, compared to relaxation training, reduces Interleukin-6, an inflammatory health biomarker, in high-stress, unemployed community adults. The biological health-related benefits occur because mindfulness meditation training fundamentally alters brain network functional connectivity patterns and the brain changes statistically explain the improvements in inflammation. "We've now seen that mindfulness meditation training can reduce inflammatory biomarkers in several initial studies, and this new work sheds light into what mindfulness training is doing to the brain to produce these inflammatory health benefits," said David Creswell, lead author and associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. For the randomized controlled trial, 35 job-seeking, stressed adults were exposed to either an intensive three-day mindfulness meditation retreat program or a well-matched relaxation retreat program that did not have a mindfulness component. All participants completed a five-minute resting state brain scan before and after the three-day program. They also provided blood samples right before the intervention began and at a four-month follow-up. The brain scans showed that mindfulness meditation training increased the functional connectivity of the participants' resting default mode network in areas important to attention and executive control, namely the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Participants who received the relaxation training did not show these brain changes. The participants who completed the mindfulness meditation program also had reduced IL-6 levels, and the changes in brain functional connectivity coupling accounted for the lower inflammation levels. "We think that these brain changes provide a neurobiological marker for improved executive control and stress resilience, such that mindfulness meditation training improves your brain's ability to help you manage stress, and these changes improve a broad range of stress-related health outcomes, such as your inflammatory health," Creswell said.

In six studies with more than 4,600 participants, researchers found an almost even split between people who tended to value their time or money, and that choice was a fairly consistent trait both for daily interactions and major life events. "It appears that people have a stable preference for valuing their time over making more money, and prioritizing time is associated with greater happiness," said lead researcher Ashley Whillans, a doctoral student in social psychology at the University of British Columbia. The researchers found an almost even split with slightly more than half of the participants stating that they prioritized their time more than money. Older people also were more likely to say that they valued their time compared to younger people. "As people age, they often want to spend time in more meaningful ways than just making money," Whillans said. The researchers conducted separate surveys with a nationally representative sample of Americans, students at the University of British Columbia, and adult visitors of a science museum in Vancouver. Some of the studies used real-world examples, such as asking a participant whether he would prefer a more expensive apartment with a short commute or a less expensive apartment with a long commute. A participant also could choose between a graduate program that would lead to a job with long hours and a higher starting salary or a program that would result in a job with a lower salary but fewer hours. A participant's gender or income didn't affect whether they were more likely to value time or money, although the study didn't include participants living at the poverty level who may have to prioritize money to survive. If people want to focus more on their time and less on money in their lives, they could take some actions to help shift their perspective, such as working slightly fewer hours, paying someone to do disliked chores like cleaning the house, or volunteering with a charity. While some options might be available only for people with disposable income, even small changes could make a big difference, Whillans said. "Having more free time is likely more important for happiness than having more money," she said. "Even giving up a few hours of a paycheck to volunteer at a food bank may have more bang for your buck in making you feel happier."