“The mind is like water. When it is turbulent it is difficult to see. When it is calm everything becomes clear.”
Day 7 Morning Scorecard and Meditation Self-Reflection:
Why Meditation Works: Upgrading Your Brain
The Lateral PFC is where your attention goes while meditating. This area is a great “muscle” to activate because it is the area that has the greatest effect on impulse control.
To put it simply, meditation helps to make your brain bigger. Meditation accomplishes this by increasing the amount of gray matter in your brain. Gray matter is the actual "stuff" your brain is made of and its what we see when we look at a brain. When you meditate consistently the parts of your brain being activated "grow," the same way muscles expand when they are consistently activated. The parts of your brain being most activated during meditation are the corpus callosum, insula cortex, and the lateral prefrontal cortex.
The corpus callosum is the bundle of nerve fibers that connect the left and right hemispheres of your brain. Once you strengthen these fibers through meditation you are increasing your brain's ability to communicate with itself. This will improve your problem-solving skills and help you to calm yourself down quicker by letting your emotional right brain and logical left brain communicate faster.
The insula cortex also sees a lot of action during meditation, this is the part of your brain that regulates positive body sensations and empathy. Meditation improves your mood and general feelings of well-being by increasing synaptic traffic to this area of your brain. The insula cortex is activated during meditation because focusing on one point of reference slows down the hamster wheel of thoughts that usually occupy our attention and allows the brain to focus on what's happening in your body.
Last but not least, meditation also strengthens the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is very important in shifting and focusing attention. This added perk of meditation helps people to focus on the task or person in front of them allowing regular meditators to be more successful in the workplace and in their personal relationships.
FACT: After only 20 hours of meditation training, participants showed an average of 40% increase in activity in their lateral prefrontal cortex (attention center).
TAKEAWAY: It doesn’t take that much effort for meditation to start positive effecting your brain health.
Flow: Unlocking Human Potential
Meditation if done regularly can lead to what researchers call a "flow" state. This is the state that athletes, musicians, and chess masters hit when they are "in the zone." Meditation helps people achieve this peak performance state by altering the electrical patterns in your brain. We know this because Zen monks have been put into functional MRI machines and had their brain waves recorded while they meditate. Researchers then compared these results to other peak performers such as professional athletes and orchestra musicians. What they found was that the brain wave signatures of both groups showed gamma wave activity. Most of us run off beta waves for the majority of our waking hours, due to the brains need to address daily hassles. However, when when we meditate our brains quiet down and focus on what's in front of us the same way a major league baseball player focuses on the game in front of them. This flow state is hard to achieve and many people will never even experience it, however, meditation can get you there in under twenty minutes. You may not get there every time, but staying with a formal meditation for twenty minutes sets up the parameters for your brain to reach electrical synchronicity. What this means is that different areas of your brain will work in harmony instead of focusing on separate tasks. This allows your brain to send information across various brain regions at breakneck speeds and solve problems faster. When gamma waves are present in the brain, information is moving at around 40 hertz compared to beta waves that consistently run at around 12 hertz. These increased processing speeds allow regular meditators to reach gamma waves quicker and achieve what researchers call "effortless efficiency."
FACT: Meditation increases the size of the brain’s hippocampus, lowers cortisol levels, and raises serotonin levels.
TAKEAWAY: Meditation helps the learning/memory center of your brain expand, helps you feel less stressed, and more content overall.
“Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.”