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meditation

Do Transcendental Meditation for Anxiety to Save Your Heart

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There are factors that play massive roles in your risk of heart disease. Stress is one factor.  Luckily, you can do Transcendental meditation for anxiety.

Stress from work.  Stress from family.  Stress from school.  It never seems to end and seems to have become ingrained in today’s hectic lifestyle.

Keep in mind that stress is a programmed protective response.  It creates underlying physiological changes that ensure our survival.  Short term it may cause the breakdown of muscle to keep a constant source of glucose in the bloodstream so that the brain has fuel and you can stay alert.  Imagine if a sabre toothed tiger was known to be in the area.  Not a good time to drop off for a nap, so you can see how the release of cortisol (the body’s stress hormone) to keep sugar in the bloodstream can keep you alive for the next few hours.

On the other hand, stress signals can be passed up the food chain.  Drought could change the grasses in the area.  Animals eating the grasses would recognize these signals within the plant and the animal’s body would respond with its own protective changes.  We then eat the meat from the animal and the message passes to us.  Our bodies may undergo adaptive changes, such as storing more calories as body fat to prepare for the coming famine.

So you can see, stress keeps us alive.  Or rather, it was designed to keep us alive when dealing with a clearly defined threat.  That does not define stress in today’s society.  Sure, when we are in a life threatening situation your body will release adrenaline and we can see how this could save your life.

But, in every other situation in today’s lifestyle does not have a clearly defined threat.  Worse, there is rarely a clearly defined end point, either.  This wreaks absolute havoc on your health.

It is possible that stress related problems are the leading cause of death in the US today.  Consider the research that finds that taking sleep medications are associated with over a half MILLION deaths per year.  While the study did not suggest this, stress can absolutely contribute to sleep problems (and is probably the leading cause of sleep disorders) and it is likely that the use of sleep medications was a marker for people who were over-stressed.  The stress is what is killing this many people per year.

If you have stress in your life, you need to rearrange your thinking.  It’s killing you and setting your kids up for health problems (read my previous blog post on this topic).  While this is not an easy solution, you need to first understand that it’s not an option. Doing otherwise IS going to kill you.  It’s that clear cut.

In the meantime, you need to manage your stress.  Exercise can be very effective.  I know that personally, for those few times that I have felt overwhelmed by stress, hiking very aggressively has always help to burn out the stress inside, leaving my problems to be faced academically, without emotional filtering.

Transcedental Meditation can be one of the most powerful tools to calm your brain.  Previous studies that I have reviewed have shown very strong protective benefits of meditation.  The pinnacle of meditation is Transcendental Meditation, or TM. 

In this particular study, participants who had heart disease (secondary prevention) were trained in transcendental meditation over the course of 12 hours of courses and followed up for a period of 5 years.  Before we go over the results, you need to understand that these patients already had problems.  Without the addition of meditation, drugs like Lipitor and blood pressure medications are usually used to try to prevent progression of heart disease and prevent death.  Frankly, they don’t do a very good job and have been trumped by much more fun interventions like dark chocolate.

So what kind of results did those who practiced Transcendental Meditation achieve?

  1. 48% overall lower risk of death. (Tweet this)
  2. 24% lower risk of dying from heart disease, having a heart procedure or being hospitalized for heart disease. (Tweet this)
  3. Those who do Transcendental Meditation according to the recommendations were more likely to survive the longest.

The bottom line is that, if you have been diagnosed with heart disease (or, frankly, if you are on your way to heart disease), taking a passive role and just using medication is going to get you half-ass results.  The ONLY way to live a long and healthy life is to make significant changes.  In the case of this study, it meant learning to manage your stress using a powerful meditation technique.

Of course, not all of us have the time and money to undergo Transcendental Meditation training.  But there are CDs, shorter online courses and biofeedback devices like the Resperate that you can take to learn skills in meditation that will dramatically benefit your health.

If you have adopted any type of stress management techniques in your life, what have you tried and what kind of benefits have you seen?

Meditation Techniques for Beginners Help Protect Your Brain

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Protecting your brain is a high concern as we age, but today’s lifestyles aren’t good for brain health. Luckily, there are things you can do to make sure your brain outlives your body.

Without a doubt, stress destroys the brain.  Multiple studies have demonstrated damage to the brain with long term stress.  Damage to the rest of the body is just as great.

So, with this knowledge, why is it that our population is so darn stressed out??

Sure—there is work, family and financial stress, but everyone has these.  There have been times when I have employees who are stressed over financial issues, but if they had seen my checkbook they may have a better understanding of what it’s like to manage a company with employees.  Any self employed person likely dreams about the day of being broke, rather than in a hole of debt deep enough to bury the bodies from the deaths caused by the drug companies in any given year.

So we all have stress—but obviously some of us manage it better than others.  Or rather, should I say that some manage it not at all.

Stress has always been an adaptive response.  Our bodies would undergo changes from stress that would allow us to adapt to the new situation (drought, moving the tribe, fighting off predators, etc…).  But this chronic stress that our society is collectively dealing with is destroying us.

So what tools can we use to manage stress?  Obviously, the long term answer is to adjust our lives so that we can reduce future stress.  For the short-term solution, we need to use tools to help our bodies survive until the long term stressors are managed:

Meditation is arguably one of the most powerful tools for helping us manage stress and protect our brain. But just how good is it?

This particular study looked at the changes in the white matter of the brain after just 4 weeks of meditation training.  We are not talking about Transcendental Meditation practioners with years of experience.  These were beginners.  Researchers found improvements in the overall function of the white matter in the brain of the participants.

Interestingly, they were also able to demonstrate increased myelin surrounding the brain cells.  Myelin is the material that makes up the sheath that surrounds the nerve cells. This is the material that breaks down in multiple sclerosis patients, leading to the symptoms associated with MS.

So, could meditation be powerful enough to help MS patients begin to heal some of the damage to their brains? Certainly we can see the benefits to all of us from the use of meditation to protect our brain, whether we have MS or not.

Further, studies have even shown that stress management techniques can reduce the number of brain lesions in MS patients.

Have you tried meditation before, and, if so, why types of benefits have you seen in your life and health?

Natural Headache Cures vs Medications for Migraines

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 Headache sufferers can live their lives in frequent misery.  While there are many natural cures for headaches that can help in the long run, tools for immediate relief of headaches are a strong need.

Far too many headache sufferers turn to medications to cure their headaches, but in no situation does the medication actually fix what is causing the headache in the first place.  Many drugs use to treat headaches merely stop one brain cell from communicating with its neighbor, but do not make the original, problematic brain cell any healthier.

Read the entire article here