Meditation Changes Your Brain for the Better, Even if You're Not a Monk | Wendy Suzuki | Big Think

Wendy Suzuki: We know a lot about or are growing our knowledge about the effects of meditation, long-term meditation in people like monks that meditate for 50,000 hours in their lifetime. And we know that this completely changes the electrophysiological responses of their brains. They have much higher levels of what we call gamma waves, which is a particular frequency of wave. Not only that, but even their resting baseline — even when they’re not meditating, their brainwaves are more like meditation, the meditation kind of brainwaves than novice people that don’t have any experience meditating.

So it really changes both the baseline level of physiological activity as well as the response when you’re asked to actually meditate. There are kind of two categories of studies that have been done on meditation: one on these lifelong meditators, the monks, and the other category of studies on people like you and me that started out with no meditation experience and started to meditate. And those perhaps are more relevant studies for most people.

And those studies have shown significant improvements in attention functions with increased exercise. And also actual anatomical changes in the brain with perhaps a little bit more experience with meditation. Maybe five years of meditation experience increased the size of white matter bundles in the prefrontal cortex. So there are, you know, substantial physiological, anatomical changes that have been shown with meditation, and there are also effects on depressive symptoms.

So decreases of depressive symptoms, decreases in stress symptoms. So meditation is doing lots of positive things, and some very, very similar to exercise and some slightly different. So I think there’s definitely going to be a difference, but there are overlapping positive functions that exercise and meditation have on your general brain health.

How do you get to be a regular meditator? And the answer is, I think, start very, very small. I know, for myself, I have a subchapter in my book called Confessions of a Yo-yo Meditator because I think I have tried all different kinds of meditation. And my big mistake early on was to try and meditate for too long at a sitting. So I would try to meditate for 20-25 minutes with no meditation experience, and it was a disaster.

I forced myself to do it for 30 days thinking that that would be it and I would form my habit. And day 31, I took a little break and I never came back. But then when I came back again, starting very, very small with things that, you know, I could just do on my own — just breathing meditation, focusing on the breath. Something that we all do at the end of yoga classes. That’s what really kind of helped me build my muscle.

And I just had to stick with that very short meditation and build it up that way. And I think people too often either start too long or don’t stick with it enough. But again, shorter is better, and I think that’s a key for people that want to start to meditate.