Meditation May Help Reduce Anxiety And Improve Cardiovascular Health

MessageToEagle.com – In just one hour you can reduce your anxiety levels and some heart health risk factors.

A new study with 14 participants shows preliminary data that even a single session of meditation can have cardiovascular and psychological benefits for adults with mild to moderate anxiety.

Mindfulness and its ability to reduce anxiety has been  studied by John Durocher, assistant professor of biological sciences and his a team of Michigan Technological University researchers and their results are presented at the 2018 Experimental Biology meeting April 21-25 in San Diego.

Researchers explain that 60 minutes after meditating the 14 study participants showed lower resting heart rates and reduction in aortic pulsatile load–the amount of change in blood pressure between diastole and systole of each heartbeat multiplied by heart rate.

Additionally, shortly after meditating, and even one week later, the group reported anxiety levels were lower than pre-meditation levels.

“Even a single hour of meditation appears to reduce anxiety and some of the markers for cardiovascular risk,” Durocher says.

A meditation session conducted by the team  included repetition of the cardiovascular testing plus the mindfulness meditation–20 minutes introductory meditation, 30 minutes body scan and 10 minutes self-guided meditation–as well as repeating cardiovascular measurements immediately following meditation and 60 minutes after.

“The point of a body scan is that if you can focus on one single part of your body, just your big toe, it can make it much easier for you to deal with something stressful in your life. You can learn to focus on one part of it rather than stressing about everything else in your life,” according to Hannah Marti who proposed a research design.

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