We’ve heard and read so much about meditation and its benefits. Yet we have little idea about “how” exactly meditation helps one minimize mental stress, let alone the far-fetched issues like loneliness.
The reason is that whatever we hear or read are mostly abstract and don’t help us understand how meditation works. But that doesn’t mean you can overlook the importance of meditation, particularly when it comes to your well being when you’re a senior.
Understanding Loneliness
May be it is the length of the days, may be your son or daughter moved out, or maybe it is your emotional proximity with your adult kid, but, all the same, loneliness is absolute when it strikes. You can’t always overcome the feeling with all those self help quick fixes. When you are by yourself for the most part of the day, it becomes a fundamental issue to deal with, rather than finding spontaneous solutions.
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Loneliness in general, as one Huffing Post article puts it, “isn’t just an emotional issue; it’s a form of stress that has been linked to a higher risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s, depression and early death.” And it comes as no surprise that it is acute among the elderly.
How is loneliness linked to such risks? For one, various studies are continuously reassuring that feeling alone does more harm to the heart than actually being alone does. And if you read enough about depression, it won’t be a surprise that it is the cause of various physical ailments.
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How Meditation Helps
The HuffPost article also talks about the very first study conducted in this direction at the University of California. The goal of the researchers was apparently to assess the effectiveness of meditation (as a type of “psychological intervention” they chose) in decreasing loneliness.
They studied 40 adults aged between 55 and 85 years divided into two groups, and the metrics they chose to measure were the gene expression and the levels of inflammation (the immune system’s response to injury) in the adults. The first group of adults went through a meditation program that consisted of weekly meetings and everyday practices at home, while the other group simply did not meditate.
The idea was to measure the effectiveness of meditation in pacifying the expression of inflammation-related genes, since chronic inflammation eventually relates itself to heart diseases, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and stroke.
At the end of the experiment, the researchers found two things:
- The adults who meditated had apparently reported decreased feeling of loneliness
- Their blood tests revealed a considerable decrease in the stimulation of inflammation-related genes
We’re always aware that we must take care of our physical health. What we sometimes overlook is the fact that, as we age, our physical and emotional healths become much more interdependent. Meditation is probably the best way we have for taking care of both.
Read the original article here: http://www.allseasons-homecare.com/blog/uncategorized/meditation-seniors-deal-loneliness/
