I hope all of you are having a wonderful day and doing the best you can to enjoy life. Today we will be looking over the benefits of meditation and how the activity relates to the substances called nootropics. I will fill you in on the term nootropics and the process of meditation.
Nootropics refer to a variety of substances that are known to enhance cognition and facilitate learning. For example, caffeine is a nootropic. When we drink caffeinated coffee or a cup of caffeinated tea, we feel energized, more focused, and ready to learn.
On the other hand, meditation is not a substance like caffeine but an act of sitting still and allowing your thoughts to dissipate into thin air. How is meditation related to nootropics, you ask? The same substances like caffeine that stimulate the release of specific chemicals in your brain give us the same feeling as participating in meditation. According to Dr. Stéphanie Hahusseau, who studies meditation and neuroscience, "The cognitive function that mediation may affect the most is attention since meditation is a form of attention training.”1 If caffeine helps you focus and meditation helps you focus, something is happening here. Please try it for yourself. I am not suggesting drinking caffeine and going to meditate but try each one separately at your own convenience and see which one helps and determine which one is more sustainable. If you are anything like myself, I love caffeine, but I know it is not sustainable to be drinking all day as it can be detrimental to your health. Meditation may offer you the same benefits without drinking coffee all day. With meditation, you don't have to focus on anything but breathing.
Maintaining any practice is not easy, but I promise that meditation gets easier and easier as your training becomes consistent. Try practicing if possible at the same time each day, and remember to take a day off if you would like. If you click on my first article, I demonstrate how diaphragmatic breathing assists in refocusing your thoughts and relaxing your mind. Breathing supports getting the mind in a meditative zone. Remember, you may have ups and downs with the process of meditation; however, it is all right there for you to experience. All you have to do is release and be free.
The challenge here is getting yourself in the zone and staying in the zone. Try throwing in some headphones while sitting in your favorite comfy place. I will usually put on music that has no words. If the music has words, I will start listening and interpreting the song's message, not meditating but listening to music. Then my thoughts start racing, so no words in the music, preferably the music, will be mellow.
Once you get into the zone, the distractions will fade, and you will be experiencing the nootropic effect of meditation. Below I will list three supporting facts regarding focused attention from a great book I am reading authored by Jennie Allen called, "Get out of Your Head;” and I quote:
“Your brain will be physiologically altered.
The kind of brain waves present during relaxation increases and anxiety and depression decreases
Your brain stays younger longer” 2
If Jennie can find these three pieces of evidence that mediation does something to your brain, think how many more supporting facts are out there. Go to google scholar and look up the benefits of mediation - you will find an abundance of info on how meditation impacts the brain. Now, if I haven't convinced you that meditation is a nootropic and will benefit your life tremendously, that probably means you haven't tried it, so please give it a try and let me know how it goes in the comments below.
In Good Health,
Coach Chris
Braboszcz, Claire, Stéphanie Hahusseau, and Arnaud Delorme. "Meditation and neuroscience: from basic research to clinical practice." Integrative clinical psychology, psychiatry and behavioral medicine: Perspectives, practices and research (2010): 1910-1929.
Jennie Allen, GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts (Colorado: Waterbrook, 2020), 75.