Cortisol, the stress hormone, is the cause of various diseases, but learning to meditate can help us reduce stress in the long term.
Cortisol, the stress hormone, is the cause of various diseases, but learning to meditate can help us reduce stress in the long term.
It is now known that the meditation may help relieve daily stress, and there is a new one study which provides objective evidence to support these claims. In fact, the researchers found that cortisol levels dropped by 25% after a six-month meditation training program. (Read also: Meditation: what happens to the body and mind by practicing it 10 minutes a day)
A systematic review
Mental training that promotes skills such as awareness, gratitude o compassion reduces the concentration of the stress hormone, cortisol, which also accumulates in the hair. This is what scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Social Neuroscience Research Group of the Max Planck Society in Berlin have discovered.
La amount of cortisol in the hair fit provides information on how burdened a person is with persistent stress.
According to the study, 23% of people in Germany suffer from stress. This condition not only puts a strain on a person's general well-being, but is also linked to a number of physiological diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and psychological disorders such as depression, a leading cause of disease burden in the world.
Therefore, they seek each other effective methods for reducing daily stress in the long term and a promising option is mindfulness training. What's it about? Participants train their cognitive and social skills, including attention, gratitude and compassion, through various meditation and behavioral exercises.
Until now it was not clear how much this technique actually helped to reduce the load due to daily stress. What is certain is that the concentration of cortisol in the hair it is considered an adequate measure to assess how stressed you are. Cortisol is a hormone that is released, for example, when we are faced with a demanding challenge that puts us to the test. In these particular situations, it helps to alert our body and mobilize the energies to overcome this challenge. The longer the stress lasts, the longer a higher concentration of cortisol circulates in our body and the more it accumulates in our hair.
On average, hair grows one centimeter per month. For measure your stress levels of study participants during the 9 months of training, the researchers, in collaboration with the working group of Clemens Kirschbaum of the University of Dresden, analyzed every three months the amount of cortisol in the first three centimeters of hair, starting at the scalp . The focus was on the factors of attention and awareness, on socio-affective skills such as compassion and gratitude, and on so-called socio-cognitive skills, in particular the ability to take a perspective on one's own thoughts and those of others.
Three groups of around 80 participants each completed the training modules in different order. The training lasted up to nine months, 30 minutes a day, six days a week.
The results
After six months of training, the amount of cortisol in the subjects' hair decreased significantly, on average by 25%. Mild effects were initially seen in the first three months, which increased over the next three months. In the last third, the concentration remained at a low level.
Researchers, therefore, assume that learning to meditate could lead to effective stress reduction. Hence, it can be concluded by saying that, training in meditation could improve the management of particularly stressful social situations and alleviate general stress levels even in healthy individuals.
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Photos: Psychosomatic Medicine
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