Study participants got 8 years younger!
Did you know you can count your age in 2 ways?
Chronologically: How long you’ve been on this earth. Love it, own it because there’s nothing you can do about it!
Biologically: This, to be particularly blunt about it, is how fast your body is decomposing towards death. Now, this you have LOTS of control over.
There are lots of factors that go into calculating your biological age, such as weight, exercise, alcohol, smoking, diet and also your mental state.
We love a good study
A study was completed on a group of new meditators vs non-meditators over 5 years. All participants had ‘normal lives’. Jobs, families, money worries and a variety of diet and exercise routines. And all had a biological age within the same year as their chronological one at the start of the study.
At the end of the 5-year study, the meditators had an average biological age 3 years younger than when they started the study.
They had rewound their biological clock by 8 years!
How did this happen?
1. Time
Being stressed and in constant fight/flight takes a lot of time, energy and attention from your body. Now that this group were regularly meditating and reducing the amount of stress in their bodies, there was all this time available for their bodies to maintain themselves and fight infections.
2. Acid vs Alkaline
When your body is in fight/flight it releases cortisol and adrenaline into the body, both of which are acidic. It also releases an acid oil onto the skin so you aren't as tasty if you get bitten! The reduction in both of these events has a profound impact on the ageing of our organic bodies.
3. Less illness & meditation
They get sick a lot less and their dependence on medication was reduced.
If your body and brain are younger and healthier, then a lot of the age-related illnesses are less prevalent - diabetes, heart attacks, cancers, Alzheimer's, dementia and high blood pressure.
If you want further proof of what stress does to age the human body, just look at a picture of a Prime Minister or President on the day they arrived in office against the day they left. You’ll see visible proof of what extreme stress does on the body over a relatively short period of time.
And there's more...
1. Weight loss
Students of Vedic Meditation often report that they lose weight when they start to meditate. This is a combination of a lower desire to comfort eat, less need to drink copious amounts of alcohol to unwind or guzzle sugar-laden caffeine drinks to stay awake, your body having time to clear out those old fat cells and the toxins they hold and the reduction in cortisol which encourages visceral fat to accumulate in the abdomen.
2. Beauty sleep
Disrupted sleep is one of the first signs that your stress levels are too high. An improvement in sleep quality and quantity is regularly seen within the first few days after learning to meditate.
And being tired makes you look older, so just getting your required amount of ‘beauty sleep’ enables your body to get through its nightly to-do list and charge you up for the day ahead.
3. The meditator glow
When you meditate your body produces bliss chemicals and, like when in fight/flight an oil is released onto the skin. However, this time it's a lovely rejuvenating one and far more beneficial for your skin than any anti-ageing cream you can buy at Boots or a beauty counter.
Meditators also typically have open, alert eyes, healthy skin and generally a smile on their face which is very attractive to others. Don’t be surprised if you find people smiling back or coming up to you to ask for help.
5 years will go by anyway. So why not start your anti-ageing programme now!