It’s no new concept that meditation has benefits for the heart. Some of the earliest research decades ago were focused on the mind-body connection with common heart related ailments such as heart attacks, strokes, and hypertension.
While the medical side of the heart is important to keep it free from disease and other such medical problems, the emotional health of the heart can affect its condition too - emotions including love, fear, and compassion.
Everything to do with the functions of your body from the way that you breathe to how you think and what you feel are joined at the heart. It is a known fact that periods of extreme change including the death of a loved one or the loss of employment can make people more likely to contract a heart related illness or can being about a heart attack.
A Holistic Meditation Method
Research has found that proper meditation can help to undo the buildup of fatty plaques that can eventually clog a patient’s coronary arteries. This fat build up is the main factor affecting heart disease.
Along with following a holistic meditation method to control stress levels, you would also need to keep to a strict diet and exercise program to help improve the health of your heart.
An unhealthy lifestyle leads to the hardening of the fatty build up in the arteries. It is something that takes many years to happen and comes from bad lifestyle choices such as smoking, bad diet, little exercise, not enough sleep, stress, and sudden and excessive weight gain.
Mediation is an important factor in ending this cycle, as you will be able to return your mind to a better emotional state of balance, which in turn will encourage your mind to signal you to be better, sleep better, and exercise more.
Stress Management
Although it may seem that meditation is not something that can be measured to see how effective it is, there are indeed many factors that can prove its effectiveness.
Stress for example, has a very negative effect on heart. In order to reverse the effects of stress, it is important to trigger chemical reaction in body, which results in the production of hormones.
These hormones work with neurotransmitters to reduce stress. Thanks to these chemicals that play a major role in stress relief, it is possible to detect just how effective meditation really is.
Cortisol is the main hormone that causes stress, and by measuring the amount of cortisone in the bloodstream, some studies have found that cortisol levels are consistently reduced in patients who practice frequent meditation.
Meditation also stimulates the brain in releasing healthy neurotransmitters. The main ones that are good for stress include Oxytocin and dopamine.
Oxytocin is especially important as it prompts you to act calmly in a particularly stressful situation. It has been measured that Oxytocin in dopamine levels are increased in those people who frequently meditate.
This connects with the heart, as it is believed that there are Oxytocin receptors within the tissue of the heart.
Less stress on the blood vessels
The blood vessels are a key factor in heart health. There are two nervous systems that are key when it comes to pumping blood around the body. The parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system which when balanced, counteract each other.
The sympathetic nervous system is one that can be controlled. It responds to things like stress and other such factors that are going on in your life.
The parasympathetic nervous system is much more dormant. It works with the involuntary processes and processes that you make when you are unconscious, such as when sleeping.
If you can reduce stress levels through meditation, your blood pressure will return to normal. Meditation and its breathing element benefit this by helping to lower your cortisol (stress hormone) levels and relaxing your body.
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