Humor, music and spirituality may offer physical benefits

Monday, February 14, 2011; 8:17 PM

Humor, music and spirituality can boost your mood, but growing evidence suggests that they also offer physical benefits.

Image by Vinod Kumar M. via Flickr

Humor for your health

Laughter appears to have such physiological effects as:

l Increased blood flow. Watching 30 minutes of a comedy film (“There’s Something About Mary“) caused the arteries of volunteers to expand, according to a 2006 study from the University of Maryland Medical Center, while scenes from a stressful film (“Saving Private Ryan“) caused them to constrict.

l Strengthened immunity. Laughter might stimulate production of disease-fighting T cells and natural killer cells and might reduce levels of inflammation-triggering cytokines in people with rheumatoid arthritis. Watching funny movies might also help ease allergy symptoms and help people with asthma resist flare-ups.

l Reduced muscle pain. Laughter causes muscles in the abdomen, face and shoulders to relax, which might ease muscle tension.

l Lower blood sugar. People with Type 2 diabetes had smaller increases in blood glucose when they watched a comedy show after a meal than when they sat through a boring lecture.

l Lost calories. Laughing boosted people’s energy expenditure by 10 to 20 percent in a 2007 study.

What to do: If funny movies aren’t your thing, or if life of late hasn’t given you much to laugh about, consider “laughter yoga,” a variation designed to induce joyful, prolonged laughter.

Music for your brain

Image by Mario Inoportuno via Flickr

Reading music and singing might boost your brain’s auditory and language-processing functions, while playing an instrument strengthens reaction speed and manual dexterity. Other research has linked choral singing with physical and emotional health. Music might also improve symptoms of several health problems:

l Alzheimer’s disease. In people with this condition, music might curb aggression, irritability, restlessness and wandering.

l Insomnia. Listening to 45 minutes of soft music before bed improved self-reported sleep time and daytime drowsiness in a study of 30 older adults.

l Pain. People recovering from hernia or varicose-vein surgery who listened to music reported less pain than a control group did in a trial of 182 patients. Music might also ease the pain and distress of arthritis, childbirth, colonoscopy, fibromyalgia and herniated disks.

l Parkinson’s disease. Listening to rhythmic music can help patients move more easily.

l Stress. Listening to music can reduce stress, blood pressure and heart rate during and after eye surgery. And people who had music therapy after knee-replacement surgery had less depression.

l Stroke. Singing might help patients regain the ability to speak more clearly after a stroke.

What to do: Choose relaxing music. If someone you care about is in a health-care facility, consider asking about music therapy.

Image by BenSpark via Flickr

A spiritual life

Regularly attending religious services or practicing meditation appears to offer health benefits.

l Traditional religion. Regularly attending church was linked to a lower incidence of death from cardiovascular disease in a review of 69 studies. And a 2009 study found that men who attended church in their 40s had better physical health at 70 than men who hadn’t attended church, possibly because they tended to drink and smoke less.

l Meditation. The evidence is especially strong for an easy-to-learn form of meditation called mindfulness, in which people focus on the present while practicing measured breathing. Meditation induces rapid physiological changes, including reduced blood pressure, heart rate and muscle tension. It might also reduce cardiovascular risk, ease depression and help people with chronic pain, fibromyalgia, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, multiple sclerosis, psoriasis and Type 1 diabetes.

What to do: If you already participate in an organized religion, these findings provide more reason to continue. To try meditating, look for a class or teach yourself with the help of a book or recorded program. Try for at least 10 to 15 minutes a day, the minimum amount linked with the benefits above.

Related articles

• Transcript: Paul Nussbaum on Meditation, Neuropsychology and Thanksgiving (sharpbrains.com)
• Advancing on the Spiritual Path 2: Religious Spiritual Practices (psychologytoday.com)

Even Beginners Can Curb Pain With Meditation

by Adam Cole 02:05 pm April 6, 2011

Robert Coghill/Wake Forest University School of MedicineSigns of pain disappeared from MRI images of the brain when freshly trained novices meditated.

Meditation has long been touted as a holistic approach to pain relief. And studies show that long-time meditators can tolerate quite a bit of pain.

Now researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found you don’t have to be a lifelong Buddhist monk to pull it off. Novices were able to tame pain after just a few training sessions.

Sounds a bit mystical, we know, but researchers using a special type of brain imaging were also able to see changes in the brain activity of newbies. Their conclusion? “A little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” Fadel Zeidan, a neuroscientist and the study’s lead author, tells Shots. That finding’s a first, Zeidan says.

In the study, a small group of healthy medical students attended four 20-minute training sessions on “mindfulness meditation” — a technique adapted from a Tibetan Buddhist form of meditation called samatha. It’s all about acknowledging and letting go of distraction.”You are trying to sustain attention in the present moment — everything is momentary so you don’t need to react,” Zeidan explains. “What that does healthwise is it reduces the stress response. The feeling of pain is a very blatant distraction.”

So how did the researchers gauge the effect? They administered a very distracting bit of pain: A small, thermal stimulator heated to 120 degrees was applied to the back of each volunteer’s right calf.  The subjects reported both the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain. If pain were music, intensity would be volume.  Unpleasantness would have more of an emotional component, kind of like how much you love or hate a song.

After meditation training, the subjects reported a 40 percent decrease in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness.  And it wasn’t just their perception of pain that changed. Brain activity changed too.

Primary Somatosensory Cortex

Notes

This depiction of the body, the cortical homunculus, was first developed by Wilder Penfield.  Each body part maps to a specific spot on a cross section of the brain’s sensory processing region, the primary somatosensory cortex. The larger the feature, the more brain space devoted to it.

Source: NPR; Credit: Adam Cole, Nelson Hsu

Every part of the body is mapped to a specific part of the brain called the primary somatosensory cortex. “If I touch you on your left hand right above your left knuckle, there is an area in the brain that corresponds to that specific area in your hand that will be activated,” Zeidan explains. “When you are in pain it is much more activated — more intense and more widespread.”

This activation shows up on MRI brain scans.  When subjects experienced the heat stimulus under normal conditions, the “right calf” part of the primary somatosensory cortex lit up.  But after the subjects were trained in meditation, the activity in this region was not even detectable.

Brain images also show that meditation increased activation in areas of the brain related to cognitive control and emotion — areas where the experience of pain is built. What’s more, better meditators (those who scored higher on a standard scale of mindfulness) tended to have more activation in these areas and a lower experience of pain.

But can you achieve similar results by just approximating meditation, or believing you are in control of your pain tolerance? Zeidan says probably not. In this study, subjects who paid attention to their breathing to mimic meditation saw no significant change in pain.  And, in a previous study, subjects given fake training failed to see meditation’s effects, even though they believed they were actually performing mindfulness meditation.

Zeidan says he will run some more studies to get at how meditation relieves pain.  He hopes meditation can soon be applied clinically, perhaps to help patients cope with pain after surgery or chemotherapy.

“You might not need extensive training to realize pain-relief benefits,” Zeidan says. “Most people don’t have time to spend months in a monastery.”

Related articles

• More about Pain and Meditation (contemplativemind.wordpress.com)
• Regular Meditation Can Help Tune Out Distractions, Study Says (fitsugar.com)

Astronomy Picture of the Day: Mangaia's Milky Way, by Tunç Tezel.

This stunning view of the Milky Way reminds me of how each of us is a tiny spec within our ever-expanding universe. When our problems seem insurmountable I find it helpful to keep this in mind. Discovering peace from within is fundamental to living a healthy and happy life.

There is a flow of energy or consciousness, a way of BEING that we all have experienced from time to time— a state where everything flows together and feels in sync. We move easily from one moment to the next with a sense of meaning and purpose. We feel peace, joy, a sense of well being. This state has been called flow, living from center or simply– BLISS. It feels magical when we find it.

Our personal energy system holds the keys to enter into this state of flow as well as to access our inner wisdom and truth. Contact with these deeper aspects of ourselves provides inner peace, freedom of expression, and facilitates health on all levels.

Each of us can learn to manage our energy to generate greater health, peace, joy, meaning and purpose in our lives. Developing this ability helps eliminate much of the conflict, turmoil, feelings of emptiness and instability that create unnecessary difficulty on our journey. Through this broader consciousness we also develop greater resources of serenity and balance to deal with that which cannot be altered.

Meditation is one of the tools that helps us tap into the vast source of energy and limitless power that is available to all.

About the photo: This image holds the distinction of being selected as winner in the Royal Greenwich Observatory’s Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition in the Earth and Space category.

Related articles

• How the Milky Way got its spiral (eurekalert.org)

Take a time out when your energy is tangled or knotted!

Do you ever feel like your wires get crossed, knotted or all tangled up?  This happens to me periodically, particularly with technology. Yesterday I spent three times the length of time it took me to write a communication to rectify a technical snag in the program. The longer I spent trying to fix the problem, the more constricted my energy became. I knew what was happening, yet I continued down the path. I felt that if I just tried a little harder I just might “get it.” I took a break for a few hours while I went for a walk and prepared dinner before approaching it again in the evening. I made progress, which brought some relief, but there was still one piece evading me. By the time I was ready to call for help, online support was closed for the evening. I tried again … using a few different approaches. Still no luck. Late into the night I acknowledged that I would set the problem aside, get a good night’s sleep, and contact the Help Desk in the morning. I’m glad I did. The problem was fixed within half an hour.

As I was going through this process I realized that my experience was a replica of what many of us do each day. When we have a problem, we push and push, trying harder and harder. We might make some progress but often not enough to resolve it completely. As we get deeper and deeper into the issue, our energy gets all tangled up. Once it is knotted up inside it gets harder to extract ourselves and seek a different route. We experience blockages at many levels … mental confusion and frustration, physical tightness of breath and body, emotionally we may feel anxious, be short with oneself or those we encounter.  The more wrapped up or emotionally invested we are in the issue, the harder it is to solve.

There is an art to gently untangling knotted energy. The solution is to step away from the situation, create some space and allow options to present themselves. Anything that brings relief will ease such situations, open the door and allow options to present themselves. A walk usually helps me. I often get a lot of ideas and answers as I walk. Yesterday this was not the case. A good night’s sleep is next on my list. This is what helped me. I went to sleep knowing that I would get a resolution to my problem in the morning. After I finally set it aside, I knew getting the right help would take far less time than I had already invested. And that is exactly what happened.

The next time you realize that your energy is tangled, step away from the situation and create space. Withdraw your attention from the problem and change your pace. Breathe. Go for a walk. Meditate. Play. Watch a movie. Read a book. Spend time with family or friends. Do something creative. Sleep. Return with a fresh perspective and re-charged energy. Take a new approach. It will make a difference.

Related articles

• Untangled (chrisbrogan.com)
• An Untangled Moment (karmalifereadings.wordpress.com)

I have noticed that my brain feels frozen and even like I can feel the neural circuits all jumbled when I feel fear. Meditation, mindfulness and EFT have helped me immensely in shifting the energy flow in my brain so I am less vulnerable to the negative repercussions of brain drain!

Have you noticed how your responses vary from your norm when you feel fear rather than peace and calm?

What do you do to shift out of brain drain??

Monthly Women’s Meeting
Karen Kallie
Focused Guided Meditation & EFT Tap Along designed by your requests! 

Thursday, June 2, 2011
 7-9pm

Donation:  $10.00 includes snacks & beverage

Please call to sign up: 603-216-1440/603-216-1440        

Check website for directions: www.breathofsun.com

46 Lowell Road, Suite 3  

Windham, NH 03087  

You can also find more on meditation in our archives—scientific, how to, benefits and even a video with a specific technique to calm and quiet your mind. Click on the select categories  ”button” on the right side bar on this page and you will find more articles as well as the video. You can also find a nine minute meditation here: http://www.livingenergyworks.com/audio.html

We’ll be getting back to more information on dealing with energy vampires shortly, but for now— the practice of meditation is a great way to begin to be in touch with your energy and to build a strong field so you can be sensitive and aware of energy and not be drained by the people. places and events of your life!

 Meditation & Breathwork

There are many ways of altering the breath and using it to change our state of awareness. However unless you are working with a practitioner who is knowledgeable about these techniques it is best to stay with simple straightforward methods.  Most of us breathe very shallowly, so simply deepening the breath and opening the chest fully can go a long way to raising your energy level and helping you to feel more relaxed. Another thing that breathing in this way accomplishes is to slow the mind. You will notice at the start that your mind will wander…A LOT! That’s okay; it’s what the mind does. The point is to notice when this happens and bring your attention back to the breath. The mind needs something to focus on in order to become steady and less busy. 

 This may seem too simplistic a tool in the overall scheme of things that you are trying to accomplish in your life. Be assured however that if you engage in such a practice, you will actually develop more ability and strength to achieve your goals in a much less effortful way than you may imagine at the outset.  The simple approach just described regarding the breath can also become your form of meditation. Meditation techniques in general employ a specific focal point of attention to help quiet the mind and body. We have to breathe; it’s always present and costs nothing so it’s a good choice for a focal point.  It is that simple but not easy!  There are many styles of meditation just as there are techniques of breathwork. The important thing is to choose one that fits for you. We are each unique in how we respond to stress and our lives. The tools we use should fit our particular temperament, life & stress style.  There are many books, tapes, classes and videos that can teach you these techniques for self mastery and feeling good. Explore the many alternatives with your needs in mind and discover what fits for you. The effort you make to integrate a twenty minute ‘stress break’ into your day will bring great returns in the form of increased perception, improved ability to concentrate, enhanced health and an overall increase in your ability to build and use energy for your benefit.

 Paying attention to your breathing on the inside pays significant dividends for you on the outside.  You can strengthen your core, the center of your personal power system, by simply focusing on your breath and bringing your attention to it.  Breathe in as deeply as you can.  Expand your chest and draw your breath into your abdomen.  If you can’t do this right away, don’t worry.  Do a little bit everyday and before you know it, you’ll be breathing more deeply and more fully.

 When you strengthen your core, you put yourself in control.  Begin to notice how you feel and what you are feeling.  You will notice different triggers: situations and things that make you feel great as well as conditions under which you feel more stressed.  Pay attention to the people and relationships that strengthen and energize you as well as those that deplete you.  When you find yourself feeling more stressed, take note and practice breathing consciously for just a few minutes, or even a few complete breaths.  Breathe in slowly, fully and deeply.  Doing so will slow you down and allow you some thinking time.  As you think, you can consciously choose how to handle each situation vs. simply reacting. 

 Pay attention to your breath at various points throughout the day. Before you get out of bed in the morning take a few deep breaths.  Nice, long, slow deep breaths.  Expand your chest and breathe all the way down and into your abdomen.  Practice deep breathing while you are in the shower.  Simply breathe deep, long and slow as the water washes over and cleanses you.  If thoughts of your upcoming day rush into your mind, acknowledge them, let them go and return to breathing deeply, slowly and consciously.

 Breathe deeply as you are on your way to work.  Long, slow, conscious breaths.  As you do so, think about what you want to happen.  Think about the events in your day flowing easily and effortlessly.  Try to hold these thoughts for at least 68 seconds.  There is a theory that says holding our thoughts for 68 pure seconds (without self-doubt or sabotage creeping in) helps whatever you are thinking about to manifest.  The key is to keep your focus pure and undiluted.

Take a few moments during the day to breathe as deeply and as consciously as you can.  If there is a lot going on around you and you find it hard to focus, take three deep breathes.  They will only take a little time and you can return to your present situation in a calmer and more directed state of mind.  Become aware of what you are thinking and choose thoughts that are supportive.

 Also take time to breathe deeply and consciously before you go to bed.  Review the events of your day.  Focus on what went well and give thanks before you drift off to sleep.  Breathe in slowly, deeply and consciously. It’s one of the best methods of self-care and it costs you nothing!