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Tag: meditation

  • How Meditating Daily Can Help Treat Diabetes Mellitus

    How Meditating Daily Can Help Treat Diabetes Mellitus

    Researchers found that meditation can help lower blood sugar levels. Meditation can also help treat diabetes mellitus in other ways.

    Meditation Is a Healthy Activity, Not Just a Religious Ceremony

    Meditation should be an integral part of everyone’s lives. It’s not just an activity that religious monks do at a temple. Meditation has shown to improve your cognition and attention. Researchers found that meditating regularly lengthens your DNA’s telomeres, which are responsible for preventing aging by keeping your DNA safe from deterioration when your cells multiply.

    It’s also been found to boost your immunity. They found that people who meditate have a higher immunity against viral infections.

    And then there are the mainstream benefits you probably already know about that meditation confers: It lowers your blood pressure and stress.

    These are just the tip of the iceberg. Researchers are constantly discovering more health benefits that regular meditation can give you.

    Meditation Helps Treat Diabetes Mellitus

    But did you know that meditating everyday can also help treat diabetes mellitus? Researchers found that meditation lowers the levels of compounds responsible for causing inflammation, which is elevated in people suffering from diabetes mellitus. By lowering inflammation, meditation can help protect you from atherosclerosis and other diseases that you’re more susceptible to because of diabetes mellitus complications.

    Meditation’s stress-lowering effects are another way it helps treat diabetes mellitus. Since less stress means lower cortisol levels, meditation helps lessen insulin resistance.

    Meditation has also been found to directly lower blood sugar levels. Researchers instructed 50 diabetes mellitus patients to meditate after breakfast everyday for two weeks. They found that their postprandial sugar levels (their blood sugar levels after eating) were much lower after they started their meditation intervention.

    You should definitely include meditation into your daily routine because it will help treat diabetes mellitus, and is overall healthy for your body and mind.




    Here Are Some Ways You Can Ease Into Meditation for Diabetes Mellitus Treatment

    Meditation can be tricky and frustrating if you’ve never tried before. But you should make the effort because it’s a natural way to lower your blood sugar levels without medications. Here are a few helpful tips to get you jumpstarted:

    Try gradually. Do you remember when you first started learning to run or jog? At first you couldn’t go the full hour, but you gradually made your way there by increasing the time you ran or jogged each time you tried. Treat meditation like exercise – try meditating for only five minutes, then ramp it up to fifteen then twenty, and so on. You don’t have to go the full forty-five minutes on your first few sessions! This helps you ease into meditation without straining yourself and making the activity harder than it should be.

    Try mindfulness. Try mindfulness, which is probably the easiest form of meditation. Here you simply shift your focus to something else in a nonjudgmental manner. You’re concentrating on anything else, but objectively without emotions. You’re being an observer, like a scientist. For example, you can focus on your breath and try to feel all the sensations that come to you when you inhale and exhale. Soon you’ll find yourself in a deeper state of awareness with your blood pressure and heart rate lower. If you suddenly get lost in emotional or stressful thoughts, simply pull your focus back to whatever it was you were objectively focusing on.

    Visualize light. If you feel like trying an advanced form of meditation, try visualizing light. Imagine a golden light shining down on you from above, like the sun. After a while, imagine that the light can enter your body through your pores, penetrating every cell and healing them of their insulin resistance. Doing this has been proven to help treat your diabetes mellitus two-fold. The meditation lowers your blood sugar levels, while researchers found that healing visualization boosts rates of healing in diabetics. Diabetics with foot ulcers who were frustrated and depressed healed much slower than those who had positive thinking toward their condition and focused on healing.

    Meditation is a holistically healthy activity. Start meditating everyday and it will help treat your diabetes mellitus. There are no drawbacks, only good things can come from including this ancient practice into your daily life.

  • Pulling All-nighters Might Lead to Brain Damage

    Pulling All-nighters Might Lead to Brain Damage

    Scientists announce that not getting enough sleep causes your brain to physically destroy itself.

    Sleep deprivation commonly affects a significant percentage of the global population. In the U.S., the CDC found that 35.3 percent of adults get less than seven hours of sleep each night. When you include teens, that percentage could be far greater for the overall population since adolescents are known to stay up into the late hours of the night only to be forced awake before seven in the morning the following day.

    Sleep is something most people put off because they’ve procrastinated doing other responsibilities, like studying, finishing work papers, or because they just want to relax into the night with the television. But doing so on a regular basis can increase your risk for neurodegenerative diseases, like Alzheimer’s.

    Researchers found that your brain’s astrocytes, which are like specialized immune cells of the brain that protect your brain from pathogens, also rid your brain of extra synapses to boost your mental efficiency. Microglial cells work in the same fashion by combing your brain and getting rid of debris and dead or damaged brain cells.

    They took two groups of mice and let one group go five days without sleeping, while the other group slept as long as they wanted everyday. The well-rested group’s microglial cells and astrocytes were only active in 8 percent of their brains’ synapses, but the sleep-deprived group’s microglial cells and astrocytes were active in 13.5 percent of their brains’ synapses.

    They say this increased brain-eating activity may lead to harmful neurodegeneration if it goes on long-term, like if you keep staying up late on weekdays and party until late on weekends. Although these results concern mice, these researchers are fairly sure they significantly represent what goes on in sleep-deprived people.




    Sleep Deprivation Can Also Lead to Obesity, Cancer, and Other Diseases

    When you don’t get enough sleep, it’s not only bad for your brain but for your whole body. Researchers discovered that your cells express fewer important genes when you don’t get enough sleep. The genes affected include those that regulate inflammation and metabolism.

    If your body is more prone to inflammation when you’re sleep-deprived, it can increase your risk for cancer, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and acne. All these diseases are linked with increased levels of overall inflammation.

    Since genes affecting your metabolism aren’t working 100 percent, your body will burn less carbs and store more fat and you’ll have higher blood sugar levels. Not only can this also play a role in your obesity risk, but it can increase your risk for diabetes too.

    Researchers found that acne is especially susceptible to sleep deprivation. They studied high school students with acne and found that 65 percent of them were sleep-deprived. Since there’s a higher proportion of sleep deprivation in acne sufferers, they concluded that not getting enough sleep can exacerbate or cause acne.

    Try Meditation to Get Your Full Night’s Sleep

    Sometimes it’s hard to fit in more than 7 hours of sleep per night – especially during exam time and when work gets hectic. It’s a good thing there’s a slight cheat that lets you get more sleep without spending more time sleeping!

    Researchers found that meditating in the afternoon for 40 minutes improves your attention and cognitive performance better than sleeping. That means if you’re sleep-deprived and need a brain power boost, use some of your lunch hour to meditate and you’ll supercharge your mental facilities.

    They also found that people who regularly meditate need less sleep. Those who meditated regularly needed only 5.2 hours of sleep per night, while normal people usually sleep 7.2 hours.

    If you’re not getting enough sleep, meditation can’t totally make up for it. But it can help counter the mental disabilities caused by sleep deprivation. If you meditate everyday, you may also start needing less sleep – and this can help lessen your sleep deprivation as well. But the best thing you can do is get seven or more hours of sleep every night to keep your brain and body healthy.