For older adults, learning to be mindful and meditate can be more than just calming.
A fresh study shows that practicing meditation for a year and a half can help seniors pay better attention and handle their feelings better.
But it’s not a miracle cure for everything – the research team couldn’t find any big changes in brain structure or how the brain works, compared to those who didn’t meditate.
The Study at Hand
Dr. Natalie Marchant, who led the study, says the findings give us hope. Meditation seems to make life better for older adults, helping them focus and manage their emotions.
But while there weren’t any noticeable changes in their brains, the team isn’t giving up. They’re keeping a close eye on the people from the study to see if some benefits might take a bit more time to show up.
Meditation’s Role in Emotional Regulation
Mind exercises like meditation have been known to help manage the emotional and mental changes that come with growing older.
They’re especially good at lessening stress, worry, and sadness. Earlier studies have found that certain parts of the brain, like the insula and anterior cingulate cortex, respond well to meditation.
These parts are responsible for self-awareness and managing attention, feelings, and empathy.
Brains on Meditation
In young adults, meditation has been shown to change these brain parts both in size and function. Meditation experts, those with several thousand hours of practice, show these changes most clearly.
Earlier studies also show that older adults who are meditation experts have more gray matter (important brain tissue) and better glucose metabolism (which helps the brain function) than those who don’t meditate.
Team Effort in Research
A team from the European Medit-Aging research group, with members from Inserm, Université de Caen Normandy, UCL, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, University of Liège and University of Geneva, tried to figure out if meditation could physically and emotionally help older adults.
The Age-Well Experiment
In the Age-Well experiment, the team asked 136 people aged 65 or older to be a part of a year-and-a-half-long meditation study.
They looked at the volume and activity of certain parts of the brain, as well as certain mental and emotional parameters.
The participants were divided into three groups. The first group practiced meditation, the second learned English, and the third didn’t follow any program.
After a year and a half, the team found no big changes in the brains of the meditation group compared to the other groups.
Looking Forward
Dr. Gaël Chételat, the lead author of the study, thinks that while meditation can change younger, more adaptable brains, a year and a half might not be enough to see those changes in older brains.
They did see some interesting trends favoring meditation, and they plan to continue the study with a bigger group and over a longer time.
Meditation Wins the Day
Even though there were no big changes in brain structure, the team did see differences in how the meditation group and the English-learning group behaved.
The meditation group was better at paying attention and managing their emotions.
Antoine Lutz from the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, says the practice of meditation really showed its benefits for the mental health of older adults.
They saw big improvements in well-being, attention, and emotional management.
The team plans to take more measurements and do more analyses to better understand how meditation works its magic.
These new findings could help us figure out which measures are most affected by meditation, and how it has its effects.
If you care about mental health, please read studies about 6 foods you can eat to improve mental health, and B vitamins could help prevent depression and anxiety.
For more information about mental health, please see recent studies about how dairy foods may influence depression risk, and results showing Omega-3 fats may help reduce depression.
The study was published in JAMA Neurology.
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