What are the benefits of meditation?

 Meditation have many  physiologycal and psychological benefits, here are some:

1.- Reduces anxiety and stress: A study involving 3515 participants that suffered mental and physical health issues, including depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, substance use, diabetes, hearth disease, cancer and chronic pain. They found moderate evidence of improvement in symptoms of anxiety, depression and pain after participants underwent what was typically an eight-week training program in mindfulness meditation. They discovered low evidence of improvement in stress and quality of life. There was not enough information to determine whether other areas could be improved by meditation. In the studies that followed participants for six months, the improvements typically continued.

2. Improves concentration and intelligence: Recent studies suggest that months to years of intensive and systematic meditation training can improve attention. However, the lengthy training required has made it difficult to use random assignment of participants to conditions to confirm these findings. This article shows that a group randomly assigned to 5 days of meditation practice with the integrative body–mind training method shows significantly better attention and control of stress than a similarly chosen control group given relaxation training.

3.- Improves immune function: In a study of twenty five subjects under 8 weeks of mindfulness meditation, the subjects were vaccinated with influenza vaccine, the meditation group produced more antibody titers against the non meditator group.

4.- Better sleep: 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program on the sleep quality of a heterogeneous sample of 63 cancer patients. Overall sleep disturbance was significantly reduced and participants reported that their sleep quality had improved . There was also a significant reduction in stress , mood disturbance , and fatigue. The associations among these changes and implications for improving quality of life of cancer patients are discussed.