Meditation may help alleviate stress and anxiety

By Staff Writer

According to researchers from Emory University, a meditation practice invented more than 1,000 years ago may have real health benefits for people today. CNN reports that the scientists are looking at how an ancient Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice called Lojong may help reduce stress.

Dr Charles Raison, principal investigator of the Compassion and Attention Longitudinal Meditation Study (CALM), gathered preliminary results from a group of Emory University students, as well as a more recent study on teenagers in foster care in Georgia. In both groups, researchers found that the more a person practices, the more stress reduction benefits he or she receives.

"It tries to train people to rethink and reimagine their relationships with other people," Raison told the news source. "It's a series of visualizations and mental challenges where you use meditation to challenge why you feel the way you do about people."

Participants are taught to look at all people equally as being valuable and important, and then attempt to develop strong feelings of compassion. They first examine compassion toward people they already care about, then toward people about whom they feel neutral, and then finally enemies.

According to PBS, approximately 4 percent of adolescents develop serious depression each year.