Meditation, spirituality and prayer can make us happy, says Dr Craig Hassed of the department of general practice at Monash University. Meditation, spirituality and prayer can make us happy.
Craig, who spoke recently about meditation and happiness at a conference on happiness in Sydney, says studies have shown that meditation is a powerful therapy for severe, relapsing depression.
Whether meditation actually promotes happiness in the general population is less clear, but Hassed says brain scans and physiological markers indicate that it may. He says research shows meditation can
- lower blood pressure,
- improve immune function
- and bring about chemical changes in the brain.
- Meditation also appears to bring about a shift in frontal lobe brain activity. “Frontal lobe activity in the left brain tends to be associated with more optimism and higher moods and more right frontal activity tends to be associated with lowered mood and depression and poor immune function,” he says. “Studies have shown when people learn to meditate over a number of months the balance tends to shift more to the left side.”