This 15-Minute “Far-Eastern Fix” Helps You Improve Blood Pressure and Ditch Meds

This 15-Minute “Far-Eastern Fix” Helps You Improve Blood Pressure and Ditch Meds

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By: Adam L.

One of the deadliest diseases in the world is heart disease.

Heart disease is the all-encompassing terminology for a series of conditions that eventually lead to heart failure.

Fortunately, this 15-minute “Far-Eastern Fix” helps you improve blood pressure and ditch meds which many people depend on to protect their heart.

Best of all is this Far Eastern Fix doesn’t require a prescription, is 100% safe, and is free.

This “Far-Eastern Fix” is meditation.

Meditation has a long history of use in the Far East for both religious purposes as well as medical therapy.

Meditation, as defined by Wikipedia, is: “…a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing their mind on a particular object, thought or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.

Scholars have found meditation difficult to define, as practices vary both between traditions and within them.”

When it comes to meditation as therapy, the various kinds all seem to offer the same benefits. These include better adaptation to stress, decreased anxiety, enhanced brain function, and most importantly (at least for the scope of this article), better heart health.

Meditation Plays a Big Role In Improving Heart Health

As stated above, there are numerous kinds of meditation. The one seeming to hold the most power over the biological aspects of heart health is transcendental meditation.

Transcendental meditation is a form of meditation where the subject repeats a specific phrase, or word over and over again to block competing thoughts from entering the mind and causing distraction.

Studies show this form of meditation helps improve blood pressure, lower both systolic and diastolic blood pressure and reducing the chance of developing heart diseases.

In a meta-analysis from 2008, nine different studies centering on blood pressure changes and transcendental meditation could improve both measures of blood pressure (systolic and diastolic) roughly 4.7 and 3.2 mm Hg, a significant improvement.

Another study from 2015 and published in the journal Plos One indicated meditation had the power to help relieve advanced hypertension.

Dr. Robert Schneider, who directs the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at the Maharishi University of Management, asked 48 African American men and women to try and see if meditation could reduce their hypertension.

They chose African Americans specifically because hypertension is much more prevalent in African American communities than others.

Splitting the group down the middle, half the group was assigned the task of practicing meditation for blood pressure where the other half was advised to try lifestyle modifications for blood pressure improvement. These lifestyle improvements included not eating as much salt, losing weight, exercise, and alcohol avoidance.

Lifestyle modifications are thoroughly proven to help with blood pressure, so Dr. Schneider was trying to find if meditation could mimic the success of lifestyle modification for the reduction of hypertension.

After 16 weeks, both of the groups saw significant reductions in blood pressure, and both of the groups had near-identical improvements.

The team studying the participants believed meditation helped to achieve these results by enhancing telomere function. Telomeres are the end portion of DNA meant to protect the rest of the chromosome from corruption. And damaged telomeres are likely to lead to hypertension.

When the team concluded the study, they measured telomere gene expression in both groups. They found meditation and lifestyle improvements helped increase telomere expression positively (and in the same amounts).

This led them to conclude that the increased telomere expression and reductions in blood pressure provided by the two practices were both effective enough to help one day lead to the cessation of blood pressure meds.

As Dr. Schneider wrote in the conclusion of his study:

“The finding that telomerase gene expression is increased, and that this is associated with a reduction in blood pressure in a high-risk population, suggests that this may be a mechanism by which stress reduction improves cardiovascular health.”

How to Start Meditating

Meditation is not a problematic therapy to start.

A small amount of research on YouTube or the Internet is all you need to begin.

There are also numerous phone-based apps you can use that will guide you through the steps of meditation.

All you need is 15 minutes of time, a chair with an upright back, and a willingness to try something new to start.