Not everyone cherishes the wrinkles and lines on their face. We know that adequate hydration, sufficient sleep, reducing smoking, and eating foods rich in anti-oxidants can slow down and prevent wrinkle formation. Hooray! Recently I was pondering on how stress can age the skin, and how it shows up on the face so quickly! Lo and behold there is research to show that meditation can slow down wrinkle formation. I had heard of this before and had forgotten about meditation’s positive effects on a physiological cellular level. My observations is that most people who meditate actually do look youthful.
Meditation appears to slow some of the cell loss which causes wrinkling of the skin. Telomerase’s -which are basically enzymes that looks after the long-term health of your cells and are added to many expensive lotions. Telomeres are structures at the end of chromosomes, sometimes envisaged as the equivalent of the cap on the end of a shoelace. They get shorter each time a cell divides and when they drop below a specific length, that cell can no longer divide and dies. By maintaining telomere levels or promoting their activity, it’s possible to slow down cell loss. It’s this cell loss that causes wrinkling and other signs of ageing. The researchers believe that this beneficial side effect of meditation is down to the reduced stress that practitioners feel. They base this theory on the fact that those study participants who showed the highest levels of telomerase activity were also those who showed the greatest improvement in terms of positive psychological changes. If meditation makes you feel good, de-stressing you and giving you a general sense of wellbeing, then it may also increase your telomerase activity. But if gardening or painting gives you a similar sense of wellbeing, it may well be just as effective.
