A new study shows loving-kindness meditation may actually
help postpone the inevitable.
Last
year I reported on research showing that kindness is the most underappreciated tool for greater
wellness. Along with diet and exercise, simply being warm and
thoughtful will do more for your health than any fancy detox or "healing
crystals." It's a happy message for our divided times, so no wonder it was
one of the most popular posts of the year.
But it
turns out that even that cheerful news from scientists doesn't fully convey the
powerful health-boosting effects of kindness. In fact, new research suggests
kindness won't just make you happier and healthier now, but may actually
prolong your life.
Can kindness slow
aging?
The new
study out of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is small and
preliminary, but given the known benefits of kindness, there's no harm in
jumping ahead to put its conclusions to use. There are, after all, no nasty
side effects to hugs, politeness, and good will.
And the
results are pretty startling. The researchers gathered around 150 middle-aged
volunteers and then separated them into three groups. One group went through a
six-week mindfulness meditation training involving
weekly hour-long classes and 20 minutes of daily at home practice, another
received similar training in loving-kindness meditation, another form of meditation that encourages you to
open your heart to others, and a third served as a control group.
At the
beginning and end of the experiment all the volunteers had the lengths of their
telomeres measures. Telomeres are like little caps on the end of your
chromosomes that protect your DNA from daily wear and tear. As we grow
older they get shorter and shorter, making them a good proxy for aging. The
slower your telomeres wear down the longer you're likely to live.
While
all three groups had shorter telomeres at the end of the 12-week study period
than they did at the beginning, the loving kindness meditation group's had lost
the least. The control group had lost the most with the mindfulness
meditators in the middle. Practicing loving kindness meditation for just
six weeks seems to have slowed aging a little.
Yes, there are
caveats, but....
Again,
I should repeat, there are plenty of reasons to take these results with a grain
of salt. It's a small. short-term study focused on willing meditators. Things
might look different if more skeptical folks were measured over longer periods.
But as I also mentioned, there are also plenty of reasons to suspect kindness
might be linked with better health and therefore longer life.
First among
them perhaps is just how serious the effects of nastiness and isolation can be.
A heap of research shows that loneliness will kill you just as surely as a
ten-day smoking habit (I'm not exaggerating). And a mean boss has
been shown to be the biggest predictor of whether a man will die of heart
disease. Lack of warm, human connection can kill.
That
suggests that the flip side is also likely true. Kindness and fellow feeling
don't just make life more pleasant for everyone, they also physically protect
your body from the ravages of stress and time. So while the exact science of
how loving kindness and DNA interact is still in the works, if you want
to slow down your aging, it's a good bet to
simple try to be a little kinder and surround yourself with those who are kind to you.
PUBLISHED
ON: JAN 6, 2020
The opinions expressed
here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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