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AFH Regenerative Anti-Aging Medicine: Top 10 Benefits of Meditation

Meditation is the routine exercise of focusing and training your mind in a deliberate way. In the process, self-presence and awareness of your surroundings is increased.

There are two major broad techniques of meditation:

The first is focused –attention meditation. This is where one directs attention to a single object, thought, sound, or visualization. All distractions are pushed out of the way. Meditation may focus on breathing a mantra, or calming sound.

The second is open-monitoring meditation. This is where you focus on broadening the awareness of you surroundings, follow you train of thought, and sense of self. You may become aware of suppressed thoughts, feelings, or impulses.

In our busy schedules a simple exercise of hourly breathing exercises may also help. You can set your phone to chime every hour and then take deep breaths: five seconds drawing air in, holding for five seconds, and then slowly exhaling over five seconds. You can repeat this five times every hour.

Practicing meditation has many health, regenerative, and anti-aging benefits. We will discuss the top 10.



1. Reduce stress.
Most people practice mediation to reduce stress. Normally, mental and physical stress cause increased levels of the stress hormone cortisol. This produces many of the harmful effects of stress, such as the release of inflammatory chemicals called cytokines.
These effects can disrupt sleep, promote depression and anxiety, increase blood pressure, and contribute to fatigue and cloudy thinking.
2. Control Anxiety
Anxiety is controlled when stress is controlled. Several studies have shown mindfulness meditation helped reduce anxiety symptoms in people with generalized anxiety disorder along with increasing positive self-statements and improving stress reactivity and coping. Yoga has also been shown to have this effect combining meditation and physical activity.
3. Foster emotional health
Studies have shown meditation decreased negative thoughts when exposed to viewing negative images and reduced inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, which are released in response to stress that, can affect mood, leading to depression.
4. Increase self-awareness and generate kindness
Certain types of mediation such as self-inquiry meditation is designed to help you develop a greater understanding of yourself and how you relate to those around you. Other forms teach you to recognize thoughts that may be harmful or self-defeating. p\Practicing tai chi may be associated with improved self-efficacy, which is a term used to describe a person’s belief in their own capacity or ability to overcome challenges. Not only can meditation help with self awareness but positive feelings towards others as well as yourself are increased. Metta, a type of meditation also known as loving-kindness meditation, begins with developing kind thoughts and feelings toward yourself. This form of meditation demonstrated its ability to increase peoples’ compassion toward themselves and others. In one study, practicing metta meditation 3 times per week improved positive emotions, interpersonal interactions, and understanding of others after 4 weeks
5. Enhances attention span
Focused-attention meditation is like body building for your attention span. It helps increase the strength and endurance of your attention. Studies showed people who listened to a meditation tape experienced improved attention and accuracy while completing a task, performed better on a visual task and had a greater attention span than those without any meditation experience, and can reverse patterns in the brain that contribute to mind-wandering, worrying, and poor attention. One study found that meditating for just 13 minutes daily enhanced attention and memory after 8 weeks.
6. Mitigate age-related memory loss
You can keep you mind young by improving attention and clarity of thinking. Kirtan Kriya is a method of meditation that combines a mantra or chant with repetitive motion of the fingers to focus your thoughts. Studies in people with age-related memory loss have shown it improves performance on neuropsychological tests. multiple meditation styles can increase attention, memory, and mental quickness in older volunteers. Meditation can also help improve memory in patients with dementia. It can also help control stress and improve coping in those caring for family members with dementia.
7. Helps fight addictions
The habitual practice of meditation increases your mental discipline so that you can break dependencies by increasing your self-control and awareness of triggers for addictive behaviors. Research has shown that meditation may help people learn to redirect their attention, manage their emotions and impulses, and increase their understanding of the causes. Meditation may also help you control food cravings. A review of 14 studies found mindfulness meditation helped participants reduce emotional and binge eating.
8. Improves Sleep
Studies show practicing mindfulness meditation allowed people to say asleep longer, improved insomnia severity, and helped people control or redirect the racing or runaway thoughts that often lead to insomnia, and helped relax the body, releasing tension and putting people in a peaceful state in which you’re more likely to fall asleep.
9. Control Pain
Pain is modified by your state of mind and when you are more stressed you perceive more pain. One review of 38 studies concluded that mindfulness meditation could reduce pain, improve quality of life, and decrease symptoms of depression in people with chronic pain. A large study showed meditation was associated with decreased pain. Meditators and non-meditators experienced the same causes of pain, but meditators showed a greater ability to cope with pain and even experienced a reduced sensation of pain.
10. Decrease Blood Pressure
Meditation reduces the strain on the heart and therefore improves overall physical health. Over time, high blood pressure makes the heart work harder to pump blood, which can lead to poor heart function. High blood pressure also contributes to atherosclerosis, or a narrowing of the arteries, which can lead to heart attack and stroke. Several studies showed meditation helped reduce blood pressure. This was more effective among older volunteers and those who had higher blood pressure prior to the study. In part, meditation appears to control blood pressure by relaxing the nerve signals that coordinate heart function, blood vessel tension, and the “fight-or-flight” response that increases alertness in stressful situations.

To find out more about mediation and how we use it as a part of our All Functional Health Anti-aging and regenerative medicine programs email [email protected], request an appointment at www.allfunctionalhealth.com, or call (925) 736-9828. We’ve helped thousands of people on their health journey and we look forward to helping you. Take care and stay healthy.

Jeffrey Mark, M.D.

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Today I'd like to talk to you about a new vaccine that's just been approved, which is the Johnson and Johnson and Janssen joint venture. And this is a COVID-19 or SARS Cov 2 vaccine that's a single dose or single injection, which is an advantage over the two previous ones that required two injections. And it also is favorable in terms of storage in terms of not needing a deep freezer and maybe more convenient and other ways. We first tell you a little bit about what the mechanism of this one is compared to the others. So the way this one works is it's a real ad no virus, meaning it's actually a virus. That's the vector, what uses it to deliver into your body or get into your body, and it takes a virus but makes it relatively inactive in the sense that it's not going to be causing the flu or some other type of significant symptoms, but it's using the machinery of the adenovirus to deliver into the body and into the cells, and what's happened is that the actual DNA is manipulated so that a strand is inserted and this strand has the spike protein. So I can illustrate this for you. And what happens is that this gets placed in DNA machinery or the virus. Then you get inoculated or injected, and then your body incorporates this into the cells similar to like the Pfizer BioNtech and Moderna vaccine descriptions that I've given before, so it gets into the cell ribosomes decipher after messenger RNA is made from the DNA. And then the spike protein is made and then you make antibodies, the humoral response from the B cells and making antibodies and also a T cell response as well. So, this is the difference between Pfizer Biotech, and the Moderna in that this is a DNA based, and it's an agonal virus, and I've just lifted by a layer that gets into the cells, and it's also single injection which is a major difference and we'll talk a little bit about differences as well. So comparing the three, the efficacy of the Pfizer BioNtech, and Moderna vaccines were 95% and 94% respectively in terms of avoiding significant or severe disease death or hospitalization. But you have to recall that at the time that Pfizer and the Moderna were available there were fewer variants than we have now, namely, the UK variant, the South African variant, and the Brazilian variant at this time. Looking at Johnson and Johnson, efficacy is about 66% overall. But you have to break down the numbers a little bit further in that in the United States, the numbers, where there's less variation was 72% advocacy. And there's like I said less variance here in terms of the South African and Brazilian varieties, and in Latin America than in Brazil particularly. There's 66% efficacy and that's even with the Brazilian variant, and in South Africa where there's a prevalence of their specific variation of to 95% prevalence. There was 57% efficacy so even though they had this different variation of the original source code. there was still efficacy at 57%. Well, initially these numbers don't look as good as the others in terms of 94 and 95%. You can see over time though the data suggests that things get better over time and you make more antibodies as your body becomes more responsive, in the sense that, on day 28 there's 85% efficacy in terms of preventing any severe cold and that means hospitalization and death which is something that you want a vaccine to be able to do. On day 49, or 49 days after the vaccination or inoculation and this is a single dose inoculation, there was 100% efficacy in preventing severe COVID, death, and hospitalization. So again, over time by day 49, the vaccine becomes very effective in that severe COVID, death, or hospitalization is avoided. Even in Brazil and South Africa where these variants, as I showed you in terms of preventing any symptoms of COVID relatively lowered the severe reactions were avoided. So it's interesting to know that also that the adverse effects were actually lower in the people that receive the vaccinations versus the placebo. And this is a single shot as well so it doesn't need special refrigeration. And there are actually potentially fewer side effects from the vaccine itself, although there was not a direct comparison, the others. And the other thing is that Johnson. Johnson has shown a commitment to making this a cost-effective option in the sense that they're trying to make this a nonprofit venture, as per their printouts and website. So this is another option I think that will greatly help expand the rollout and the options for people to get a vaccine. If you have other questions about functional medicine and how it can help you with immune resiliency, brain health, and gut health, call us at 925-736-9828, email [email protected], or visit our website at www.allfunctionalhealth.com. Thank you. Take care, and stay healthy.

Jeffrey Mark, MD
Quadruple Board Certified Functional and Regenerative Medicine Gastroenterology Specialist