We’re guessing that when you picture meditation, your gut isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But, here’s the thing: your brain and gut are directly connected. This is how meditation can have a rather significant impact on your gut and digestion. How? Let's dive into the importance of meditation and it's many benefits. Plus, we'll share why we make it a must when we start our weekly team meetings!

What Is Meditation?

During his life, Buddha instructed his followers that to end suffering, one must have a neutral or positive mindset. Today, with our better understanding of stress physiology, we can see there is depth and actual underlying science in his teachings.¹

Through the practice of meditation, you too can uncover the mental state that Buddha preached is necessary for the end of suffering. However, as a practice, meditation can be hard to define because it varies for different people. For some, meditation is the quintessential image of someone sitting cross-legged while holding their hands in a 'Gian Mundra.' For others, it's as simple as closing their eyes and listening to the world around them. Regardless of the form it takes, meditation shares the same guiding principles and goals: live more fully in the present by connecting the mind and body and creating physical and mental peace and calm.

Meditation Benefits

Today, meditation is growing in popularity in clinical settings, and its treatment ability is being studied for an extensive array of psychological and physiological illnesses.

Here are some potential benefits of meditation:

1. Improves Concentration

One of the main touted benefits of meditation is its ability to enhance and improve concentration. This potential benefit is backed by a study that revealed that after only a few weeks of meditation training, people saw a noticeable increase in their focus and memory in the GRE's verbal reasoning section. Overall, the increase in score was approximately 16 percentile points which is no small feat.²

2. Boosts Creativity

Research suggests that our most extraordinary insights and breakthroughs occur when we're in our most meditative or relaxed state of mind. While there's a variety of theories on this, the most common belief is that meditation encourages divergent thinking, which is a component central to creativity.³

3. Rewire The Brain

A research team led by Sara Lazar at Harvard University discovered that meditation altered the structure of the brain. Their research observed that the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory increased in cortical thickness as well as the areas of the brain responsible for emotional regulation and self-referential processing. Moreover, they observed a decrease in brain cell volume in the area of the brain responsible for anxiety, fear, and stress. Ultimately, these studies indicated that meditation not only alters the brain but also improves our subjective perception and feelings.⁴

4. Reduce Anxiety

Anxiety expresses itself in many different forms. Meditation is a potential tool at your disposal to help you navigate anxiety and reduce your overall stress levels.⁵ In a study that took place over eight weeks, researchers discovered that people suffering from generalized anxiety disorder saw a reduction in their anxiety symptoms after adding mindfulness meditation to their routine.⁶

5. Improve Memory

According to research, our minds tend to wander 50% of the time. Studies confirm meditation training can help control our tendency for distraction and thus, strengthen our ability to stay focused and even boost our memory.⁷

How Are the Gut and Brain Connected?

So, how does meditation affect our guts and digestive health? Well, let’s start with the basics: the gut and brain are connected! The gut-brain axis provides feedback between your brain and your gut through a network of neurons and a highway of chemicals and hormones. These updates include everything from hunger to stress. We all know what hunger feels like but you know that sensation you get in the pit of your stomach after reading your credit card bill? This sensation is an example of how the connection works: the stress you feel is palpable in your stomach.⁸

History of the Gut-Brain Connection

Theories about the gut-brain connection began in the 18th century. French anatomist Marie Francois Xavier Bichat first discovered the gut had its own nervous system that was separate and independent from the central nervous system. Incredibly advanced for his time, Bichat referred to the connection between emotion and the gut as the “epigastric center.” By the end of the 20th century, Bichat’s concept was better and more fully defined by Michael Gershon, who entitled the intestinal nervous system the second brain.⁹

Like Bichat, Gershon deciphered that the gut was closely related to your mood. For example, when your gut is running efficiently, your brain is calm. But when “pathogens” or dangerous microbes threaten your health, anxiety spikes transfer to your brain.¹⁰

What Is Microbiota?

But let’s take a step back: what are microbes or microbiota? To understand what the microbiota is, you first must understand that we live in a microbial world. Our earth is packed with microorganisms or microbes that have been here for billions of years. A microbe is a form of microscopic life, such as bacteria. You can find microbes on everything on the planet, human, animal, or otherwise.¹¹

In every niche of the human body, there is a distinct microbiome, i.e. a collection of microbiota. The main colonizations, however, are the skin, the airways, the urogenital tract, the eyes, and the digestive system. While our oral and pulmonary microbiota are important and serve a purpose, the majority of our microbial inhabitants live in the gut.

The Gut Microbiome

The gut microbiome is an assorted community of microorganisms, including bacteria, yeasts, archaea, and parasites such as helminths, viruses, and protozoa.¹² The large intestine harbors about 10,000 more bacteria per teaspoon than the small intestine, and these bacteria survive, if not flourish, on leftovers, primarily dietary fiber.¹³

Communication Between Your Gut & Brain

Until recently, the prevailing opinion was that intestinal microbes were only concerned with digestive processes. But with new molecular techniques and bioinformatics, research has interpreted the role of intestinal microbiota in various physiological processes.¹⁴ 

Today, more and more data indicates that your gut microbiota communicate with your central nervous system through your nervous, immune, and endocrine pathways. In other words, your gut is talking to your brain and influencing brain function and behavior.¹⁵ To get to this conclusion, researchers used animal model studies. Through manipulating changes to the microbiome, researchers have witnessed the detrimental outcomes these changes have on the brain and behavior.¹⁶

Meditation & Your Gut

With a clear connection between the gut and the brain, meditation can potentially impact gut health. Researchers believe that meditation activates the parasympathetic response, or 'rest and digest.' By activating this response, one can theoretically ease digestive issues like IBS, support a healthy gut barrier, and encourage a reduction in inflammation.¹⁷

As you can see, meditation offers a wide array of benefits! So much so that we still can't pinpoint one definitive reason why we start our Monday all-team meeting by practicing meditation. So, we asked two team members who lead our meditation and asked them why they lead and what meditation means to them.

Here’s what they had to say:

• Anne Dyer, Customer Experience Manager - "I found meditation practice in my teens, initially to deal with depression and anxiety, but its benefits weigh so beyond just that! When I first joined OLIPOP, weekly meditation was already commonplace during our team meetings, and I couldn't wait to jump on board to lead! I believe that our collective participation in this practice, sprinkled in with other mindfulness and self-awareness tactics, is one of, if not the best, ways to kick off a week."
• Leah Dockstader, Trade Marketing Manager -"I lead meditations at OLIPOP because I care deeply about wellness, and I enjoy offering experiences that can help expand self-awareness in all of us. I have personally found mindfulness to be an incredible resource myself. I know being able to accomplish what we've set out to do and how we want to do it at OLIPOP requires clarity, emotional intelligence, and personal growth, and it's a joy to support that in the company.

Want to give the practice a try? Here’s a recorded version!

Sources

1. Placek, Katarzyna. “Microbiota in the Context of Epigenetics of the Immune System.” In Epigenetics of the Immune System, 139–59. Elsevier, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-817964-2.00006-x.
2. Mrazek, Michael D., Michael S. Franklin, Dawa Tarchin Phillips, Benjamin Baird, and Jonathan W. Schooler. “Mindfulness Training Improves Working Memory Capacity and GRE Performance While Reducing Mind Wandering.” Psychological Science 24, no. 5 (March 28, 2013): 776–81. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23538911/. 
3. Emma Seppälä, “How Meditation Benefits CEOs ,” Harvard Business Review, December 14, 2015.
4. Hölzel, Britta K et al. “Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density.” Psychiatry research vol. 191,1 (2011): 36-43. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004979/. 
5. Hofmann, Stefan G., and Angelina F. Gómez. “Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Anxiety and Depression.” Psychiatric Clinics of North America 40, no. 4 (December 2017): 739–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psc.2017.08.008.
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7. Seppälä, Emma . “How Meditation Benefits CEOs .” Harvard Business Review, December 14, 2015.
8. Justin Sonnenburg and Erica Sonnenburg, The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-Term Health (Penguin Books, 2016).
9. Scott C. Anderson, John F. Cryan, and Ted Dinan, The Psychobiotic Revolution: The New Science of Psychobiotics and How Your Microbiome Shapes Your Mood (National Geographic Books, 2017).
10. Scott C. Anderson, John F. Cryan, and Ted Dinan, The Psychobiotic Revolution: The New Science of Psychobiotics and How Your Microbiome Shapes Your Mood (National Geographic Books, 2017).
11. Justin Sonnenburg and Erica Sonnenburg, The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-Term Health (Penguin Books, 2016).
12. John F. Cryan et al., “The Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis,” Physiological Reviews 99, no. 4 (October 1, 2019): 1877–2013, https://doi.org/10.1152/physrev.00018.2018.
13. Justin Sonnenburg and Erica Sonnenburg, The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-Term Health (Penguin Books, 2016).
14. Karolina Skonieczna-Żydecka et al., “Microbiome—The Missing Link in the Gut-Brain Axis: Focus on Its Role in Gastrointestinal and Mental Health,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 7, no. 12 (December 7, 2018): 521, https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm7120521.
15. Scott C. Anderson, John F. Cryan, and Ted Dinan, The Psychobiotic Revolution: The New Science of Psychobiotics and How Your Microbiome Shapes Your Mood (National Geographic Books, 2017).
16. Karolina Skonieczna-Żydecka et al., “Microbiome—The Missing Link in the Gut-Brain Axis: Focus on Its Role in Gastrointestinal and Mental Health,” Journal of Clinical Medicine 7, no. 12 (December 7, 2018): 521, https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm7120521.
17. Keefer, L, and E.B Blanchard. “A One Year Follow-up of Relaxation Response Meditation as a Treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.” Behaviour Research and Therapy 40, no. 5 (May 2002): 541–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0005-7967(01)00065-1.