Can Meditation Cure Diseases? What Science Actually Says

Meditation has become the go-to stress reliever for many urban office workers. Modern meditation generally falls into two types: mindfulness meditation and focused attention meditation.

Mindfulness meditation means focusing on your present-moment experience without attaching any subjective judgment to it. Take failing an exam: normally, thinking about it makes you sad, because the thought carries a negative evaluation. Mindfulness meditation asks you to simply observe the thought itself — without judging it.

Focused attention meditation, on the other hand, directs all your mental energy onto one specific object or task — for example, your breath. Whenever your mind wanders off to something else, you simply bring your attention back to the breathing.

This all sounds simple, but in practice it is surprisingly hard — many beginners can't even sustain it for one minute. Yet after a period of practice, you may notice that you feel less anxious and find it easier to concentrate. Why is that?

The Brain Mechanism Behind It

To understand this, we need to look at how the brain works. Inside your brain there is a network called the Default Mode Network (DMN). When the brain is focused on a task, DMN activity decreases; it only becomes active when the mind is at rest.

Moreover, a 2021 study found that the DMN may be linked to self-referential thinking — for instance, when you contemplate the "three ultimate questions of life" — Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? — the DMN becomes highly active. Meditation happens to suppress DMN activity, putting a stop to all that mental "chatter."

According to a 2015 study published by Yale School of Medicine, DMN activity decreases during meditation compared with periods of no meditation. The study also found that regular meditators show lower DMN activity than ordinary people even outside of practice — possibly because meditation has changed the structure of their brains.

In 2011, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital put 16 volunteers through an 8-week meditation training program and scanned their brains before and after. The results showed that after the training, gray matter density increased in the hippocampus — which handles learning and memory — while density decreased in the amygdala, the brain's "fear center" responsible for anxiety, fear, and depression.

In addition, a 2021 study found that after nine months of meditation practice, the cortisol levels in the hair of 80 volunteers dropped by an average of 25%. Cortisol is a stress hormone secreted by the adrenal glands; prolonged stress causes it to accumulate in the scalp.

Whether it is the reduced amygdala density or the lowered cortisol levels, the evidence shows that meditation can indeed relieve anxiety and reduce stress to a certain extent.

But Can It Actually Cure Diseases?

Despite all these benefits, relying on meditation to cure diseases is still unrealistic. According to a 2014 study, there is currently no evidence that meditation can replace medication or other conventional treatments. So treat meditation as a form of "brain gymnastics" — great as a daily practice — but if you actually have an illness, you should still visit a professional medical institution and seek help from a doctor.

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