Meditation Could Help Soldiers Concentrate

According to a new scientific study, it may be that allowing soldiers some time to meditate before they go into battle could make them more tough mentally, as well as better capable of controlling their own emotions. This could lead directly to them being a lot more effective in battle, without the risk of snapping, or experiencing mental problems afterwards. The researchers behind the new study say that meditation provides something like a mental armor when engaging in battle, which means that soldiers could learn to stay alert and in the moment without becoming emotional about what they do, LiveScience reports.

Mindfulness training was found to be beneficial in direct investigations, when it was applied on United States soldiers who were readying to be deployed in Iraq. The thing about this type of training, experts say, is that it's very similar to any other type of workout, such as physical routines. Amishi Jha, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, says that meditation needs to be practiced daily, as this is the only way to ensure that it produces the desired results. The expert is also the coauthor of a new study detailing the findings, which appears in the February issue of the esteemed scientific journal Emotion.

“Their findings really support the idea that you've got to work at it for mindfulness to have this positive impact. You not only have to learn it, but you have to practice it,” the Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), Susan Smalley, says. In a study conducted on soldiers, researchers were able to discover that those who practiced meditation every day tended to report a lot fewer negative moods, as well as more positive moods than their colleagues who chose not to get involved with this research. “Mindfulness training might be a nice protective addition to our lifestyles,” Smalley believes.

The science team however admits that a lot more research is needed in order to accurately assess precisely how meditation influences an individual. Scientists say that the correlation is fairly obvious, but add that the exact mechanisms that trigger it still remain mysterious. According to Jha, mindfulness training also has positive effects when it comes to improving working memory, a type of memory that the brain uses to store data for short amounts of time. The information is discarded after it is processed.