Research has long shown that people who have integrated daily meditation into their lifestyles over the long term sleep better, are less likely to experience anxiety, and have fewer chronic illnesses than those who do not. Research also shows that there are a number of benefits of meditation for concentration as well. Meditation teaches the practitioner to push distraction to the background and to focus with sharp precision, directing a concentrated beam toward the task at hand.
Improved concentration as a result of meditative practices is not just a matter of heightened attention to habit, though. The brain itself undergoes certain changes during meditation. Over the long term, practitioners are actually able to rewire the brain so that the areas of the brain associated with concentration become more developed.
Improved concentration, which gets better the longer the practitioner meditates both in terms of a single session and over the long run, can actually be noticed in as little as a few days with only 20 minutes of mediation per day. Performance on cognitive skills tests have shown improvement in a number of studies. Practitioners also report that using meditation for concentration not only enhances this ability, but long-term memory is supported as well.
The benefits of meditation for concentration are clear for brief, focused tasks. Both practitioners and researchers, however, believe meditation also helps maintain steady concentration on longer, more complex tasks. Studies of Buddhists monks that began in the 1970s determined that the monks are able to sustain focus for far longer than those who did not meditate and were not as easily exhausted by concentration to boot.
Concentration is really a relationship between two activities. On the one hand, concentration is about narrowing the mental lens to a very intense and focused beam that allows a deep look into a task or idea. In order to pay attention to something, everything else must be actively ignored. This means that, to truly concentrate, the mind must be able to focus on not focusing!
While this may seem a bit convoluted, it’s an almost perfect description of meditation. In the meditative state, the practitioner is ignoring everything except being fully present in the moment. When other thoughts or emotions distract the mind, the practitioner sees the distraction and erases it in a single moment, returning to the mantra, image, or breathing pattern that helps with focus. Meditation for concentration enhancement and improvement can be very beneficial.