Mental stress has been reported to impair cognitive functions. This may be relevant to the performance of students, office workers, and many others for whom optimal alertness, concentration, and memory are significant variables affecting their performance.

Researchers in India studied the effects of meditation before stress and after stress using computer games as the stressor.  Computer games usually give immense pleasure after a win. However, in the initial stages of the game when a player suffers repeated defeats or constraints, the game becomes very stressful.

The computer games gave a sharp increase in stress levels. The study measured galvanic skin response, heart rate, electromyography, sympathetic reactivity, cortisol, and acute psychologic stress scores.

They found benefits were given to even first time meditators.  Meditation, if practiced before the stressful event, reduced the adverse effects of stress. Memory quotient significantly increased for those that meditated before, whereas cortisol level decreased after both stress and meditation. The practice of meditation after stress may ameliorate some negative effects of stress, however the effect was greater on those that meditated before the stress!

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD sifted through nearly 19,000 meditation studies, they found 47 trials that addressed stress and met their criteria for well-designed studies. Their findings, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that meditation can help ease psychological stresses like anxiety, depression, and pain.

It’s pretty amazing that there are 19,000 studies on meditation already completed on the effectiveness of meditation.

The Ishaya Tradition techniques/meditation have been practiced for thousands of years and have been verified to be universally true for all. 
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The Ascension Attitudes are priceless for the modern world. The Art of Ascension is ex­treme­ly easy to prac­tice and quick­ly frees any­one from stress. This opens life to maxi­mum cre­ativity, enjoy­ment, health and success.

The last US census report of 2010 reported 53,364 people over 100 years old (including 330 people over 110).  In 2014, there were 72,197 Americans aged 100 or older, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The number of centenarians is up 44 percent from 2000. Worldwide, there are about 233,000 people over 100 years old.  Just to put that in perspective, in 1908, average life expectancy in the US was 51 years old.  

What do you think was the most common factor in people living over 100?  Of course, good genes are a great help.  But the most important factor for which people had some level of control was their ability to handle stress.

Centenarians overwhelmingly cite stress as the most important thing to avoid. Their lives are marked by as many stressful events as the rest of us, but they differ in how well they manage their stress. Rather than dwelling on it, they let it go. 

"What we are finding with our twin experiments is that one little factor difference can have a very major impact on them, and there is some evidence that mildly optimistic people do live longer than pessimistic people," says  Prof Tim Spector, an expert on ageing from Kings College London.

Stress initiates the release of a variety of hormones that make your pulse race and cause your blood pressure to rise. The hormone cortisol, released to lessen these effects, also creates problems when it remains chronically elevated. 

Spector suggests that the difference in how a person views the same situation could actually have an impact on the genes affecting their brains which in turn could change certain chemicals and alter stress levels. All this could potentially have an effect on health and longevity.

It is important to understand, we need not be a victim of stress.  Remember, that stress is not the event; stress is a result of our reaction to the event. We react based on stresses lodged in our nervous system from our past reactions. Without a meditation practice that reduces stress, modern man is just caught in a loop of adding more and more stress into the nervous system.  

Through a daily, regular practice like the Art of Ascension, the nervous system is freed from stress as consciousness expands; consciousness expands as the nervous system is freed from stress. Both happen simultaneously. Indeed, one is impossible without the other.

As stress decreases and is removed from the nervous system, the conflicting demands from the mind change; this alters enzymatic production to allow for maximum effect from digestion and the health tends to improve. Also as stress decreases, the mind starts functioning more clearly to inspire one to make better choices.  The practice of the Art of Ascension includes an open-eyed practice that reduces new stresses from adding to the nervous system.  The close-eyed meditation practice dissolves old stresses.  So it need not take nearly as long to eliminate the stress in the nervous system as it took to accumulate it!

Whether we live to be 100 or not, don’t we also want to live all our years in greater health, happiness and more consciously?

According to Drug Addiction Now, the new trend in treating addiction includes meditation to help people overcome dependence during rehab as well as after rehab. A possibly not so surprising figure, is that 40-60% of those who seek treatment relapse.  The addition of meditation to their program has the opportunity to change that figure.
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A 2004 Study published in Molecular Psychiatry indicates that when the addict gets a fix, they get a dopamine rush and later a crash due to extremely low dopamine, and hence need another fix.  However a 2002 Study of John F Kennedy Institute found that meditation boosted dopamine by 65%. 

A 2006 Study from the University of Washington followed 78 addicted inmates.  They found that including meditation in their treatment program made it 6 times more effective than the more traditional chemical dependency treatment plan.  A second study followed 286 in post rehab.  One third of the group used meditation, another third used the 12 step program and another third a “relapse prevention program”.  The relapse prevention program had 17% relapse, the 12 step program had 14% relapse, and the meditators had 9% relapse after 1 year.

A meta study from October 2016 published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction shows ten benefits that help treat addiction when one is more mindful (becoming more aware, on purpose, in the present moment, in a non-judgmental way).

1. Structural Brain Changes in at least 6 areas of the brain that are associated with learning, memory, self-regulation, and more.
2. Reduced Autonomic Arousal which increases relaxation response and brings on blissful states
3. Perceptual Shift so that people change their relationship and responses to their thoughts and feelings
4. Increase in Spirituality which helps buffer against loneliness and help in re-evaluating priorities in life
5. Greater Situational Awareness allows the practitioner to enter into a form of effortless communication with the present momentwhich is understood to improve (amongst other things) decision-making competency, job performance, and the ability to anticipate how a particular situation might unfold
6. Values Clarification because the practitioner begins to appreciate more fully that life can only unfold and be experienced in the present moment, and that fantasizing about the future or ruminating over the past is ultimately a futile and fatiguing process.
7. Increase in Self-Awareness which in turn helps to improve ability to identify and label negative mood states and thinking patterns 
8. Addiction Substitution because the blissful state from meditation can substitute for the addicted person’s buzz addiction, in other words, substituting a negative addiction for a positive one.
9. Urge Surfing refers to the ability to observe the urge but not react to it which allows them to deal with their cravings in a new way
10. Letting Go pattern is positively correlated with acceptance, non-reactivity, self-compassion, subjective wellbeing, and eudemonic wellbeing 

 
“What happens is when you meditate, your brain starts to shift,” said Christina Nadeau, meditation instructor at Outer Banks Meditation & Mindfulness in Corolla, North Carolina. “You start looking at something in a different perspective. The body is processing all those toxins. Your toxicity levels go down; your blood pressure goes down; your immune system gets better; you are able to make natural chemicals like dopamine and serotonin.”
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Meditation also helped Stacy Thrash with the physical symptoms she experienced during addiction recovery. “The physical craving in the body gets worse if you resist it,” she said. “We’re used to running from our emotions. When we’re able to respond to something differently, it comes and goes. A headache doesn’t last forever.”

One thing that corresponds to both anxiety and depression is rumination. Ruminating means that someone repeats a thought or problem again and again without resolving it or taking it to completion. This could include worrying and self-defeating thoughts. For those with depression, the common themes are being inadequate or worthless, leading to hopelessness and helplessness.  The repetition of the feeling associated with the thought raises anxiety, which interferes with the ability to solve the problem.  Then depression deepens.

Negative emotions have been shown to limit the scope of attention.  These negative emotions involve neural, cardiovascular, endocrine and muscular changes as well as the tendency toward the primitive urge of “Fight or flight”. Also, when thinking about a situation in which you felt inadequate or worthless, it lights up a neural network of other situations in which you felt the same way. The brain chemistry creates a loop.

Research with Dr. Frederickson has shown that what she calls “Upward spirals of positive emotions” can counter these spirals of negativity caused by rumination. 

Her research has shown that positive emotions, like love and gratitude, encourage new and creative actions, ideas, and social bonds. When people experience positive emotions, limits fall away and they open up to new possibilities and ideas. At the same time, positive emotions help people build new resources, ranging from physical resources, to intellectual resources, and social resources.

Jacobs research in 2011 also showed that a meditation retreat utilizing positive emotions significantly reduced symptoms of ruminating, worry, anxiety, and depression.

The positive emotions of Praise, Gratitude, Love, and Compassion is only one component of the Art of Ascension.  Ascension Attitudes have 3 parts, the upward spiraling emotion, a component to align you with the Infinite Source, and third part is an area of life to be expanded into wholeness.  It is more difficult to understand than it is to practice.  

The Ascension Attitudes are designed to clear out past beliefs and behavior patterns which inhibit full mental and physical function­ing. By effortlessly introducing these seed thoughts at deeper levels of thinking, the entire structure of the mental framework gradually and gracefully transforms.