Study Summary — Loving Kindness Meditation Slows Biological Aging in Novices

2 min readJul 2, 2020

Notes:

This study provides evidence that certain forms of meditation can have positive effects at a cellular level.
Loving kindness meditation is a form of meditation in which the meditator directs loving thoughts towards others or themselves. A common form of living kindness meditation involves visualizing another person, and thinking thoughts such as: “may you be happy, may you strong, may you be healthy.”
Biological aging is often measured be observing telomere length. Telomeres are caps that exist on the ends of chromosomes, and shorten as we age. Longer telomeres (relative to average telomere length at a given age) are associated with good health. To learn more about telomeres, check out the video at the end of this post.
This study looked at the effect that the implementation of a loving kindness meditation routine had on telomere length.

Excerpts:

“Midlife adults (N = 142) were randomized to be in a waitlist control condition or to learn either MM (Mindfulness Meditation) or LKM (Loving Kindness Meditation) in a 6-week workshop. Telomere length was assessed 2 weeks before the start of the workshops and 3 weeks after their termination. After controlling for appropriate demographic covariates and baseline TL, we found TL decreased significantly in the MM group and the control group, but not in the LKM group. There was also significantly less TL attrition in the LKM group than the control group.”

Further notes:

As mentioned previously, telomeres shorten as we age. Telomere shortening is one of the drivers of biological aging. Therefore, the results of this study suggest that loving kindness meditation may help to slow the aging process. This is demonstrated by the fact that the telomeres of the loving kindness group showed less shortening after the experimental period than the telomeres of the control subjects.

More info on telomeres and telomere disorders:

Written by Sunday Newsletter