Managing stress with meditation

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Melissa Shattuck recently was stranded for three days at an airport while on her way back home from a workshop in Puerto Rico with the Chopra Center.

Instead of becoming overly worried and stressed, Shattuck took the setback in stride. A friend remarked to her how calm Shattuck was during the event.

Shattuck credits her meditation practice for helping her keep anxiety and stress in check. Shattuck, co-owner of a yoga center, started meditating about 41/2 years ago after an experience at the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, Calif.

She started meditating to deal with stress.

“This was the most life-changing thing for me in dealing with depression and anxiety,” Shattuck says.

She is a certified meditation instructor with the Chopra Center, started by teacher and author Deepak Chopra and David Simon. She also teaches Ayurveda and yoga.

During her regular practice, Shattuck meditates twice a day for 20 to 30 minutes. She notices the effects when she doesn’t meditate.

“I would say there’s so many subtle benefits of meditation. ... I noticed out of the blue I would respond to a situation in a different way,” she says.

A team of researchers led by Massachusetts General Hospital found that people who meditated for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks had measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy and stress. Their findings appeared in a recent issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging.

The study’s senior author, Sara Lazar of the hospital’s Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program, says the study explains why people who meditate feel better, according to the website ScienceDaily.

“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” Lazar says.

Gannett News Service