Meditation may lower anxiety, boost heart health

WASHINGTON: Just a single session of meditation can alleviate anxiety and boost heart health, a study has found.

Researchers from Michigan Technological University in the US found that that 60 minutes after meditating the 14 study participants showed lower resting heart rates and reduction in aortic pulsatile load - the amount of change in blood pressure between diastole and systole of each heartbeat multiplied by heart rate.

Additionally, shortly after meditating, and even one week later, the group reported anxiety levels were lower than premeditation levels.

It sounds like a late-night commercial: In just one hour you can reduce your anxiety levels and some heart health risk factors. But a recent study with 14 participants shows preliminary data that even a single session of meditation can have cardiovascular and psychological benefits for adults with mild to moderate anxiety.

"Even a single hour of meditation appears to reduce anxiety and some of the markers for cardiovascular risk," said John Durocher, assistant professor at Michigan Technological University.

While it's well-documented that meditation over the course of several weeks reduces anxiety, there have been few comprehensive research studies on the benefits of a single meditation session. Researchers wanted to understand the effect of acute mindfulness on cognition and the cardiovascular system to improve how antianxiety therapies and interventions are designed.

They designed the mindfulness study to include three sessions. First, in an orientation session researchers measured anxiety and conducted cardiovascular testing by measuring heart rate variability, resting blood pressure and pulse wave analysis; then there was meditation session that included repetition of the cardiovascular testing plus the mindfulness meditation - 20 minutes introductory meditation, 30 minutes body scan and 10 minutes selfguided meditation - as well as repeating cardiovascular measurements immediately following meditation and 60 minutes after. This was followed by a post-meditation anxiety test a week later. During a body scan, the participant is asked to focus intensely on one part of the body at a time, beginning with the toes. By focusing on individual parts of the body, a person can train his or her mind to pivot from detailed attention to a wider awareness from one moment to the next.

"The point of a body scan is that if you can focus on one single part of your body, just your big toe, it can make it much easier for you to deal with something stressful in your life. You can learn to focus on one part of it rather than stressing about everything else in your life," said Hannah Marti, a Michigan Tech graduate. SEOUL: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's promise to build "socialist economic construction" in his nuclear-armed but impoverished and isolated country could herald more Chinese-style economic reforms, according to analysts –but he will never explicitly say so.

Alongside the declaration Saturday that the North had completed the development of its nuclear arsenal and no more atomic or missile tests were needed, Kim proclaimed that the "new strategic line" for the ruling Workers' Party would be "socialist economic construction".

The three words appeared a total of 56 times in the report by the official KCNA news agency on Kim's speech and the subsequent party decision. It has a long way to go. For a time after the Korean War the North was wealthier than the South, benefitting from a Japanese colonial decision to concentrate industrialisation there as it had more mineral resources and more hydroelectric power potential than the largely agricultural southern end of the peninsula.

But that situation reversed as the North –long considered one of the most state-controlled economies in the world –suffered from decades of economic mismanagement, worsened when the demise of the Soviet Union ended the financial support that had helped to plug the gaps.

Average incomes were less than one-twentieth of those in the South in 2016, according to the most recent statistics available from Seoul –Pyongyang itself does not publish figures even for GDP growth.

The situation has been improving as Pyongyang quietly allows the market to play a greater role in its economy under Kim.

It recorded its fastest expansion in 17 years in 2016, according to the Bank of Korea, the South's central bank – although that is threatened by recent UN Security Council sanctions imposed on sectors such as coal, fish and textiles over its weapons programmes.

Kim intends to pursue "essentially the Chinese-style economic programme he is busily implementing", said Andrei Lankov of Korea Risk Group.

"Economic reforms which are not going to be called economic reforms." In neighbouring China and nearby Vietnam, Kim has two examples of Communist parties that have embraced capitalism without threatening the rule of the oneparty state –even reinforcing their positions by delivering increasing prosperity.

Deng Xiaoping's "Reform and Opening" in the 1980s started a decades-long economic boom that propelled China from a lumbering backwater to the world's secondlargest economy and a crucial driver of global growth.

Beijing calls it "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", and officials have long pressed Pyongyang to follow its example.

In public, Kim is having none of it. At the Workers' Party congress in 2016 –the first such meeting for 36 years – he pointedly decried "the filthy wind of bourgeois liberty and 'reform' and 'openness' blowing in our neighbourhood".

But in practice he has brought in changes.