Calm . . . and self-centred

WITH breathing exercises that help to tune out anxious thoughts, meditation has become popular for its stress-relieving and calming benefits.

But that same detachment also makes its advocates less generous by reducing feelings of guilt, according to University of Washington researchers.

More than 1,400 participants in a trial were asked to recall a time they had wronged someone and felt guilty, before being randomly assigned to meditate or not. They were then asked to split a hypothetical $100 between a birthday gift for the person they wronged, a charity for African flood victims and themselves. Participants who had meditated allocated on average 17 per cent less to the person they had wronged compared with those who had not.

‘Meditating can reduce feelings of guilt, thus limiting reactions like generosity,’ says Professor Andrew Hafenbrack,apsychologist at the university.

MORE than 60 per cent of endometriosis sufferers say it is not taken seriously. It can lead to intense pain in the stomach and back, as well as severe period pain, but is notoriously hard to spot. More than three-quarters of women who live with endometriosis, where tissue similar to the lining of the womb grows in other places, such as the ovaries, fallopian tubes and even the bowels, say their concerns were dismissed at least four times by a medic before they were finally diagnosed. According to Frendo, a support app that conducted the survey, almost one in ten sufferers sought advice more than ten times before the condition was spotted.

AMAZONIAN tribes have some of the lowest rates of dementia in the world, possibly thanks to their physically active lifestyle.

In indigenous people in one part of the rainforest in Bolivia, less than one per cent of the older population suffer from the degenerative brain disease, researchers from the University of Southern California have found.