Meditation is often seen as synonymous with stress relief, and a major benefit of meditation is its influence on your fight/flight syndrome. This is your stress response, shaped to equip you to escape from a tight situation fast, or to deal with an adversary by fighting them off. This serves you well if the danger is relatively short-lived, but problems occur if your stress response continues for any length of time.

It’s easy to go through life with your fight/flight response permanently switched on. Cortisol, your stress hormone, triggers the physiological changes needed to deal with stress, but it also encourages the release of inflammatory chemicals, causing many of the adverse physical effects of long-term stress. Regular meditation decreases cortisol levels.

Meditation involves paying attention to your breath. Sleeping babies breathe deeply into their bellies, but many adults have developed the habit of constantly taking small, shallow breaths, using only the upper chest. This is how you would naturally breathe if you were faced with a stressful situation. Simply by breathing in this way your brain is told something is stressing you out, even if it isn’t. The reverse is also true – breathe deeply into your belly as you would in a relaxing situation and you can fool your brain into believing there’s nothing to be stressed about, sending a message to switch off your fight/flight response.

Not surprisingly, meditation can reduce the symptoms of stress-related conditions like IBS, high blood pressure, psoriasis, heart attack and stroke, and even seems to slow the ageing process.

But meditation is much more than simply relaxation, its benefits stretching far beyond stress relief.