Meditation Heart Beat and Longevity

Meditation, heartbeat and longevity 

By Tesha Jie, Reviewed by the cardiologist Dr. Michael D. Becker

The heart starts beating before you were born and it beats at an average rate of 80 times a minute, about 115,000 times in one day or 42 million times in a year. During an average lifetime, the human heart will beat more than 3 billion times -- pumping an amount of blood that equals about 1 million barrels. It is one of the most important organs, if not the most important in a human body, yet it is also just a pump, right? Doctors can replace your heart temporarily by a mechanical pump during an operation, or you can also have an organ transplant. They also seem to have already made hearts with stem cells technology, but rarely does it work as well as the undamaged original! …For it to work as well as the original, it has to be the original… I hope in real life, it’d never get to the scenario as in the film -«The Island », where they clone fully functional human beings, then kill them to extract organs… Ok, guess we all agree before we seek how to replace a heart, maybe the best thing to do is to better conserve the one we have! Actually the slower your resting rate is, the longer you live. Certain aspects of someone’s resting heart rate are directly connected to uncontrollable factors, such as age and genetics, but we can slow down a given individual resting heart rate by exercising, eating fish oil, meditation and generally de-stressing.

 

Danish researchers gave physical exams to 5,249 healthy middle-aged and elderly men beginning in 1971. In 1985 and 1986, they tracked survivors, of whom there were 3,354. Of these, 2,798 had sufficient data on heart rate and oxygen consumption for the analysis.

Researchers followed them through 2011. After controlling for physical fitness and many other health and behavioral factors, they found that the higher the resting heart rate, the greater the risk for death. Compared with men with rates of 50 beats a minute or less, those at 71 to 80 beats had a 51 percent greater risk. At 81 to 90 beats, the rate of death was doubled, and over 90 it was tripled. “If you have two healthy people,” said the lead author, Dr. Magnus Thorsten Jensen, a researcher at Copenhagen University Hospital Gentofte, “exactly the same in physical fitness, age, blood pressure and so on, the person with the higher resting heart rate is more likely to have a shorter life span.”

 

Sport can slow down the resting heart rate: Exercise is great for securing a normal resting heart rate. When you work out, you train your heart to be stronger and more efficient at pumping blood. Then, when you’re in rest mode, your heart is more easily able to maintain a normal heart rate.

Eating fish oil: incorporating more fish has been associated with lower resting heart rates, according to a study from the American Heart Association. Or you can take fish oil supplements, which may have positive effects on heart rate as well.

 

Meditation is a de-stressing method for the mind, and not only can it slow down brain waves, it also slows your heart rate. With the creative meditation that I’m suggesting, it’s less boring. For more meditation tips and articles, please read my blog section on meditation. Besides meditation, we can try to generally de-stress, the stretch and breathing exercises that I showed in my pre-meditation videos and articles.