Can meditation help prevent the effects of aging?

In 2009, Elizabeth Blackburn won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering telomerase, a protein crucial to aging and age-related diseases. Her research took a transformative turn after meeting psychiatrist Elissa Epel, who explored how chronic stress affects the body. Their unlikely collaboration led to a groundbreaking insight: stress doesn’t just harm our health—it accelerates cellular aging. A 2004 study revealed that stress can accelerate cellular aging by shortening telomeres, the protective caps on our DNA. Remarkably, one of the most promising ways to slow this process—or even reverse it—is through meditation.  “Ten years ago, if you’d told me that I would be seriously thinking about meditation, I would have said one of us is loco,” Elizabeth Backburn told the New York Times in 2007. But still “People are very uncomfortable with the concept of meditation” (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140701-can-meditation-delay-ageing)

In 2025, researchers at Mount Sinai used intracranial EEG (Electroencephalogram) recordings to observe how meditation affects deep brain regions like the amygdala and hippocampus, which are tied to emotional regulation and memory. Even first-time meditators showed measurable changes during a 10-minute loving-kindness session (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409423122).