Sarah Berry, Stuff.co.nz: Meditation is many things, but it is not always relaxing.
It restores clarity, relieves stress, changes our brains for the better, encourages creativity and calms our nervous system.
But a new study has found that we experience elevated heart rates during certain types of meditation.
Participants in the study were asked to practise loving-kindness meditation, thought-observation meditation and a relaxing breathing meditation technique.
The neuroscience researchers found that heart rate and effort were higher during loving-kindness meditation and observing-thoughts meditations.
“In contrast to implicit beliefs that meditation is always relaxing and associated with low arousal, the current results show that …