mind and body

5 reasons why walking on grass is good for your health

There is a common belief that walking on grass in the morning and evening is a great for your health; especially for your eyes. Have you ever wondered why? Well, here are five reasons waking on grass can do a great deal of good for your mind and body.

Rejuvenates your senses and calms the mind: The entire environment in the morning – the fresh air, sunlight and peaceful atmosphere helps you in innumerable ways. Fresh oxygen helps your body work better, sunlight helps you keep warm, replenishes your vitamin D stores and the calm atmosphere helps relax your entire body and mind, allowing you to let go of all your stress. Apart from that the green colour of grass, helps stimulate your body to produce calming hormones that help you relax

Stimulates your entire body, including the eyes: Our feet are store houses of reflexology zones that correspond to various organs of our body. According to the principles of reflexology, stimulating these points can help relieve ailments of the particular organs and keep them in a general state of good health. The foot has points for the eyes, ears, lungs, nerves of the face, stomach, spleen, brain, kidneys and many more organs, so when we walk on grass, these areas are gently stimulated, helping your entire body stay healthy. Dr Anjali Sharma, senior consultant, Naturopathy, Sri Balaji action medical institute, Delhi says, ‘When we walk on grass we stimulate the nerve endings of the foot, where thousands of nerve endings converge. These nerve endings get gently yet directly stimulated by the grass, helping the body stay in a state of equilibrium.’

Another reason for this belief is that when we walk, we put maximum pressure on the first, second and third toe. The reflexology pressure points for the eyes are present on the second and third toes, which is why walking on grass has a large number of benefits for one’s eyes.

Connects you to the earth and neutralizes your electrical energies: Dr Anjali says, ‘In naturopathy we base our treatment on the five elements of nature, out of which one of the elements is earth. The earth contains magnetic fields and has a certain flow of energy. Therefore when we walk barefoot on grass, we directly get connected to the magnetic field of the earth, which affects the entire electrical and magnetic field of our body. This exchange of energies helps neutralize negative electrical impulses in our body which are known to cause certain ailments. Therefore, cleansing our bodies of negative electrical energies definitely has a positive effect on our overall health.’

Lets you soak in the sun: When we walk on grass early in the morning we give our bodies the precious gift of ‘sun energy’. Dr Anjali says that sun energy is a great source of healing energies and restorative powers. ‘Sun energy’ – as it is called in Naturopathy – is the source of life and energy. It helps disinfect the body, tones the muscles and nerves, supplies the entire body with energy and supplies the body with the all essential vitamin D.

Dr Anjali suggests that, ‘Walking in the sun is extremely important and beneficial and one gets the maximum benefit of the sun between 6:30 to 9 in the morning and between 4:30 or 5 to about 6:30 in the evening. That being said, one should be careful not to expose themselves to harsh sunlight that we commonly see in the afternoons, as this can be damaging to the body.’

Replenishes your vitamin D stores: In recent times, osteoarthritis and other bone related diseases have become common place. Doctors say that this is mainly due to the lack of exposure to the sun. Therefore when you walk in the open – early in the morning – the sun replenishes your vitamin D stores automatically, helping you keep bone and joint diseases at bay. If you are pregnant, this vitamin is all the more important for you

Source: the Health site

Thicker brain sections tied to spirituality: study

For people at high risk of depression because of a family history, spirituality may offer some protection for the brain, a new study hints.

Parts of the brain’s outer layer, the cortex, were thicker in high-risk study participants who said religion or spirituality was “important” to them versus those who cared less about religion.

“Our beliefs and our moods are reflected in our brain and with new imaging techniques we can begin to see this,” Myrna Weissman told Reuters Health. “The brain is an extraordinary organ. It not only controls, but is controlled by our moods.”

Weissman, who worked on the new study, is a professor of psychiatry and epidemiology at Columbia University and chief of the Clinical-Genetic Epidemiology department at New York State Psychiatric institute.

While the new study suggests a link between brain thickness and religiosity or spirituality, it cannot say that thicker brain regions cause people to be religious or spiritual, Weissman and her colleagues note in JAMA Psychiatry.

It might hint, however, that religiosity can enhance the brain’s resilience against depression in a very physical way, they write.

Previously, the researchers had found that people who said they were religious or spiritual were at lower risk of depression. They also found that people at higher risk for depression had thinning cortices, compared to those with lower depression risk.

The cerebral cortex is the brain’s outermost layer made of gray matter that forms the organ’s characteristic folds. Certain areas of the cortex are important hubs of neural activity for processes such as sensory perception, language and emotion.

For the new study, the researchers twice asked 103 adults between the ages of 18 and 54 how important religion or spirituality was to them and how often they attended religious services over a five-year period.

In addition to being asked about spirituality, the participants’ brains were imaged once to see how thick their cortices were.

All the participants were the children or grandchildren of people who participated in an earlier study about depression. Some had a family history of depression, so they were considered to be at high risk for the disorder. Others with no history served as a comparison group.

Overall, the researchers found that the importance of religion or spirituality to an individual – but not church attendance – was tied to having a thicker cortex. The link was strongest among those at high risk of depression.

“What we’re doing now is looking at the stability of it,” Weissman said.

Her team is taking more images of the participants’ brains to see whether the size of the cortex changes with their religiosity or spirituality.

“This is a way of replicating and validating the findings,” she said. “That work is in process now.”

Dr. Dan Blazer, the J.P. Gibbons Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, said the study is very interesting but is still exploratory.

“I think this tells us it’s an area to look at,” Blazer, who was not involved in the new study, said. “It’s an area of interest but we have to be careful.”

For example, he said there could be other areas of the brain linked to religion and spirituality. Also, spirituality may be a marker of something else, such as socioeconomic status.

Blazer added that it’s an exciting time, because researchers are actively looking at links between the brain, religion and risk of depression.

“We’ve seen this field move from a time when there were virtually no studies done at all,” he said.

Weissman said the mind and body are intimately connected.

“What this means therapeutically is hard to say,” she added.

Source: Reuters