Meditation makes me sick: Meditation and sensitivity to parasympathetic nervous system stimulation
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Meditation stimulates parasympathetic nervous system and leads to relaxed states. We hypothesize sensitive individuals with extreme response to parasympathetic nervous system stimulation will feel sick and nauseous during meditation. The objective of this study is to monitor individuals during exercising meditation breathing technique and determinate the causes of extreme physiological response connected to autonomous nervous system activity. We hypothesize meditation slows down a heart rate, decreases variability of a heart rate, decreases turbulence of heart rate and deceleration capacity. We assume that susceptible individuals will respond to meditation by strong irritation of the parasympathetic system and thus increase neurovegetative response – change of blood pressure and heart rate profile. The key is a continual monitoring of basic physiological functions of participants during baseline and meditation as a body surface temperature, arterial blood pressure, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation and heart activity (EKG) accompanied by nausea questionnaire. The poster will shed light on a fairly unexplored relation between meditation and sickness feelings as an effect of autonomic nervous system stimulation in sensitive individuals. |
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