Meditation practices offer a promising method for studying how mental states influence physical health, particularly immune function, cardiovascular health, and pain perception. This review describes how meditation may work by enhancing emotion regulation, self-regulation, or repeatedly inducing specific mental states like love or meta-cognitive awareness. The field needs large randomized controlled trials with active control groups and dual-blind designs to test whether changes in cognitive and affective processes from meditation directly cause improvements in physical health. Meditation is a potentially powerful tool for understanding mind-body interactions.
Mindfulness meditation and Buddhist-informed contemplative practices improve health and well-being partly by helping practitioners adopt a less immersed perspective on present-moment reality. These practices build meta-awareness and psychological distance from mental activity, reducing negative emotions and craving while increasing mental flexibility. The dual-system model contrasts cool, analytic processes with emotional, hot system processes; contemplative practices facilitate adaptive coping by reducing hot and promoting cool system activation. Buddhist philosophies emphasizing present-moment awareness, the futility of self-focused striving, and the self-perpetuating nature of negative emotions explain how these practices shift activation from hot to cool systems over time.