The amygdala is the part of your brain that fires up when you’re stressed. It can make you behave irrationally in stressful situations.

The amygdala changes if you’re stressed for an ongoing period of time. In this photo you can see what happened to subjects amygdala after an 8 week meditation course.

Sourced from a Boston University study.

In 2012, Desbordes a neuroscience student demonstrated that changes in brain activity in subjects who have learned to meditate hold steady even when they’re not meditating. Desbordes took before-and-after scans of subjects who learned to meditate over the course of two months. She scanned them not while they were meditating, but while they were performing everyday tasks. The scans still detected changes in the subjects’ brain activation patterns from the beginning to the end of the study, the first time such a change — in a part of the brain called the amygdala — had been detected.