I always thought of medition like conditioning your brain to tune out all the floods of information from outside of you, be completely in the moment, and allow the mind to be awake without processing a bunch of stuff. Kind of like when you have too many programs open on your computer. You need to shut the programs down and just “be” for a few minutes so your mind can catch up with the background tasks like breathing, digesting, etc.
For example with physical excercise, you don’t do it because you need to right now, you do it all the time, so when you need your body to work, it will be in good condition.
So if you actually learn about meditation and practice it until you have some amount of skill, it will be there for you when you need it. I suppose that it excercises your executive function, because you have to make a conscious effort to shut down all the things you are thinking about and keep them out for a short period of time. I’ve always sucked at it – can’t maintain a quiet mind for very long. But, when I start putting in the time to challenge myself, and increase the amounts of time I can stay “uncluttered,” I feel like it reaps rewards.
I feel it helps me to carry less stress, be less impulsive, less worrisome, more loving, more grateful. It’s another one of those tools I never remember to work on – haha 