We are living in a fast-paced world. Everywhere we look, there’s people waking up in a rush and jumping in the shower. People who barely have breakfast because they’re on the go. People who spend a great deal of their days commuting. With all this stress, it’s crucial to find personal time for you and give your body, and more importantly your mind, a break. The most effective way to bring your mental and emotional state back to optimal is meditation. Keep reading to find how practicing meditation even a couple times a week can change your life for the better.
Relieves Stress and Controls Anxiety
Stress reduction and anxiety management is the #1 reason why people turn to meditation. There’s something soothing about reaching those theta brain waves that can instantly help you relax, even helping you control your breathing and tone down any negative thoughts or fear. Meditation benefits people who suffer from social anxiety, phobias, or panic attacks. A couple of minutes of meditation before you start your day, before you go to bed, or even during your midday break at work can restore your balance and get rid of worries. It fills you with energy and self-confidence to move on with your day.
Decreases Blood Pressure
One of the most surprising benefits of frequent meditation is it can control your blood pressure by deeply relaxing the nerve signals that are in charge of coordinating heart function, the tension in blood vessels, and the response that increases alertness and pressure spikes in stressful situations. As you might know, high blood pressure can make it harder for your heart to pump blood, eventually leading to poor heart function. A high blood pressure also increases your odds of suffering heart attacks and strokes. If you have high blood pressure you might want to try practicing meditation through a silent mantra, which is a repeated, non-vocalized word.
Helps Control Chronic Pain
It’s a known fact for scientists that pain can be perceived differently by people according to their state of mind. When someone is under a lot of stress or fear, for example, they might perceive pain as ten times worse than they would under different circumstances. Meditation naturally activates the brain centers that control pain, making them less sensitive to chronic pain over time. If you’ve gone through an accident or a serious injury and you want a natural way to ease the pain and promote healing, start meditating daily. Even people who suffer from chronic pain can mitigate this feeling with meditation therapy.
Improves Sleep
Insomnia so common that it affects half of the population at some point in their lives. Stress and anxiety are closely related to our quality of sleep and, sadly, some people have tried all sorts of approaches but just can’t get a good night’s sleep. Meditation is a very effective remedy against sleep disorders because it eases thoughts and calms your nerves, thus helping you set healthy sleep-wake cycles. Since insomnia becomes a stress cycle, doing a short meditation before going to bed can do wonders for your sleep. Make sure to dim the lights, put on some relaxing music, and leave all electronics outside the bedroom.
Increases Your Attention
Most people incorrectly think that meditation only equates to better sleep but it can also help you “work out” certain areas of the brain. This is known as focused-attention meditation and it has effects such as better focus at performing single tasks, better short- term memory, and can reverse brain patterns that lead to mind-wandering and poor attention spans. Even a couple of days of meditation for 10 minutes can help increase your attention span. It’s like taking your brain to the gym.
Enhances Self-Awareness
In modern and classic types of therapy, more experts are turning to meditation as a tool to help their patients get to know themselves. Meditation not only makes you self-aware by getting to know “the inner you”, it can also help you detangle relationships you have with certain people, recognize toxic patterns for you and those who around you, and ultimately make you grow as an individual. Meditation is a very powerful experience where you get up close with your problems and your fears, or even with your happiest moments to cling to them through hard times and move on with your life.
Improves Age-Related Memory Loss
When people start to grow old it’s only natural that some physical and mental abilities start to deteriorate. One of the most frustrating is memory loss. There is a meditation method called Kirtan Kriya that consists of a combination of mantras and a repetitive motion of the fingers to focus your thoughts. If you practice this type of meditation a few times a week, you could find great improvement with memory-related tasks and allay age related memory loss. Mental quickness is a sign of a young mind so, to live longer and healthier, turn to meditation!
Fights Addictions
Meditation is, after all, a discipline. It requires people to commit to the practice and be persistent in their sessions. This type of discipline can help you break different types of dependencies by increasing your self-awareness and control over the triggers that link to your addictive behaviors. Meditation is great at providing you with the willpower and control you need to control impulses and urges. Both of which are things that relate to addictive behaviors. Remember that an addiction can be anything from pharmaceuticals and alcohol, to food, or even a bad relationship.
Meditation could be the secret to make your life better. The best thing about meditation is that it is completely free and you can do it anywhere you want at any time. So start giving in to the goodness of meditation and watch your health and relationships improve.
