What Are the Benefits of Meditation?

Even in the hectic modern world, the ancient practice of meditation still holds many benefits. Meditation comes in many forms, including guided meditation, mantra meditation, contemplative meditation, yoga, and countless others. Whether you’re looking to reduce stress, increase your self awareness, or just get a good night’s sleep, practicing regular meditation can help keep you happy and healthy. Here’s why you should give it a try.

Stress Reduction

Stress isn’t just a negative emotion, it can trigger serious issues with your physical health. Chronic stress can lead to health problems such as weight gain, high blood pressure, muscle tension, and reduced immune system response. Stress is triggered by the body’s response to perceived threats, which while sometimes helpful in the short term can be a big problem if you never get the chance to relax. Adrenalin, cortisol, and other fight-or-flight hormones and chemicals are released into the body when someone is under acute stress. These can also trigger inflammation when the body is exposed to them long term, causing even more physical health problems. Meditation can help get this natural response to danger back under control by focusing the mind and relaxing the body. With regular practice, meditation can help you become less reactive to stressful situations.

Mood Regulation

Meditation can help regulate your moods. Anxiety, depression, and anger can all become easier to process with regular meditation. Meditation promotes mindfulness, which makes it easier to step back from feeling emotions to examine them objectively. Even a short meditation session can offer an interruption that can help prevent negative emotions from spiraling into even worse moods. By keeping emotions in check, meditation can help prevent you from taking out your emotions on yourself or others.

Improving Sleep

Meditating before bed can help promote deep and restful sleep. This works on both a mental and physical level by reducing stress, slowing breathing, and reducing heart rates. Meditation may stimulate the natural production of melatonin, a hormone that helps promote good sleep. Racing thoughts and worries often keep people awake in bed, so by meditating and quieting the mind before bed, it can be easier to fall asleep.

Lower Blood Pressure

Several modern scientific studies suggest that one of the beneficial physiological responses that meditation can trigger is lowering blood pressure. When combined with a healthy diet and lifestyle, meditation can help reduce blood pressure induced by emotions like stress. One of the suggestions for how this works is that the relaxation experienced during meditation promotes the production of nitric oxide, a naturally occurring chemical that widens blood vessels.

Increased Self Awareness

Regular meditation can make it easier for you to observe your thoughts from the outside, rather than being easily controlled by passing thoughts. The mindfulness promoted by regular meditation encourages people to examine their own thoughts and emotions in a non-judgmental and objective way. This meditation can help you control passing impulses and feelings. With practice, this can help you redirect harmful or negative thoughts. Building this skill with regular meditation can help promote inner peace and make it easier to live in the moment.

Increased Focus

Meditation may help increase focus and attention span by reducing stress and distracting thoughts. Practicing meditation can make it easier to clear your mind and not be distracted by daydreams, making it easier to focus on tasks for longer periods of time. Once you’re used to directing and focusing your thoughts while practicing meditation, it becomes a simpler to apply it to work, study, and other jobs that tend to make the mind wander. In a world filled with distractions and instant notifications, being able to dismiss distractions can be a huge benefit.

Boost Memory

With regular practice, meditating may help improve memory. Daily stress causes the body to release cortisol, a hormone which can have negative effects on the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for forming and retrieving memories. Long term exposure to high levels of cortisol can even cause the hippocampus to shrink, accelerating memory loss. Meditation makes the body and mind relax, which can reduce the stress that causes cortisol to be produced. In addition to relaxing, meditation can also help you practice controlling your own thoughts in an objective way, which can make it easier to dismiss distractions that can make it hard to remember things.

How To Get Started Meditating

Meditating comes in many forms to fit every lifestyle, but there are some common traits that many of the most popular forms of meditation share. You can practice theses to start gaining the benefits of meditation while you try out and learn which kind is best for you.

1. Find a comfortable seat in a quiet place - Once you have experience, you can meditate anywhere, but beginners may find it easier in a calm and peaceful location. While seated, keep you posture good and make sure to not slouch.

2. Set a timer - 5 or 10 minutes are popular time frames for beginners and are long enough to start enjoying the benefits of meditation.

3. Close your eyes and focus all your thoughts on your breathing - Take deep breaths, and if you get distracted redirect your mind to only thinking about breathing.

Once you have some practice in this simple form of meditation, you’ll find it easier to perform more complicated types, such as guided meditation, yoga, or focused meditation. If you don’t like to meditate alone, many places offer group sessions, especially for the more kinetic forms of meditation, such as tai-chi or yoga. There are also phone apps that can help guide you in meditations once you move beyond focusing on only breathing. Some find that peaceful music or white noise helps enhance meditation, while others find it distracting. However you choose to meditate, the most important point is to practice regularly so that you can achieve the full benefits of meditation. Meditating can feel awkward or uncomfortable when you first start, but if you stick with it, you can increase your health and happiness at the low cost of just a little time per day.