Millions, if not billions of people around the world practice meditation. Maybe you are not entirely sure what it involves or how it could benefit your life. Here are 10 mental and physical benefits of meditation that could enrich your life.
What is Meditation?
Meditation is a technique used for relaxation and becoming present in the moment. This is achieved through breathing exercises, repeating a mantra, going to classes, listening to guided meditations, or simply going for a walk or touching objects in your milieu. There is no wrong method of doing it because meditation is a personal experience.
There are various different forms of meditation. You can even meditate through workout. For instance, when you are lifting weights and completely focus on your breathing and contraction of muscle, it is a type of meditation. You can try different techniques to see which style works the best for you.
10 Mental and Physical benefits of meditation
Physical Health Benefits of Meditation
1. Stress relief
Meditation can have an immense effect on your stress levels. In fact, meditation has been scientifically proven to bring down stress levels.
2. Keeping High Blood Pressure at Bay
Blood pressure is often linked with high levels of stress. Because meditation is effective for reducing stress, it has a direct impact on your blood pressure levels, right? If you stress less, you don’t raise your blood pressure levels unnecessarily.
Numerous studies have revealed that practicing transcendental medication can assist with reducing blood pressure in those who are at risk of developing high blood pressure as well as those who have a pre-existing condition.
3. Beneficial For the Immune System
Your immune system is an essential part of your body, almost like a second brain. Your immune system assesses to an extent if you get seasonal flu, cancer, or other health conditions. One of the primary health benefits of meditation is that it helps keep your immune system functioning efficiently.
4. Helping You Getting a Good Night’s Rest
Apart from the calming impact of sitting down to clear your mind, meditation is also useful in your battle against insomnia. It could help with improving your sleep patterns.
5. Helping You With Staying Focused and Being More Productive
If you allocate at least twenty minutes of your day to sit down and meditate, it could have a massive effect on your ability to stay focused and stay productive at work. Meditation has been shown to help with controlling brain waves referred to as alpha rhythms.
These brain waves help you to subdue disrupting sensory information, subsequently resulting in an improved ability to stay focused. The more focused you remain, the more productive you are, and the less stressed you will feel.
Mental Benefits of Meditation
1. Calming Your Nervous system
Meditation is an effective way to calm your nerves through triggering your parasympathetic (rest and digestive) system, reducing blood pressure, slowing down your breathing, and teaching your body how to activate natural relaxation responses. All these factors play an essential role in lowering stress levels and calming your nerves.
2. Anger Management
We all have feelings of frustration and anger at times and wish that we have an effective method for calming down. But when you are in a worked up state it can be difficult to break the pattern.
When you meditate on a daily basis it could help to prevent getting into that state in the first place. Since anger often sprouts from stress built up which could result in an explosion of emotions over something entirely unrelated to the underlying issue.
Through meditation you can lower stress in general, calm yourself and avoid frustration to build up. During times of acute anger due to an unexpected event, meditation can assist you with focusing your breathing and getting through the situation without feeling like you are losing your insanity.
3. Assist With Combatting Depression and Anxiety
Many people have benefited from meditation to help them through depression and anxiety which made a huge difference to their lives. Anxiety is most commonly the result of anticipation over future events or depression about things that happened to them in their past. Both conditions also originate from neurological imbalances too.
Daily meditation can assist with drastically reducing the amount of depression and anxiety that you feel because of your thought processes. It can also be useful in helping with neurological imbalances by lowering stress levels and as a result, your neurological stress reaction. Therefore, allowing yourself to relax and mend these imbalances.
4. It Can Assist With Clearing Your Thoughts
Have you ever had those days where it feels impossible to think straight? And you are feeling quite overwhelmed because of it. It is almost like you have lost your groove and struggle to feel your old self again.
Meditation that involves deep breathing and focusing can help with clearing your thought process. By boosting oxygen to your brain, taking time to emphasize on the moment, and calming your nerves, you will start noticing that you are thinking more clearly and avoid rushing through decisions.
5. It Can Help With Building Discipline
After a while meditation will become such a part of your life that you wouldn’t want to miss out on it. This might not be the case from the start. But once you’ve started and have begun and have not yet experienced the calming effect of meditation, it may feel like a chore.
But willing yourself to get out of bed every morning and meditate before starting the day, or forcing yourself to meditate before bedtime, you are building discipline. Discipline involves numerous other areas of one’s life and results in many other positive habits. If you stick to your meditation regime, you will also start reaping the mental and physical benefits of meditation that we have already mentioned above.
Conclusion
Hopefully, through this post, you have learned about all the useful mental and physical benefits of meditation that can be an incredibly essential practice to incorporate into your life.
There are many YouTube videos that can teach you different meditation techniques to help you get started. No matter which form of meditation you choose, I hope that you will find that it has a positive effect on your life and has changed it for the good.
Have you been benefiting from meditation and did it have a positive effect on your life? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Sending you lots of light, inner peace, and calmness.
Anthea
I like that you pointed out how meditation could have a big effect on a person’s stress levels. My stress level is usually very high, so I want to find a new way of coping with stress. This time, I should probably look into a beginners guide to meditation.