The Benefits of Meditation

Meditation is the habitual process of training the mind to screen out distractions and focus on your thoughts. Meditation can be performed anywhere to help bring inner peace and enhance your day to day life.

How does meditation help people?

It’s easy to get caught up in the whirl of our busy lives. Constant activity – whether your mind or body – leads to losing your connection to self. This leaves people feeling discombobulated and stressed out.

Meditation allows you to step out of the chaos of everyday life to still the mind and allow you to notice what’s really going on.

There are several different ways to meditate so you can chose one that suits you. It only takes a few minutes a day to start noticing the benefits.

10 Benefits of Meditation

A simple way to instantly reduce stress and bring inner peace. Here are the top ten benefits of practising meditation.

1. Increases Success at Work:

With so many things vying for your attention these days it can be easy to get distracted, lose focus, and struggle to prioritise your workload when you have jumbled thoughts crowding your mind.

Meditation improves concentration. It helps you to focus on the present so that you are better able to complete the task at hand. With dedicated practice this helps increase your attention span and self-discipline to enhance learning, boost productivity, and achieve success in the workplace.

2. Increase Self Awareness:

Historically, meditation was used to help deepen the understanding of sacred and mystical forces. For our practical present day purposes, it can help increase self-awareness leading to more self-efficacy.

Most of us are so busy in our day to day lives we don’t know what’s really going on. Taking time to meditate allows you to examine your thoughts without judgement and observe emotions as they arise.

Cultivating self-awareness through meditation allows you to not only understand yourself better but also challenges your assumptions and lazy thinking. This improves your relationships with others by allowing you to gain other perspectives..

3 Reduce Stress response:

Meditation helps to manage stress on a physiological level. When you still the mind and breath deeper it send a signal to your autonomic nervous system to slow your heart rate, reduce your blood pressure and lower the stress hormone cortisol. This helps to make you feel relaxed and overtime helps to reduce inflammation and disease.

4 Manage Emotions:

Meditation is a powerful way to boost mental health. It can reduce anxiety and help people with depression gain a more positive outlook.

Meditation helps to break the vicious cycle of unhealthy thought patterns that lead to negative emotions by concentrating on the present moment and seeing thoughts for what they are – just products of the mind. This frees you up from being at the mercy of your emotions.

5 Deal with addiction:

Meditation can be beneficial to use as a complement to other treatments in order to break free of substance dependencies. The self-awareness that comes from meditating helps increase self-control to manage impulses, avoid triggers and even reduce cravings.

6 Enhance physical well-being:

When you meditate it triggers the autonomic nervous system which reduces the stress response to lower stress hormones. This reduces systemic inflammation, lowers blood pressure, slows heart rate, and improves circulation. The physical benefits will help to avoid stress related health problems such as heart disease. It may even help manage pain in chronic conditions.

7 Manage symptoms of medical conditions:

Meditation can be a great complementary therapeutic treatment particularly for conditions which are exacerbated by stress. These include anxiety, asthma, cancer, chronic pain, fibromyalgia, depression, heart disease, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, and insomnia.

8 Increase creativity:

Meditation gives you a sense of peace and calm. This is not just effective for dealing with stress but can also help you to become more creative in your thinking so you can come up with effective solutions to problems.

Openness is linked to success at work and when your mind is free from the riddling anxiety caused by overthinking it has the freedom to come up with brilliant ideas and solutions whether it’s an ingenious way to fix something or creating a vision for a better future.

9 Deal with age related memory loss:

Studies on people who regularly meditate show that there is an increased amount of grey matter in mediators compared to non-mediators. More grey matter is linked to more connections in the brain.This shows that meditation may preserve the ageing brain as well as helping to keep you young at heart.

10 Become a kinder person

When you meditate you gain greater awareness of yourself and of your place in the greater scheme of things. This helps you appreciate more the struggles that each of us have as part of the human condition. This improves empathy, increases tolerance and helps you to grow kinder and more understanding.

Types of meditation

Guided meditation

This is a form that uses different techniques to get into the meditative state. It may be done under the guidance of a teacher or practitioner or a simple visualisation, where you form mental images you find relaxing. You can also use music to get into the meditative state.

Mantra

This is when you repeat a calming word or phrase to prevent distracting thoughts.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness involves increasing your awareness of the present moment to calm the mind. This is done by focusing attention on the breath, sensations in your body, or observing your thoughts and bringing your mind back to your focus when your mind starts to wander.

Other practices like Qi Gong, yoga and Tai Chi can also help with building your awareness to your body and breath.

What you need for meditation

The beauty of meditation is that you don’t need any special equipment - just set aside time and space and you can do it anywhere.

If you like you can use a special cushion or blanket. You might even want to set aside a space in your home. You can add plants, crystals, aromatherapy candles or anything else to set the mood - but you don’t have to.

Meditation can be easily learned. There may be classes in your local community and if not there are online classes where you can learn how to meditate. You can even start by using a book or an app like Headspace or Insight Timer.

The important thing is that you make time for meditation. Even a few minutes a day can make a difference.

How to use meditation to improve your life

When you start to meditate find a quiet setting. It’s best to be in a comfortable position. A very simple way to meditate is to focus you attention on the breath.

Bringing an open attitude to your practice will help you let go of doing it right. The truth is it isn’t always easy to focus your attention – even if you are a practiced meditator. Stay open and curious to what comes up without judgement.

Find the best way for you. It helps if you enjoy it because that makes it easier for you to integrate it into your daily routine. Early morning is a good time for meditation as the mind is less full of the day’s events and you can carry the benefits of your practice throughout the day.

Other meditative practices include prayer, reading from sacred or spiritual texts and reflecting on the wisdom, walking meditation, focusing on the breath, or even focusing on positive emotions like love and gratitude.

Meditation for children

Educators are becoming more and more aware of the benefits of meditation and some are keen to bring those into the classroom.

Short meditation breaks can help kids in school concentrate more effectively on their work. As meditation helps improve attention span it can help focus scattered minds and improve learning. Children face many stressful situations these days in our frenetic world. Meditation can help especially to reduce stress and anxiety.

As meditation has been shown to improve connectivity in the brain it could have a huge positive impact on developing brains to support healthy happy kids.

Conclusion

In the modern world you are constantly bombarded with distractions vying for your attention. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and powerless.

Meditation is an antidote to this as it screens out the external, brings focus inward to draw on your innate strengths to improve emotional, physical and mental wellbeing so you are able to live your best life.

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