How Meditation Benefits Your Mental and Physical Health
•Posted on January 13 2022
Why is meditation good for you?
A practice that is thousands of years old, meditation is becoming increasingly popular for its health benefits. We all lead busy lifestyles that often take over, giving us little time to relax. This continuous cycle damages both our mental and physical health but it’s been proven that meditation can overcome this and improve our well-being. Here, we’ve detailed the benefits of meditation for your mind and body.
Your mental health
Meditation is calming, not just when you’re practicing it but for the remainder of your day. It works by focusing your mind, helping to clear it of all the thoughts that build up and cause stress. When you have too much to do and too many things to worry about, your stress levels increase and this brings you down emotionally. By practicing meditation, you’ll quickly learn to control this and will notice a considerable improvement in how you feel and approach things. The following five benefits of meditation do wonders for your mental health.
- Reduce your stress levels
Stress triggers many negative side-effects, both mentally and physically. The levels of stress hormone in your body, called cortisol, increase when you’re stressed. A type of meditation called mindful meditation helps reduce the cortisol levels while others, such as transcendental meditation, help you feel calmer without the feeling of exhaustion that stress can cause.
- Get your anxiety under control
As your levels of stress are reduced, so are your feelings of anxiety. Various methods of meditation have been found to reduce anxiety in different ways, such as when you’re feeling under pressure at work, are suffering from depression, or have increased anxiety caused by chronic pain. Using meditation to train your mind, there’s less room for negative thoughts, which reduces your anxiety. In turn, your mood is lifted and you naturally combat some side effects of anxiety, such as a loss of appetite or a lack of sleep.
- Increase your self-esteem
One benefit of meditation is to increase your self-awareness. As you become aware of negative thoughts and what causes them, you learn how to control them. This ability increases your self-belief and gives you a more positive outlook. If you suffer from social anxiety, you’ll find that the boost to your self-esteem from practicing meditation will make you feel more inclined to interact with others and appreciate your own worth.
- Improve your concentration
By focusing your thoughts through meditation, you’ll find that your attention span increases, and your ability to concentrate improves. If you tend to think about other things than the task at hand, you’ll notice that meditation reduces this habit so you can fully concentrate on what you’re doing.
- Boost your productivity
Without the hindrance of stress and anxiety, and with the improved levels of concentration and self-esteem, your levels of productivity will naturally increase. You’ll be more focused on what needs doing and feel more motivated to accomplish tasks.
Your physical health
Meditation also helps you manage physical issues. Many of these are caused by stress and anxiety, such as high blood pressure, tension headaches, and sleep disorders. Use meditation to benefit your physical health in the following ways:
- Improve your sleep
Meditation calms your mind, reducing worrying thoughts and the tendency for your mind to race. In so doing, your body relaxes and you’ll drift off to sleep easily. When you sleep, it will be deep rather than fitful.
- Lower your blood pressure
One of the physical benefits of meditation is the reduction of high blood pressure. High blood pressure can lead to various health problems but meditation is an effective way of getting this under control and actively reducing it.
- Reduce memory loss
By focusing your mind on meditation and learning to think with clarity while having increased concentration, you’re training your mind. In so doing, meditation can increase your mental agility and combat memory loss that you may otherwise experience with age.
- Combat addictions
Training your mind through meditation is also a way to fight against addictions. As your mental discipline improves, you not only become aware of the triggers for addiction but learn how to apply some self-control. This can help you curb the desire to overeat and combat cravings for drugs and alcohol.
- Cope with pain
When you suffer from chronic pain, meditation can help you to control it. The level of pain you experience can be exacerbated by stress. As you meditate and calm your mind, you reduce your stress levels. This, in turn, reduces the amount of pain you feel and helps you to cope with it better.
*Always consult your doctor for health related issues. Suicide Prevention hotline 1-800-273-8255