Meditation is a healthy habit that includes training your mind to focus and redirect thoughts. The popularity of this practice has significantly increased since more and more people have discovered its health benefits. There are dozens of studies that have proved the benefits of regular meditation. It can raise your awareness of both yourself and your surroundings and it is proven that it can reduce stress and improve concentration. Besides these two, there are many other health benefits of meditation, so let’s dive in.
Increases Focus
By practicing mindfulness and meditation, you are helping your brain focus on the present. This further improves your concentration on other daily tasks you have. One study from 2011 from the Harvard Medical School examined the effects of this type of meditation on the brain. They have found that there is a connection between mindfulness and processing new information. By doing brain scans, they have seen an increase in gray matter in the brain which is responsible for learning, emotional regulation, and memory.
Reduces Stress
It is known that meditation can reduce stress, and there is scientific proof behind that. When we endure physical or mental health, our body increases the production of cortisol (stress hormone) which can further damage our health. With meditation, researchers have found that it can reduce stress hormone production and helps people feel more relaxed. What’s more, repeating mantras during meditation can have a calming effect since it helps you shift focus away from stressful and distracting thoughts.
Additionally, people like using various crystals, harmonizers, or other stones used in meditation to help shift focus. Also, when meditating for relaxation, people love creating a specific environment in their home for this practice. There are plenty of crystals, stones, and other meditation items at SPH Creations that you might want to check out and create meditation heaven at home.
Manages Anxiety and Depression
Since meditation helps train your brain to focus more on the present it helps you reduce your focus on anxious thoughts which fuel depression. Many studies have found that meditation can help ease depression and anxiety and that it even could become a part of comprehensive mental health treatments.
What’s more, mindfulness-based stress reduction can help people who suffer from anxiety, and help them calm their minds and severely reduce symptoms of depression, as well as low mood, trouble sleeping, and loss of appetite.
Helps Fight Addiction
Meditation has proven to be able to alter brain receptors that are associated with drug and alcohol addiction. With meditation, those cravings for substances can be reduced, and it can even raise your awareness of cravings to better manage them. If you are more aware of them, you have more power in controlling them and thus overcoming the addiction. Mindfulness training can help people prevent future relapses as it produces a therapeutic effect that regulates how the brain experiences pleasure.
Helps Control Pain
There are a lot of doctors that recommend mindfulness meditation to manage pain. In 2020, there was a study found that meditation could reduce pain in people with post-surgical, acute, or chronic pain. However, meditation is not a cure or it won’t necessarily make the pain go away but it can help you shift focus, and be aware that there is pain and thus it can help you better cope with it.
Promotes Emotional Health
There are forms of meditation that can help you improve your self-image and gain a more positive look at life. As said, meditation can help reduce symptoms of depression and gain emotional health. In some studies, people who practiced meditation managed to lessen the number of negative thoughts when seeing negative images.
Additionally, mindfulness and awareness can help us control our emotions better. If we are fully aware of the emotions we are feeling, we can control them better and cope more easily, especially when it comes to negative emotions.
Makes You Kind and Loving
Practicing meditation can improve and foster your compassion for yourself and others. This practice strengthens the circuits in your brain that are responsible for picking up other people’s emotions, promoting altruistic behavior and it decreases the unconscious bias toward harmful stereotypes.
If you’d like to start practicing loving kindness meditation you can envision a loved one and simply wish them happiness. Then you can extend that love to yourself and other people around you.
Meditation holds a plethora of benefits to our health. It can help us change our brains, and thoughts and better control our emotions. It can help reduce anxiety and depression and simply help you become more kind and loving.
About the Guest Author
Eve Anderson is a marketing specialist turned blogger. Interested in sports and exciting travel destinations. Love to share content that can inform people.
