THE 7 BENEFITS OF MEDITATION Bryan Ziegenfuse
Meditation, what is it? With the popularity of meditation, there are more and more discoveries as to the benefits that it has for people. The definition of meditation given by the online source Healthline states, meditation is the habitual process of training your mind to focus and redirect your thoughts. Meditation has been known to improve mental clarity, reduce stress, and help to develop concentration. But those are just a scratch at the surface as to what meditation benefits really are. In this article, we have compiled a list of the most important benefits of meditation.
STRESS RELIEF In today’s world more and more people are becoming overworked and overly stressed. In a newly published study on the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, over 3,500 adults have shown improvement in stress reduction with the implementation of meditation. Both physical and mental stressors have been known to increase the body’s level of cortisol. This can also cause harmful side effects such as the release of inflammation-causing hormones called cytokines. These upsets can also disrupt our sleep cycles, promote both depression and anxiety, increase blood pressure and have a contribution to causing fatigue and dazed thinking.
ANXIETY RELIEF When you have less stress you have less anxiety. In an eight-week study, dr.’s were able to show that meditation helped reduce the patient’s anxiety. Along with this it also showed reduced symptoms of anxiety disorders, paranoid thoughts, obsessivecompulsive behaviors, and panic attacks. With this, it has been shown that yoga also contributes to this with it’s meditative and physical activity.
EMOTIONAL HELP It has been proven that some forms of meditation can vastly improve your emotional state. Inflammatory chemicals called cytokines are released in a response to stress, leading to effects of your mood leading to depression and anxiety. Meditation can help to give you a more positive outlook on life.
IMPROVING YOUR SELF AWARENESS
In self-inquiry related styles of meditation can help you to “get to know yourself”, thus helping you to create a starting point to make positive changes in your life and improve your moods.
IMPROVEMENT OF YOUR ATTENTION SPAN Some forms of meditation help you to improve your attention span, in a sense acting like weight lifting for the endurance of your attention. If done consistently it could help in as little as four days to start having an effect.
MEMORY LOSS Consistently practicing meditation has also shown improvement in memory loss. With the improvement of your attention span, meditation can also improve mental clarity to help better retain information. These benefits have also been known to show improvement in older generations with memory-loss related dementia.
KEEPING KINDNESS
While it has many health benefits it also has so many mood benefits. When you are not bogged down by stress you are able to think more clearly and have a more optimistic outlook. Loving-kindness meditation is the practice of developing positive feelings at first toward yourself and then helping you to create positive feelings for others around you.
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