The perception of meditation has shifted dramatically over the past few decades. While it was once considered a more spiritual or religious practice, meditation is now recognised as something that offers a much broader range of applications that benefit everyday life, including stress reduction, cognitive enhancement, and improved mental well-being.
The best part is that anyone can practice meditation. It’s simple and can be a very low-cost or even free solution that is easily incorporated into any part of your daily life – and we mean anywhere, including while taking a walk, commuting to work, or relaxing at home.
Read on to discover what meditation is, the benefits of meditation, and why you might like to add it to your health and wellness routine.
What is meditation?
Meditation is the process of training the mind and body to achieve a state of focus and calm. It generally involves mastering the ability to focus attention and awareness via a combination of mental and physical techniques, to relax, reduce anxiety and stress, improve mental clarity, and promote emotional well-being.
Some common ways to meditate can include:
- Body-centered meditation: Also called ‘self-scanning’, this involves focusing on the physical sensations you can feel throughout your body.
- Emotion-centered meditation: Involves focusing on a specific emotion, for example, visualising what might make you happy in your life.
- Visual-based meditation: Visual-based meditation requires you to focus on something you can see, whether it is physically present or mentally.
- Contemplation: Contemplation style meditation has you focusing on a question or contradiction, without letting your mind wander.
- Mantra meditation: This type of meditation has you repeating and focusing on a specific phrase or sound, either aloud or in your head.
- Meditation with movement: Involves focusing on breathing, holding your breath, or performing specific body movements. This style of meditation can be done while walking.
- Mindfulness meditation: Can be practiced by staying aware of what’s happening in the moment, rather than letting your mind wander and worry about the past or future.
There are several ways you can learn to meditate. Photo by Shashi Chaturvedula on Unsplash.
The benefits of meditation
The practice of meditation is thousands of years old and has many different forms, but a greater understanding of its benefits through modern science and study has only occurred in the last few decades.
Although there may not be much to observe externally, internally, diagnostic and imaging tools can show the positive impact meditation can have on your brain and mental health, including links to increased brain activity in regions associated with your senses, attention span, emotional regulation, and self-awareness, and structural changes including denser brain tissue, which is a sign the neurons there have more connections to each other, and are stronger. These changes can lead to:
- Reduced stress levels: Decreased symptoms relating to anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) occur as meditation helps regulate the body’s stress response while promoting relaxation.
- Improved focus: Regularly practicing meditation can help improve your attention span and your ability to concentrate, helping you stay focused.
- Enhanced emotional regulation: Meditation can help you become more in tune and aware of your thoughts and emotions, allowing you to manage them more effectively and more easily adapt to overcome emotional problems.
- Improved self-awareness: When continuously observing your thoughts and feelings without judgment, you can help grow a greater understanding of yourself and your reactions.
- Better sleep: Practicing meditation can help you fall asleep faster, sleep for longer periods, and achieve a more restorative state of sleep.
- Greater sense of calm: By achieving a state of calm, you can help become less reactive to stressful situations and be able to respond to them with better composure.
- Lower blood pressure: Relaxing meditation can help lower your blood pressure, reducing the risk of heart disease and other cardiovascular conditions.
- Better pain management: Meditation can help reduce the perception of pain and improve your ability to manage it.
Why you should add meditation to your health journey
Meditation continues to rise in popularity as more people discover its far-ranging physical and mental benefits. Many counselors and psychologists, some of whom may have their online mental health counseling masters, appreciate the calming effects that meditation can have on their clients and choose to combine it with other medical interventions to help address a range of health conditions.
Meditation does not come easily to everyone, so if you are considering taking it up, consult with your healthcare provider, who can help you determine what type of meditation may suit you to achieve your desired outcomes. You should also do your research and seek guidance from those who already practice meditation, to learn from those with first-hand experience. There is no shortage of information and resources out there, so take the time to review them all to ensure the greatest likelihood of meditation working for you.
