Lately, the concept of meditating has been peaking my interest. I’ve been seeing more and more discussion of the practice specifically online and on social media. And, as someone who is always looking to improve their health and wellness, I recently began giving meditation a shot. I started with the intention to improve my mental health and make myself happier.
At the time, I didn’t know all the benefits to meditation, but I had kept hearing from family and friends that it was helpful for them so I decided to try it out.
To begin, let’s define what meditation is. Meditation is the habitual practice used to achieve a heightened state of attention and focus. The outcome is a mentally clear and stable mind. Meditation works by reducing the incoming flow of thoughts and information in your brain.
Even when first beginning to meditate, I noticed improvements in my mood, my confidence boosted, and my overall health improved. This goes to show that you can be inexperienced and still improve your life by meditating.
Meditation is gaining more and more popularity as people learn more about the health benefits. About 200 to 500 million people meditate worldwide.
How I meditate
You can learn more about how I meditate on my post Why You Should Start Meditating | Meditation for Beginners . I also outlined some specific methods I use to help calm my mind throughout my meditation.
For this post, let’s get into the benefits of meditating.
What Are The Benefits of Meditating?
1.Reduces Stress and Anxiety
During meditation, the goal is for you to reach a calm and relaxed state in your mind. When you do this, you stop thinking of everything at once.
You get rid of all the extra, unnecessary thoughts and ground yourself in the present moment. This removes the thoughts that may be overcrowding your mind causing you to become stressed.
Since almost all anxiety revolves around thinking about the future, grounding yourself in the present can help reduce anxious thoughts of the future.
Mindfulness Meditation which helps to increase awareness and ground you in the present moment is unarguably the best for reducing stress.
2.Improves Confidence and Increases Self-Esteem
When grounding yourself in the present moment you can turn your brain off from any thoughts that are overwhelming and aren’t really your thoughts.
What I mean by this is that sometimes if you’re having a stressful day and you stand in front of a mirror, you might pick apart everything about yourself because your mood is disturbed. These thoughts aren’t really yours, they come from you being in a stressful mood.
As opposed to this, when you calm your mind down and bring yourself out of this stressed state, you can have thoughts that come more from your heart. You can look in the mirror and be kinder and more understanding of yourself.
This helps stop negative self talk that usually comes when you are stressed and overwhelmed with thoughts.
In addition, spending qeuit time alone with yourself when your mind isn’t a jumble of random thoughts can help you learn more about your own thoughts, not stressful, overwhelming ones. This can help you become more familiar and comfortable with yourself and who you are, increasing your confidence and self-esteem.
3.Increases Concentration and Attention Span
When you clear your mind by meditating, you bring your attention back to the present. This helps you focus on one thing at a time instead of trying to multitask.
Multitasking normally causes attention on one thing to decrease, so by focusing on one thing at a time, your concentration on that one thing increases.
Practicing bringing your attention back when your mind starts to wander when meditating can translate over into real life. When you start to get distracted by something, the practice of bringing your attention back becomes more familiar and it becomes easier for you to refocus again.
4.Improves Sleep
Meditation causes your brain to relax and your thoughts to quiet. By practicing this consistently, it becomes easier to put yourself in a relaxed state and shut off your thoughts before bed.
This helps remove those hours of laying in bed with your mind racing when it feels like you’ll never fall asleep.
Meditation reduces cortisol levels, which is the stress hormone, and increases melatonin levels, which is the sleep hormone. Both of these lead to a longer, better quality sleep.
To improve sleep, it is best to meditate right before bed as these helpful hormones are released while meditating and shortly after.
These are just some of the benefits me and others have experienced from starting to practice meditation. Remember, nobody is good at any thing when they first start, so don’t give up! It takes time and practice to master meditation and even if you don’t think you’re good enough at it don’t shy away! You WILL get better with practice and you can still experience the benefits throughout the entire journey.