How Does Meditation Help You?

Meditation has the power to heal you in unprecedented ways. When you meditate properly, you can connect with your soul and inner voice. Sometimes the noise of our everyday life makes it challenging to listen to our own hearts. Especially in today’s time and age, when a sense of uncertainty has gripped the world, we need to calm ourselves down more than ever. 

Reconnecting with ourselves helps us understand what we need to do for our self-growth and development as well. Meditation lets you do this and more. In a state of complete silence, all you can hear is your breathing and heartbeat. As you count them slowly, you feel attuned to the vibrational energy of a different kind.

According to ancient mythologies, meditation levitated the soul to realms of the divine. I don’t know anything about that, but it is definitely true that you can free yourself through meditation. Take, for example, right now, this moment. 

Many of us around the world are locked in our homes because of the virus. It’s a sensation of imprisonment within the confines of the four walls, isn’t it? Well, not exactly if you let the power of meditation wash you over. When you focus within and connect to your soul, you free yourself from the anxieties, worries, and stress of day to day life. In that moment of truth, you are free, free from your inner bindings, and heaviness pulling you down. 

So, the point is you can achieve freedom right where you are through a meditative state of mind. Calming your mind down lets you accomplish complicated tasks with relative ease. Even the work that looks daunting can be solved when you put a clear, peaceful mind at work. 

There are innumerable benefits of meditating regularly. These benefits not only include alleviating some of the symptoms of physical ailments but also mental health problems. Especially when it comes to depression, stress, and anxiety, or associated disorders, there is limited dialogue, and the issues often remain unaddressed. 

For a generation thriving under tremendous pressure, the competition rat race to succeed mental health problems has become a new normal. Meditation comes in as a beneficial yet noninvasive therapy route and has shown marked differences towards a positive lifestyle. 

Let us look at some of the holistic benefits of meditation in terms of clinical conditions. 

With regular practice of meditation, it has been seen that anxiety decreases, improvement of emotional stability occurs, increases in clarity and peace of mind, mental agility, memory, and retention power rises. A significant increase in dopamine levels has also been observed after an hour of meditation, which increases your happiness levels! 

Moreover, meditation also lowers high blood pressure, lowers the levels of blood lactate, reduces anxiety attacks, reduces headaches, ulcers, insomnia, muscle, and joint problems, increases serotonin production, and improves mood and behavior of the immune system, and increases energy levels. 

A study conducted by UCLA also found that meditation slows down the process of aging in your brain. Now that’s interesting! Older meditators practicing for years had less profound loss of grey matter areas compared to their non-meditating counterparts. This directly affects memory, cognitive abilities, and decision-making powers that decline with the process of aging. Studies have also shown that the default mode network (DMN), the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thought processes, decreases through meditating. This brings a ruminating mind under control and increases a person’s ability to focus. According to Harvard scientist Sara Lazar and her team, “Eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was seen to raise the cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs the learning and memory functions. Moreover, in certain areas of the brain that plays regulatory roles in emotion and self-referential processing. There were also significant decreases in brain cell volume of the amygdala, which is the center responsible for fear, anxiety, and stress – and these changes matched the participants’ self-reports of their stress levels, indicating that meditation not only changes the brain, but it changes our subjective perception and feelings as well.

Studies have also shown that you can increase your concentration and attention span through meditation quite effectively. Moreover, according to a research group from the University of Kentucky, “Meditation provides at least a short-term performance improvement even in novice meditators.In long term meditators, multiple hours spent in meditation are associated with a significant decrease in total sleep time compared with age and sex-matched controls who did not meditate. Whether meditation can replace a portion of sleep or pay-off sleep debt is under further investigation.”

So, I hope by now, you are at least partially convinced about the unlimited potential of mediation. There are many options to bring in some well-being into your life, and meditation is one of them. The best part is it’s free and entirely up to you. 

Now that you hold the key, are you ready to give it a try and see some positive effects yourself?