Meditation and mindfulness are important topics of discussion today. This is because meditation is an incredibly accessible tool that can help improve a person's mental and physical health. Anyone can start meditating with very little training or instruction.
Meditation has potential benefits that can improve our health. There are few that are more surprising, and perhaps even more useful, than others.
Here are the top five reasons to try meditation.
Meditation Can Help You Sleep Easier
According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, meditation can help you get to sleep easier.
Meditation has become a useful treatment for people with insomnia, depression, and other conditions that lower the quality of our sleep. A NCCIH-funded study found that adults who practice mindfulness exercises reduced the severity of their insomnia. Meditation has a way of slowing everything down and helping stress to melt away. This can help people who struggle getting to sleep and rest just a little bit easier.
Manage Your Anxiety With Meditation
Anxiety is more than just an annoying emotion. It can be a serious mental health concern and aggravate existing health concerns. The fact that meditation can lower anxiety is one of the best documented effects of mindfulness practices.
Meditation helps to lower anxiety by giving us a moment to slow down, focus on the moment, and stay on top of runaway feelings. There are meditation techniques that allow people to get control of anxiety in the moment as well as meditation techniques that can help to unwind after a particularly harsh day.
Meditation Can Help With Addiction
Addiction is one of the most challenging things to manage. Addiction can cause health concerns and social problems. Meditation might not be able to solve addiction, but it can give people who struggle with it the resources they need to manage some of the worst stresses that might otherwise trigger substance use.
Research into how meditation can help with addiction is still ongoing. Meditation can help people with addiction manage their stress and anxiety and improve their general health like blood pressure. New research is starting to suggest that meditation can also help people who are recovering from addiction.
Lower Your Stress With Meditation
If you're dealing with stress, meditation is a great way to keep it in check before it leads to other issues.
The fact that meditation can lower stress is one of its most well-documented attributes. Meditation lowers stress by also lowering blood pressure and helping you to focus on the moment. There are countless different meditation techniques that you can learn whether you're looking to unwind after work or you need a quick meditation you can do before or after a challenging meeting.
High levels of stress can cause serious health concerns. There are links between stress and addiction, heart disease, and more difficult outcomes for physical health problems. Meditation helps to manage the health risks of stress, and it gives you more options when it comes to managing the stress you experience in your daily life. These include breathing exercises, focussing on the body, and mindfulness.
Meditation and Mental Health
Another area where meditation can help with your life is your mental health. Meditation is already an established solution for managing anxiety and stress, but emerging research even suggests that meditation can help with mental health concerns as complicated as post traumatic stress disorder.
Meditation provides you with tools to deal with unexpected stressors and anxiety. The techniques you build with meditation can be transferred over to helping to manage other mental health concerns. These are universal skills that you build up as you work on your mediation practice.
These are just five areas where meditation can help improve your life. There are countless other ways that meditation can reduce stress and make difficult situations more manageable.
One Quick Tip for Starting Meditation
Meditation is a practice that you learn with time. Your first few sessions might be shorter than you'd like or not as healing as you'd hoped. However, this is something that you can improve as you build up your own meditation practice.
As you explore more meditation styles, you'll build towards a practice that can help you with anxiety, stress, and mental health.
Sources
nccih.nih.gov—Meditation: In Depth
health.harvard.edu/—Mindfulness meditation may ease anxiety, mental stress
Sunshinebehavioralhealth.com - Alcohol Rehab in Austin, Texas
nccih.nih.gov—Mindfulness meditation in the treatment of substance use disorders
health.harvard.edu—What meditation can do for your mind, mood, and health
research.va.gov—VA researcher exploring meditation as a therapy for PTSD
Our blog post is a collaborative effort by the founders of More Natural Healing in conjunction with Editors of Renewed Health Alliance, and our board of advisors including doctors, herbalists, and experts in using natural herbs and supplements to enhance our daily lives. We only provide information that has been researched, validated, and vetted for our posts and includes validation from experts in the herbal community. A person of interest on this post is the talented writing ofAndrea Poteet of Sunshine Behavioral Health. Andrea is a contributing writer and blogger for More Natural Healing & Renewed Health Alliance