Balanced stones on a rocky beach
Daily life and a lot of obligations and tasks can raise our stress levels. Everyone wants to try and relieve stress in the best way possible, but not everyone knows how beneficial meditation is. Meditation holds many great benefits for our health and it can make an impact on minds, hearts, and bodies. If you are interested to start practicing meditation, here are things you should know about how it positively impacts our health.
Meditation and Stress
According to a lot of research, mindfulness and meditation can significantly lower our stress levels and improve our mood and quality of life. What’s more, when there is less stress our working memory becomes better, as well as emotional regulation and resistance to distractions. All this can easily be achieved by just a few minutes of mindful meditation each day. Additionally, you can improve your meditation processes with a few crystals to keep yourself grounded. You can easily find a great chakra crystals store and get everything you need for your daily meditation.
Meditation and Mind
There are two regions in our brains that have a role in our mental health – the amygdala and the default mode network (DMN). The amygdala regulates our memory, emotions, and concentration. And when we are stressed, or don’t take good care of our brains, the amygdala cannot function that well, resulting in a lack of emotion regulation, bad memory, and inability to focus.
The DMN is responsible for daydreaming and other wandering and distracting thoughts. It is crucial to train this part of the train in order to avoid symptoms of depression, anxiety, and insomnia. Meditation here helps train that network.
If you practice meditation daily, you can decrease activities in these two regions. This leads to a calm mind and less distracting thoughts, as well as better regulation of emotions. Additionally, your sleep may improve and you may lessen anxiety and gain a more positive look on life.
Meditation and Heart
Stressful days at work or too many things to do at home raise your cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine levels. These hormones accelerate your heart rate, or they can change it which causes your blood pressure to increase. This then activates our “fight-or-flight” response which is great pressure on our cardiovascular system. And when this system is under stress, it can lead to heart disease, heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure.
When meditating, you are calming your body and engaging the “rest-and-digest” functions. This is the opposite of the “fight-or-flight” one and can eliminate it. This daily meditation routine can help you lower your heart rate and as a result, lower your blood pressure, keep your heart healthy and avoid any health risks.
Meditation and Body
When we feel stressed, frantic, and overwhelmed, the functions in our body are put on standby since that energy is needed elsewhere. However, when this happens our body thinks that necessary functions are expendable, including our immune system, digestion, growth systems, and reproduction. But those functions are absolutely vital and stress can impact them negatively.
Meditation can help put a stop to these misguided messages. Regular meditation can soothe the nerves and help our systems run as they should. Meditation can help us avoid that stress-induced shutdown mode and provide great physical health benefits:
- Increased immunity
- Less inflammation
- Increased fertility
- Reduced symptoms of IBS
How to Get Started?
If you want to start practicing meditation, all you need is goodwill and a few peaceful minutes a day. Meditation is much simpler than most people think and you can explore all the different ways of meditation. There is mindfulness meditation, tai chi, and transcendental one. Whichever you pick you are bound to get all the health benefits and stay focused and relaxed. However, it will take some time to get practiced and skilled, but nevertheless, it is a good job just to start. And all you need is just a few minutes a day and a comfy chair, bed, or mat.
There is no right or wrong way to do this since everyone enjoys something else. You can even try guided meditation at first until you train your mind not to wander off. The key is to establish the routine and everything else will happen soon.
As you can clearly see, meditation brings a lot of health benefits. This practice is of utmost importance for our bodies, minds, and hearts. With meditation, you can avoid any major health risks, clear your mind, put a stop to anxiety, and overall improve the quality of your life.
