How Meditation easily Helps With Stress

Benefits of meditation and how it can help you reduce stress

We all have faced stress in our lives, because back then when we were still living in the jungle surrounded by danger stress was important for our survival, but now it’s more like a struggle that we have to deal with sometimes either for a short or for a long period of time, and sometimes we just feel that it’s hard to deal with it and we don’t know how to get rid of it and just continue our lives peacefully. In this article, I’ll talk to you about Meditation and how it can be a great easy solution to ease stress.

Before getting to the part where you’ll learn how meditation can help you, let’s start with some quick definitions.

What is meditation:

It is like an exercise to the mind where relaxation and awareness take place. It can be practiced both individually or with a group. It is believed to originate in India and it has been practiced for decades.

 

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The most famous types of meditation:

Actually, there are many types, but according to MEDICAL NEWS TODAY those 7 types are the best ones:

• LOVING-KINDNESS MEDITATION:

this type is for encouraging an attitude of love and kindness toward everything and everyone including your enemies and your sources of stress.

• BODY SCAN OR PROGRESSIVE RELAXATION:

This is a type that encourages people to scan their bodies in order to detect areas of tension and to allow them to release it gently.

• MINDFULNESS:

This one is my favorite because it’s not only a mental training practice that teaches you to slow down your thoughts to calm down your mind and body but also it’s a wonderful technique or a set of techniques that help you to let go of all negativity through breathing and awareness of body and mind.

• BREATH AWARENESS MEDITATION:

Clear from the title, I think of this type as one of mindfulness techniques. Breath awareness is a type that encourages mindful breathing.

• KUNDALINI YOGA:

Kundalini yoga is a different type of meditation than the other types because it includes physical activities or poses with deep breathing and mantras ( A mantra is usually any repeated word or phrase, but it’s mainly referred to as a word repeated during meditating.) People usually learn from a teacher or do a class or at home.

• ZEN MEDITATION:

Zen, also similar to mindfulness, helps you to find a comfortable position, focus on breathing, and mindfully observe your thoughts without judging them. This type can be part of Buddhist practice, it involves specific steps and postures so it’s important to practice with a teacher.

• TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION:

In this type, you need to remain seated and to breathe slowly. The goal is to transcend or rise above the person’s current state of being.

 

How does stress affect your body:

In order to deal with stress you need to know how it works: stress is your brain responding to any situation that feels dangerous whether it’s real or imagined, and this response is translated into your body through some hormones like Adrenaline and Cortisol which sets the body in emergency or alert mode. And this can be noticed as fast heartbeats, short breaths, and tight muscles and in the long term it transforms into anger and frustration, and it can even lead to anxiety and depression.

Believe it or not, stress can be positive too but it becomes harmful when you’re over-stressed or a constant stress experienced over a prolonged period of time.

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Here is a list of what long-term stress can do to your body:

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HOW MEDITATION CAN HELP WITH STRESS:

It can calm the mind and clear it from extra useless thoughts, especially by some therapy techniques like breathing and mindfulness. Once the mind settles, the body stops releasing stress hormones, the heartbeats return to normal which reduces blood pressure and as a result, the body feels calm and peaceful. Just by practicing 20 minutes each day, you can get amazing results.

According to Nature Reviews Neuroscience mindfulness practice improves emotion regulation and reduces stress by engaging various patterns involving the Fronto-limbic networks.

A study in India of 150 subjects has confirmed that mediation is an efficient tool for reducing stress especially after 8 months of meditating.

Another study examined anxiety in 40 studies where 33 of 40 and 25 of 34 studies showed significant decreases in anxiety and stress respectively after practicing mindfulness.

More benefits of meditating:

Meditating has a lot of benefits and here are some of them:

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How to meditate:

There are thousands of ways of meditating but I included below my favorite one the one that I personally practice:

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CONCLUSION:

Meditation is a mental practice to help your mind to relax and to slow down your thoughts.

There are a lot of types including mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation.

Stress can be a good thing but it becomes harmful when it transforms into constant stress experienced over a prolonged period of time.

During meditating, once your mind is clear the body stops releasing stress hormones, the heartbeats return to normal and as a result, the body feels calm and peaceful.

Meditation is an amazing technique with a lot of benefits, especially in order to help with the stress if it is practiced daily.

Benefits of meditation and how it can help you reduce stress

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