Meditation Benefits: The Top 5 Benefits Of Meditation

Whenever we feel stressed or anxious, it is important that we let ourselves calm and relax for a few minutes. How about to meditate? The word meditation itself has widely spread nowadays. In fact, the popular term is ancient and was documented for thousands of years by many religious leaders, spiritualists, philosophers, and scientists. Although they dubbed it differently and practiced it in various forms, the mission was the same – to increase self-control for a better wellbeing.

They say, once you practice it enough, you’ll learn to do it right so you won’t need an audiobook or a teacher. You can then do it in the comfort of your home or whenever you feel like meditating. Well, yes but are there any benefits if we meditate?

Yes, there are and a lot of them, science backs up. In a range from mental, physical and spiritual, meditation has various benefits for our wellbeing, research shows. At first, we associate the word itself with a serene and calm state of awareness. Then it helps keep stress at bay or even manage chronic pain.

There are various types of meditations and each of them has many benefits if done right. Scroll down to read about some of the main meditation benefits based on various research:

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1. Reduces Stress and Controls Anxiety

Healthline writes that stress is one of the main reasons that people try meditation. If you regularly practice meditation, it will help you identify negative thoughts and calm your mind. If not reducing it completely, meditation helps keep stress at bay. This based on numerous scientific research, on which meditation produced so many beneficial results, especially in areas like anxiety, and stress. The latest research included 1.140 participants and analyzed 39 studies. It discovered that if people practice mindfulness(a type of meditation) they learn to cope with stress and anxiety. This directly indicates your body and mind to feel relaxed and it may even improve the quality of your sleep.

2. Develops Self-Awareness

The good thing about meditation is that you can do it anywhere. Be it having a shower, walking in the park, working in your garden or just listening to the music. You don’t need to always sit cross-legged and repeat positive chantings. You can simply concentrate and be aware of your surroundings. Various research support that meditation can help one improve self-awareness. As life is becoming more hectic day by day, self-awareness is of great importance to help us increase productivity and be more effective. A saying by the founder of analytical psychology Carl Gustav Jung sums it up: “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.”

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3. Increases Focus

Probably a real struggle for most of us is to stay longer focused on the same task. When we multitask, we become stressed so easily and then lose the tie of things. One of the meditation benefits is to help you stay focused for a longer period of time, studies show. According to the psychologist Mike Brooks meditating around 15 minutes a day, increases focus and makes you feel better during the day. Some people like to count their breaths, meditate on their commute, while walking their dogs or other times during the day. It’s all about concentrating on one thing and decluttering your thoughts. Since the focus is an important ability to help one learn new things, meditation perfectly improves it. If you’re a beginner at it you might find your mind wander too often, which is natural, but after some time of practicing, you will learn how to tackle and lengthen your attention span.

4. Generates Positive Feelings

There are different types of meditations. And one of the general goals of these meditation types is to generate positive feelings and serene moments. There is especially one type of meditation that tends to generate compassion and positive feelings named as loving-kindness meditation. The practitioner doesn’t ignore or deny his problems through this kind of meditation, instead, practitioners train their mind to detect them and let the positive feelings be part of their life too. Through meditation, we try to focus on the positive aspects of what’s there to be noticed and focus on the good sides of things.

5. Helps Control Pain

Many researchers found that meditation can help to manage physical pain. One type of meditation that is beneficial in chronic pain healing is mindfulness. According to the clinical psychologist Elisha Goldstein “Mindfulness teaches people with chronic pain to be curious about the intensity of their pain, instead of letting their minds jump into thoughts like “This is awful”” and other negative thoughts that come with pain. In this case, she says that mindfulness helps to see our pain without judgment, instead of focusing on how much we want the pain to stop.

Lastly, there also lots of other benefits that meditation provides certain individuals. The meditation benefits are related to each other and lead to the improvement of life’s quality. As you should always remember:

In a world full of doing, doing, doing it’s important to take a moment and just breathe, just be.

So after we learn to just be, we can change the entire direction of our life. We will learn the art of compassion for ourselves and others and this will help us improve even communication in relationships.

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