How Does Meditation Help Your Wellbeing
There is ample research showing that the regular practice of meditation relieves stress and enhances the quality of life. One study found that eight weeks of mindfulness meditation helped decrease symptoms of anxiety in individuals suffering from a generalized anxiety disorder, as well as increased positive self-talk and improved reactivity and stress response. People with anxiety who practiced mindfulness meditation regularly for three years saw long-term, positive effects on their mental health, according to one study from the journal General Hospital Psychiatry.
Mindfulness-based interventions, like meditation, have been shown to improve mental health, particularly in the stress domain, according to a study in the Clinical Psychology Review. The evidence is mounting that mindfulness practices like meditation positively affect our mental health.
First, there is plenty of research showing that mindfulness helps people in good health and lower stress. In a 2013 review, researchers reviewed over 200 studies on mindfulness meditation in healthy populations, a Holistic approach to health and well-being, finding it is an effective method for stress reduction. Studies have shown some benefits of meditation including relieving stress and improving symptoms of other stress-related disorders. Research has shown that meditation can also improve symptoms of stress-related conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome, PTSD, and fibromyalgia.
Meditation has been shown to aid in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome, fibromyalgia, and PTSD by decreasing stress levels. Meditation may also help decrease symptoms of depression through mindfulness and emotional regulation. Meditation, which is focused on mindfulness and emotion regulation, may help lower chronic stress in the body and lower the risk of its side effects.
While meditation is most famous for helping with Managing stress and anxiety at work, it may also enhance your brain structure. The mental health benefits of meditation include improved attention and focus, increased self-awareness and self-esteem, lower levels of stress and anxiety, and cultivation of gentleness. Research shows that practicing meditation helps to build self-awareness and enhances impulse control and individual relationships with themselves and others. Benefits of regularly practicing meditation may include decreased stress, increased focus, lower blood pressure, and decreased symptoms of anxiety and depression, just to name a few.
It is only recently that Western medicine has discovered that meditation does indeed have physical and psychological benefits beyond making you feel less stressed. Meditation has benefits for your physical health, too, since it may increase your tolerance to pain, and it may help you to resist drug addiction. Although meditation is thousands of years old, studies of its health benefits are relatively new but promising.
After researchers from Johns Hopkins combed through 19,000 meditation studies and 47 clinical trials, their findings suggested that mindfulness meditation may help alleviate psychological stresses such as anxiety, depression, and pain. A 2014 research analysis published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found that mindfulness meditation may help relieve anxiety and depression, and maybe a part of a holistic mental health treatment plan. Yale University recently published a study that compared breath meditation with mindfulness to help with stress and anxiety, read here for results.
Many experts feel you cannot find a better, more natural, non-side-effecting way of managing stress than meditation practice. What may come as a surprise is the fact that millions of people are finding ways to manage stress with meditation. Meditation is supported by tons of science.
According to the Mindfulness Project at the University of Pennsylvania, a wealth of studies has shown that mindfulness training enhances mood and quality of life, increases working memory capacity and endurance against distraction, and improves emotional regulation. If increased happiness is not reason enough, scientists have found that mindfulness techniques can improve physical health in several ways.
Professor Emeritus Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder and former director of the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre, helped introduce mindfulness meditation practices to the world of mainstream medicine and has shown that practicing mindfulness leads to improvements in both physical and psychological symptoms, and positive changes in health, attitudes, and behaviour. As a result of Jon-Kabat-Zinn’s ground breaking MBSR program, a vast amount of research now shows that mindfulness helps people manage pain, anxiety, depression, and stress that may accompany illnesses, particularly long-term conditions. In one study among people between one and 29 years of mindfulness meditation practice, researchers found that practicing mindfulness meditation helped people detach from emotionally distressing images and allowed them to better concentrate on a cognitive task than those who saw images but did not meditate.
The researchers recorded the people’s brain activity and found that those who participated in a Guided meditation journey session had faster restoration in the brain’s emotional responses after seeing photos of disturbing scenes, suggesting meditation helped them to handle negative emotions. The results from this meta-analysis showed that the 3,515 participants experienced improvements in anxiety, depression, and pain, particularly among those who had been practicing mindfulness meditation daily. In one study among Chinese university students, those students randomly assigned to the mindfulness meditation intervention had lower depression and anxiety, as well as lower levels of fatigue, anger, and stress-related cortisol, than compared with a control group. A study on 50 adults with ADHD showed that mindfulness and meditation practices reduced their hyperactivity and allowed them to experience increased impulse control.
One study compared a mindfulness-based meditation program and found that those who meditated stayed asleep for longer periods and had better sleep severity than those in the non-meditated control condition. For instance, a review of 38 studies concluded that mindfulness meditation can decrease pain, increase the quality of life, and reduce symptoms of depression among chronic pain patients. One study in 60 individuals receiving alcohol-use disorder treatment found that practicing transcendental meditation was associated with lower levels of stress, psychological distress, alcohol craving, and alcohol consumption at 3 months post-treatment.