We know brushing our teeth twice a day reduces plaque and helps stop gum disease, but did you know that there is scientific evidence to show that meditating every day can help reduce stress levels and make us happier and kinder people.
Wellbeing is defined as ‘someone’s health and happiness’ by the Collins dictionary and meditation can play a key role in delivering this. It has been proven that meditation can provide us with many health and well-being benefits, such as a reduction in stress, anxiety, and depression. There are also huge benefits to our physical wellbeing, including a reduction in blood pressure and chronic pain, and improvements in sleep patterns.
The benefits of meditation on the psychological self, allow us to be in touch with our emotions but not to ‘be’ our emotions. This can provide a sense of distance from the emotion, which can be empowering and allows us to process feelings and emotions. The practice of meditation yields a set of tools that we can apply to situations that may feel stressful.
Fight or flight is a stress response that happens in the body when we perceive we are in danger. A study in the 1970s by Dr. Herbert Benson on this stress response showed that during meditation, this can be reversed and the body can display a relaxation response. It became known that if this relaxation response is elicited regularly, it can have a positive effect on our health and protects our bodies from the damage stress can cause.
Meditation allows more introspection on the stresses in daily life and as we become more self-aware, we come to know ourselves. This allows us to know our triggers and to understand what part of our meditation tool kit we may need to bring out to manage a situation, so we can decide how to react reflectively.
Meditation is known to increase focus and concentration. As we develop our meditation practice, it teaches us to remain anchored in the moment and less distracted, or to become aware of when we are distracted and come back to ourselves.
Meditation also balances two parts of the brain – the thinking and the feeling. Studies have shown that a regular practice of meditation, up to thirty minutes per day, shows a change in grey matter in the brain. Simply put, grey matter is responsible for the processing in our brains. Regular meditation practice is shown to decrease the amount of grey matter in the Amygdala, which is the part of the brain relating to stress and anxiety yet there is an increase in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory. Essentially, meditation can rewire our brain, allowing us to be less stressed and more focused.
Practising being ‘in the moment’ allows the brain to be less caught up in stressful ways of thinking, often referred to as catastrophising. This is where the brain gets into a habit of jumping from a seemingly moderate worry to becoming a huge, ‘what if’ catastrophe. By practising being present in that moment, it stops the thoughts from jumping from place to place, restores calm and our thought patterns and processes become clearer, therefore, allowing us to be more focused and effective at the task in hand.
One of the chemical messengers often lacking in people living with long-term stress is serotonin. It is known that a regular meditation practice naturally increases serotonin, which is not only essential to help reduce stress and anxiety, but is needed for functions in the body such as sleep. Serotonin also helps us regulate sleep patterns and is located in the part of the brain that controls when we go to sleep and when we wake up. The more we meditate, the more we will experience health and wellbeing benefits, as through a regular meditation practice the benefits begin to accumulate, not just psychological but also physiological.
By taking time out for ourselves to meditate, this is in itself an act of kindness. By allowing kindness and compassion for ourselves, this practice cultivates wisdom and trust within us that will be noticed by our loved ones and friends. It allows us to be more intuitive, to not rush in where there are problems, and be ‘the fixer’, it allows us to start to recognise what we should be responsible for and to allow others to be responsible for themselves.
One of the most helpful principles I have learned on my meditation journey is that we cannot change a situation, but we can be responsible for how we choose to react to that situation.
Meditation provides a holistic treatment, benefiting both the mind and the body. It is incredible that taking twenty minutes out of our day to meditate can not only leave us a calmer and kinder person, but make us less likely to be in pain, our stress levels are reduced and we will enjoy a better quality of sleep.