Between 200 and 500 million people around the world meditate. In fact, many people say they meditate to improve their general wellness. How exactly can meditation benefit the mind, body, and soul?
Keep reading to find out! In this guide, we’ll review the top benefits of meditation. After reviewing these benefits, you might decide to try meditating for yourself.
Then, you can start improving your mind and body with mystic meditation as well!
Read on to discover the many benefits of meditating today.
1. Ease Your Anxiety
Do you feel anxious at times? You’re not alone. Cosmic energy meditation – a practice of organizing and utilizing life-force energy that flows through each of us – might help.
In fact, people with the highest levels of anxiety found meditation decreases their anxiety most.
Consider using mindful or spiritual meditation. Using positive self-statements might ease your anxiety, too. In one study, eight weeks of mindfulness meditation helped ease anxiety symptoms in people with generalized anxiety disorder.
It could help improve stress reactivity and coping as well.
Otherwise, anxiety could have a major impact on your physical and mental wellbeing. In fact, anxiety can have short- and long-term effects.
For example, you might experience symptoms such as:
- Weakness
- Dizziness
- Restlessness
- Difficulty concentrating
- Feelings of nervousness, tension, or fear
- Panic attacks
- Rapid heart rate
- Fast breathing
- Chest pain
- Digestive issues
- Sleep issues
- Nausea
- Shaking
- Sweating
Don’t let your anxiety impact your quality of life. Otherwise, long-term effects can include depression, insomnia, chronic pain, and digestive issues.
Using meditation and mindfulness exercises regularly could keep your anxiety levels from rising. You can even pair meditative practices with yoga. Combining physical activity with meditative practices could ease your anxiety further.
If your anxiety tends towards existential doubts and questions, a more overtly spiritual but not religious practice might be useful to you. Existential doubts take the form of fretting over small physical pains, signs of age developing on your face, worries that you’re not accomplishing enough in your life, feeling competitive about age and achievements. They can also take the form of worry that you’re not a good enough person, that your moments of lapsed willpower make you sinful, that there is either a gaping maw of hell awaiting you upon death or, perhaps even more stressful, absolutely nothing waiting. Existential doubts are thoughts about unanswerable questions we ask of no one in particular, often in the middle of the night. They can take us down into a dark well of worry, stress and despair.
Spiritual meditation techniques aren’t necessarily religious or tied to any established dogma or religion, so they’re adaptable to those who practice a faith as well as those who do not. These techniques can help you to feel more grounded in your life, and give you access to the natural feelings of hopefulness and positivity that are trying to surface to the foreground of your mind. The greatest, easiest “cure” for existential doubt is existential hope. Developing your intuitive sense of rightness in life is your greatest ally in developing equilibrium. And meditation is a fantastic tool for helping you do this.
2. Reduce Stress Levels
Stress – which is sometimes at the root of anxiety – could put your entire health at risk. In fact, stress impacts your mental and physical health. Chronic stress can contribute to other health problems, including:
- Weight gain
- Digestive problems
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Sleep problems
- Memory and concentrating impairment
- Headaches
- Heart disease
Don’t put your health at risk. Instead, consider these benefits of meditation. Many people try meditating to ease their stress levels.
Easing your stress can keep the stress hormone cortisol from rising. Otherwise, cortisol can increase the release of inflammatory chemicals called cytokines.
Cytokines could promote depression and anxiety. They can also cause increased blood pressure, disrupt sleep, or cloud your thinking.
Instead, try using cosmic meditation. The benefits of this style of meditation could help keep your stress levels to a minimum.
3. Avoid Age-Related Memory Loss
Are you worried about your memory? Maybe you’re concerned about dementia, Alzheimer’s, or other forms of age-related memory loss. Mystic meditation might help.
Meditation could improve memory in patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s. It could even help increase memory, attention, and mental quickness.
People with age-related memory loss showed improved performance on neuropsychological tests after meditating, too.
4. Ease Pain
Your state of mind and perception of pain are connected. Learning how to meditate could help you control your pain.
For one thing, meditation helps us become less worried about or frightened by pain that we experience. As it does with other events and circumstances in our lives, meditation provides perspective on the “isness” of physical pain we feel. This, in turn, allows us to more easily explore the sensations of the pain. As a result, we are often able to begin separating the experience of pain from the experience of “not pain”. It’s not that it’s “all about perspective”, although perspective is certainly part of it. As the Buddhists say, making friends with a problem (in this case, physical pain) makes us less afraid of it. Less fear is relaxing. Relaxation brings ease of mind. Ease of mind mitigates our experience of the problem. This allows us to be more comfortable with working on solutions to the problem.
You can see how reducing your pain symptoms might improve your quality of life.
5. Improve Your Emotional Health
Meditating regularly could improve your self-image. It might help you find a more positive outlook on life, too.
Mindfulness meditation could improve symptoms of depression as well.
You might find it’s easier to control your negative thoughts through a regular meditation practice. Even just 10 or 20 minutes a day can make a huge difference in how you feel inside yourself, and how you feel about life. It’s a wholesome form of “me time” that can yield tremendous benefits to well-being long after you’ve completed your practice session for the day.
Stress can increase the release of cytokines, which are cellular molecules that help in the regulation of the immune system. In the right amount, they’re beneficial. But when stress overstimulates production of cytokines, the results can have negative impact on your mood strong enough to lead to depression.
If this sounds like something you might be struggling with, consider giving cosmic energy meditation a try! You can discover a positive outlook and improve your quality of life.
6. Improve Sleep
Experts say that we should get seven to nine hours of sleep each night. Otherwise, sleep deprivation can impact your mental and physical wellbeing. For example, you might experience:
- Delayed thinking
- Lack of energy
- Mood changes
- Reduced attention span
- Worsened memory
- Poor or risky decision-making
Sleep deprivation can increase your risk of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, too. Your risk of depression, anxiety, and bipolar disorder might increase as well. And, insufficient sleep can disrupt our dream cycles, which in turn increase stress levels.
Instead, consider the stress-reducing benefits of meditation as a natural – and free – sleep aid. You can reduce your stress levels, which might help you sleep.
7. Boost Self-Awareness
Meditating regularly could help you gain a strong understanding of yourself. You might find it easier to grow as a person as a result.
You could even learn how you relate to those around you.
Some forms of meditation help you recognize thoughts that are self-defeating, limiting or even harmful to your inner peace and well-being. Instead, you can steer your thoughts toward more constructive patterns through a consistent meditation practice.
You might even experience reduced feelings of loneliness. Meditation can be a terrific assist in developing self-esteem and self-compassion. As we become more comfortable with ourselves, the time we spend on our own becomes more interesting and more joyful.
8. Improve Your Attention Span
Do you have a short attention span? You’re not alone! How many times have you heard the expression “the attention span of gnats”? Or remember Dory in “Finding Nemo”? Attention can be tied to memory in unexpected ways. So, improving your attention span might help you become more aware of your daily life, and also remember details about your life.
Consider the benefits of meditation in this regard. Meditation is a form of weight lifting for your mind. You could increase your attention span’s strength and endurance over time.
You might have an easier time focusing on daily tasks as a result.
Meditation can help you form better on a visual task as well. You could even reverse mental patterns that contribute to mental wandering, worrying, or poor attention.
9. Increase Positive Feelings and Actions
Regular meditation might generate kindness and promote positive feelings toward yourself and others. You can learn to develop kinder thoughts. Then, you can extend that kindness and forgiveness around you.
This is no small thing. Developing kindness inside yourself, and being able to more quickly and easily forgive yourself and others, is not terrific not only for stress reduction, but also for building daily happiness. The happier you feel, the happier you become.
Mindfulness meditation is a great start in discovering positive feelings inside yourself, and nurturing them. As your practice develops, you might further discover benefits in overtly spiritual meditation. Spiritual meditation focuses on contemplations of the intuitive connections you experience between yourself and others, and between yourself and what you identify as the divine. Seeing these connections, and allowing your thoughts to dwell on them, helps to eliminate the “money mind” of always thinking about trivial matters or dwelling on stressful thoughts that lead to anxiety and unhappiness.
10. Potentially Fight Addictions
Developing your mental discipline could help increase your self-control. You could become more aware of your triggers for addictive behaviors, too. You might discover how to break unhealthy dependencies as a result. This is especially true if you simultaneously seek out professional help for addiction and addictive behaviors.
In fact, meditation could help you learn how to redirect your attention. You can better manage your impulses and emotions.
You might discover ways to curb your food, alcohol, or drug cravings through meditation.
11. Support Heart Health
High blood pressure could cause your heart to work harder to pump blood. You could impact your heart’s ability to function. High blood pressure could cause your arteries to narrow, too.
Your risk of heart attack and stroke might increase as a result of the body being in a constant state of stress.
Instead, try meditation. Meditating could ease your stress and anxiety, benefiting your heart health.
Say Ommm: 11 Wow-Worthy Benefits of Meditation
Do you want to improve your mental, physical, and spiritual well-being this year? Consider these top benefits of meditation. By learning how to meditate, you could improve your overall quality of life.
If you’re looking for a simple mindfulness practice, there are no shortages of online resources. And, as more states continue to open up again after the pandemic, you might even find some local resources that work for you.
But if you lean towards an interest in developing a meditation practice that is both mindful and deeply spiritual, you don’t have to undertake the journey alone. Instead, discover cosmic energy meditation for the modern old soul.
Whichever path feels more right to you is indeed the right one for you at this time. Just getting on a path could be the start of wonderful changes in your life.
Remember this somewhat humorous fact: the benefit of benefits is that they’re beneficial, but you have to start in order to start.
Sign up today to get started with a free membership to QuietSelf. It can be the first step on a remarkable journey ahead.