10 Meditation Benefits

Meditation has become quite mainstream these days, but many wonder why and how it's so beneficial. This is where science shows us the positive benefits of meditation through studies. I actually found over 100 scientific-based benefits, but the ones below I felt were the most impressive.

Reduces Stress and Anxiety

One of the most damaging issues we all face is coping with daily tension in all its forms: emotional, mental, physical, and psychological. These stressors cause increased levels of the fight-or-flight hormone cortisol. It was designed to help you escape the Saber-toothed tiger in ancient times. 

Now, however, it’s triggered by the attack of the boss or the raging spouse. This hormone causes the release of inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, that help regulate the immune system and aid in its fight against foreign pathogens. While this can be beneficial in fighting off disease, there can be too much of a good thing. 

With too much cortisol and high cytokine levels, your immune system remains in the “always on” state. Your immune system actually begins to “run out of energy,” since it’s always expecting a fight, and thus becomes less effective at fighting disease.

By meditating, you reduce your stress levels and inflammatory response by focusing on peaceful and mindful thoughts over a successive period of time. This creates an environment in which your body now feels there is no threat or invader to fight. Cortisol and cytokines levels drop and more energy is available to the rest of the body. In turn, your anxiety drops and you feel better.

Reduces Blood Pressure and Chance for Heart Disease

When cortisol levels rise too far due to stress, your blood pressure increases. This can contribute to atherosclerosis, or narrowing of the arteries, which can lead to heart attack or stroke. 

Meditation has been shown to help lower the risk of high blood pressure and heart disease by relaxing nerve signals that coordinate heart function and blood vessel tension. It also reduces the body’s tendency to bring itself into that “fight or flight” response. The longer you practice meditation, the greater the benefits you receive.

Improves Emotional Well-Being

Mindfulness meditation has been shown to improve self-image and encourage a more positive outlook on life. It also has been shown to reduce depression. This is in part due to the lower levels of cytokines we discussed earlier. 

Meditations including Sitting in the Power and Visualization take you to places you love to be, both in the physical and the non-physical, enhancing your feelings about your life and environment. This leads to a more upbeat outlook on your existence and self-image. 

Part of this comes from increased levels of serotonin, a chemical produced in nerve cells as a mood stabilizer. Meditating helps to raise serotonin levels and acts like a natural antidepressant. 

Enhances Self Awareness

Some meditation explicitly aims to help you develop a greater understanding of yourself and those around you. You learn your true capacity and increase your self-efficacy. 

This in turn helps you to to recognize and prevent harmful or self-defeating thoughts that arise. Conceptually, as you increase your awareness of thoughts and how you react to them, you can begin to steer them to more constructive models.

Improves Attention Span

Meditation definitely increases both the length and the strength of your attention span as you learn to focus your mind for a longer time. Typically, you allow your thoughts to come and go and bounce around your head continuously. You feel like your thoughts are racing a mile a minute and perhaps have difficulty even concentrating.

Meditation calls for focused attention on one thing at any given time, like your breath, your muscles, your skin, your body parts, or concentrating on specific images you are given. As you’re forced to concentrate on these individually, you no longer have time to allow random thoughts to float through your mind. 

Your mind can only hold one thought at a time. As you learn to focus on specific thoughts or mantras, phrases you repeat to yourself, you begin to train your mind to enhance focus and expand its attention span. 

Helps Fight Addictions

Meditation helps you increase your focus and mental discipline. This in turn can help you break dependencies by increasing your self-control and self-awareness regarding the triggers for those dependencies and addictive behaviors. 

Meditation studies have shown that meditation may help you learn how to redirect your attention, manage your impulses and emotions, and improve your understanding of those impulses. 

Studies have shown meditation has benefited people with dependency issues with drugs, alcohol, and food cravings as it lowered stress levels, and reduced psychological distress and negative emotions or perceptions of self. 

May Help Age-Related Memory Loss

Just like exercising a muscle, by exercising your mind and thus your brain, you’re actually strengthening its capacity to recall thoughts and increase clarity of thinking. 

Studies of people with age-related memory loss have shown that certain meditation practices have helped improve performance on neuropsychological tests. In some tests, investigators found that meditation helped to increase attention, memory and mental quickness in older volunteers. 

Helps Generate Kindness 

Metta, known as a loving kindness meditation, starts with developing with positive and kind thoughts toward yourself. It helps you learn to love yourself just a little bit more. Then you learn how to forgive yourself for things you may have done that you perceive as negative.

Over time, you begin to learn how to expand this loving kindness to others around you. This starts by extending kindness to friends and relatives and ultimately to your enemies. You soon learn how to extend compassion to both yourself and to others. 

The more loving kindness and compassion you feel towards yourself and others, the more positive you feel about yourself and the world. Thus, your sense of positivity increases.

Improves Sleep

As mentioned previously, meditation helps to focus your thoughts and prevent the randomness of your mind in your everyday life. This in turn helps you from having an overactive mind when you try to fall asleep, a common cause for insomnia. 

Furthermore, mediation helps you achieve a better state of peace and calm that releases tension in the body, helping it to relax. As a result your relaxed body promotes a state in which you can more easily fall asleep. 

Helps Control Pain

State of mind contributes to your perception of pain. In stressful situations, your perception of pain tends to increase. 

Since meditation helps reduce stress and anxiety, while also improving mental discipline and keeping random thoughts away from what you don’t want to focus on, it thus reduces your perception of pain.

Studies have shown that people who meditate are able to reduce their chronic pain, improve their quality of life, and reduce signs of depression. Those who meditated were shown to have a greater capability to cope with pain and some even had lower levels of pain. 

Tags: meditation, meditate, meditating, mantra, visualization, relaxation, spirit, living spiritually