How Meditation Benefits Your Wellbeing

Everyone’s mental health and general wellbeing could use some help right about now. It’s been a crazy year so far, and it doesn’t look like 2020 is calming down any time soon. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to help improve your wellbeing. Meditation offers multiple benefits that everyone could use this year.

Improves Self-Awareness

According to The Joy Within, meditation is a great way to improve your self-awareness. One of the primary purposes of meditation is to help you become more in tune with and aware of your body, your mental state, and your thoughts. As you practice meditation, you become more aware of how you feel in the present moment. Frequent, regular practice will help this become a natural part of how you operate. As you become more self aware, you can narrow your focus onto those thoughts and feelings you want to nurture and grow.

Reduce Your Anxiety

According to Onu, anxiety affects 40 million American adults. Many manage their anxiety with medication, exercise, and stress management techniques. Meditation is another method that can be effective at reducing anxiety. Meditation allows you the opportunity to practice observing thoughts, accepting them, and then letting them go. This helps you practice being more present, which helps decrease the time and energy devoted to fears of failure or loss. These two fears are at the root of many conflicts, arguments, and anxieties.

Improving Your Physical Health

The anxiety-reducing effects of meditation also help improve your physical health. Anxiety tends to trigger the body’s stress response, which many people are familiar with as the fight-or-flight response. The body is essentially prepared to fight or outrun a threat. If you burn off that energy, the negative effects of the stress response are minimized. If you don’t, however, the hormones don’t have a way to burn off well, which can be a problem if you are chronically stressed and anxious. This can have a serious negative impact on your overall health.

By meditating and reducing your anxiety and the accompanying stress response, you reduce your body’s exposure to those stress hormones. This decreases the inflammation that comes as a result, which reduces the stress on your body’s physical systems and improves your overall physical health. According to Headspace, there are many types of meditation you can practice to get the benefits to your physical health, so you may have to experiment and practice them for a while to find the one that benefits you the most.

Meditation is a wonderful way you can improve your wellbeing. There isn’t really a part of you that it can’t help. It helps you improve your self-awareness, reduce your anxiety, and improve your physical health as well. There are lots of ways you can practice meditation, so you should be able to find a method that works for you. Give it a try and see what improvements you notice.

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