How meditation benefits your mental health
What's the story
If you are still wondering when to start meditation, our only question is why haven't you started yet? Meditation can calm your mind and may avert degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. It is believed to help grow areas of the brain associated with focus, reasoning, and memory, and reduce areas linked to fear, stress, and anxiety. Here's why meditation is good for your mental health.
#1
Reduces stress
Managing stress is important for your overall health. Research has proved how meditation benefits mental health. It helps relieve stress and reduces anxiety. When you are free of stress, you become self-aware. Uncontrollable stress can increase the risk of chronic health problems, like heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and diabetes. Meditation can also help control symptoms in people with stress-related medical conditions.
#2
Emotional well-being
When one is free of stress they can feel and experience other emotions better. As meditation clears the mind, it also takes away the worries and promotes a happy and calm feeling. Meditation improves focus and studies have found that people who meditate are more satisfied with their lives. Those who meditate experience less aggression and react less to negative statements.
#3
You become compassionate and kind
By practicing meditation, one becomes more attentive to their surroundings, and their level of patience increases as well. This in fact makes one more generous and understanding. Meditation increases one's awareness, clarity, and compassion. One of the most beautiful advantages of meditation is that it can change our mindset. Metta, or loving-kindness meditation, develops positive feelings, it increases empathy and compassion toward others.
#4
Helps overcome anxiety and depression
Practicing meditation is effective in relieving symptoms of anxiety and depression, just the way antidepressants work. According to Ayurveda, it is known to increase the prana level (life force) in your body, and as prana level increases, anxiety decreases. However, meditation is not a magic pill that could cure depression, but it's a tool that may help manage symptoms.
#5
Tunes your brain
Meditation can lessen negative neurological connections to the medial pre-frontal cortex of the brain which is also called the "me center." This douses fear, stress and anxiety. Meditation also builds new positive neurological connections to parts of your brain responsible for promoting focus and good decision-making. The areas of the brain responsible for emotional regulation, planning, learning and memory, increase.