The key benefits of meditation.

The benefits of meditation are HUGE. Meditation really should be a part of your daily routine.

Breathing is very important. Breathing keeps us alive. It can also affect when we are happy, excited, sad or angry. So, when you think about it, practicing breathing is important.

Meditation is a mind and body practice. It has been used for thousands of years. It is used to improve calmness, relaxation, and achieve better psychological balance. This, ultimately improves overall health and well-being.

Meditation uses breathing as an anchor to bring us to the present. The aim is to reduce the mind wandering without judgment of it doing so.

Many benefits of meditation are commonly known. Also, as more and more research is carried out we are beginning to uncover its deeper impact. The benefits are long lasting.

 

How to meditate.

There are many ways to meditate. These include silent, walking mindfulness, gratitude and visualisation meditation.

Mindfulness meditation is a practice which teaches you to slow down racing thoughts. This encourages you to let go of negativity and calm both your mind and body (view Verywell Mind).

As a Confidence Coach, I use these benefits with my clients to tackle both short- and longer-term issues. Short term uses, for example, include meditative breathing before a big event. This is to calm the body. Longer term, meditation can support better management of stress.

There are three major impacts meditation can have on your quality of life. Read to find out how you can implement meditation in your day to day.

 

THE BENEFITS OF MEDITATION

1. BETTER SLEEP

The Holy Grail... Sleep. There are a few reasons we don't sleep well. Sometimes the mind decides just as you settle into bed that it is time to start whirring. You consider every possible outcome for upcoming events. You run over old conversations, emotions and opinions from the day...

Listening to guided meditation before bed can improve the quality of your sleep. By scanning your body and paying attention to your breath, guided meditation aims to divert your focus away from the mind and towards your body instead.

Another common theme of a bad night’s sleep is waking up throughout the night. To combat this, meditation can improve control of the autonomic nervous system. This reduces how easily you wake (View Healthline). It can also increase the hormones related to sleep (melatonin and serotonin).

 

2. REDUCES DEPRESSION AND ANXIETY  

It can have both short- and long-term impacts on depression and anxiety.

Evidence has been found that it can have longer term effects after just two months of practice. A study by John Hopkins University found general meditation programmes helped ease psychological symptoms of depression, anxiety and pain-related stress. Mindfulness meditation is generally agreed to be most beneficial for anxiety and social anxiety. 

 

3. CONCENTRATION AND ATTENTION 

Do you often catch yourself musing about something and think, how did I get here? Daydreaming, although lovely, can inhibit our productivity at times. You might have noticed that you've had to re-read a sentence or two in this blog because you've wandered off into thought. If you're anything like me this is often the case. Thinking about something someone said or an event coming up. Or, if you're like me, thinking about what you'll be eating for your next meal. 

Meditation is the practice of being in the present. This may seem an easy task but in reality it needs a lot of concentration. Countless research has shown how meditative practices help in the long-term to reduce ‘mind-wandering’.

After only a couple of weeks of meditation training, your focus and memory will improve. More specifically, mindfulness meditation has been shown to enhance concentration in other tasks. It helps to calm racing thoughts and train the brain to focus.

 

Next steps, to ensure you are including meditation in your daily routine.

Now you know a handful of the wonderful benefits of meditation, the next step is working out how to incorporate it into your day or week. There is no one-size-fits-all approach I can share. So, I invite you to write these questions down and answer them for yourself. This is so you can incorporate meditation into your personal schedule. 

Here are a few questions to ask yourself if you want to start your practice:

• How many times are you going to meditate a week?

• Next, you need to decide how long you are going to commit to doing each time.

• How are you going to meditate? Use mindful walks, YouTube video, insight timer app...

If you are looking to start meditating, there are a whole host of apps and YouTube videos you can listen to. My favourite app is insight timer. I do also occasionally use Spotify and YouTube.

It is best to choose the meditation that you feel like doing in that moment. I use it to go to sleep most nights. I also sometimes do morning meditations.

Meditation is a much better-spent 10 minutes than scrolling Instagram!

Doing something is better than nothing.

Read more from me.

Sarah is a Career Change Coach. She helps women breakthrough and pivot in their career. Whether you're not networking, developing your own work or side hustle! Stop feeling like you don’t know where to start and reach out! 

Sarah has a Masters in Psychology and is both accredited by and a member of the British Psychological Society. She has experience working with the military and corporate sector in recovery, transition, leadership, and mentoring.