12 Scientific Reasons to Meditate Daily!

12 Scientific Reasons to Meditate: The popularity of meditation is increasing day by day as more people are discovering its benefits.

“Meditation provides a way of learning how to let go. While we were sitting, the self we tried to build and turn into a nice, clean package continued to unravel," John Wellwood said.

Meditation is the process of training your mind to refocus your thoughts. It is the way of increasing awareness of yourself and your surroundings. It can even help in reducing stress and elevate your concentration level.

Positive outlook and mood, higher productivity, healthy sleep patterns, self-discipline, and a higher tolerance for pain are some other benefits of practicing meditation.

Out of enormous advantages of meditation, few are listed below:

1. Natural Stress Stabilizer

Stress is a natural feeling of not being able to cope with a certain thought or situation. Both mental and physical stress increases the level of the stress hormone known as Cortisol. This results in cytokines, an inflammation-promoting chemical.

These effects not only disrupt sleep but also promote depression, anxiety, fatigue, increase in blood pressure, and cloudy thinking.

Research has shown that people doing regular meditation have lower cortisol level, improves symptoms of stress-related conditions, post-traumatic stress disorders, and irritable bowel syndrome.

2. Reduces Depression

Studies on depressive individual showed that adding meditation to their daily regime reduces symptoms of loneliness and general low mood.

A study involving 400 students by Filip Raes found that students who have followed a mindful meditation program have reduced rates of anxiety, depression, negative thinking, and stress after six months.

3. Regulates Anxiety and Mood Disorders

Less stress is equivalent to less anxiety.

Anxiety disorders are generalized as phobia, panic disorders, obsession, and bipolar mood swings. Meditating daily helps in regulating unreasonable emotional ups and downs.

Meditation may also control job-related anxiety in high-pressure work environments.

Vipassana meditation reduces the density of grey matter in brain areas that are linked to stress and anxiety and bring in overall emotional stability.

4. Promotes Self-awareness

It is true that meditation may help you become the best version of yourself. Self-inquiry meditation helps you develop a better understanding of yourself and how you relate to other people around you.

There are other forms of meditation that help to recognize harmful or self-defeating thoughts.

In simple words, you gain a better understanding of your thoughts and can direct them towards more useful and constructive patterns.

5. Promotes Emotional Health and Well-being

Certain types of meditation can lead to an improved self-image and a more positive outlook of life.

A controlled study compared the electrical activity between the brains of people who practiced meditation and others who did not. The people who meditated showed considerable changes in mental health i.e. positive thinking and optimism.

Research shows that maintaining a habit of meditation helps you with the long-term benefits.

6. Lower Age-Related Memory Loss

Meditation can help to improve your attention and clarity of thinking, which in turn keeps your mind young.

Kirtan Kriya is a combination of chant or mantra with continuous motion of fingers to focus thoughts. It increases the capacity of a person to execute memory functions in various periods of memory loss associated with aging.

Besides avoiding age-related memory loss, meditation can partially improve memory in patients with dementia.

7. Prolong Attention Span

Focused attention is a type of meditation for improving attention span by increasing the strength and endurance of your attention.

One of the studies concluded that meditation can even reverse the patterns of your brain that contribute to mind-wandering, poor attention and worrying.

A study confirms that as little as 4 days of meditation could be beneficial for improving attention span.

8. Boosts Sleep

Nowadays, most of the people are suffering from Insomnia.

Some studies have determined that meditation at night helps to fight insomnia and other sleep disorders. A short session of meditation just before you hit the bed helps to calm nerves and get your body into a relaxed state.

According to a study by the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the sleep quality of people who practice bedtime meditation is better than non-meditators (Lazar, Carmody, Vangel, Congleton, 2011).

10. Controls Pain

Pain is connected to our state of mind, and in stressful situations it may increase.

A study by the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) determined that mindful meditation lowers sensations of pain in the body without using the brain’s natural opiates (Cherkin, Sherman, Balderson, Cook, Anderson, Hawkes, Hansen, and Turner, 2016).

Combining the practice of meditation with medicine for treating pain can be useful for providing long-term results.

11. Reduces Blood Pressure

Meditation can not only improve mental health but has great impact on physical well-being.

High blood pressure can lead to narrowing of the arteries, which causes heart attacks and strokes.

A study of 996 volunteers has found that when they meditated by focusing on “Silent Mantra” – a repeated, non-vocalized word- results in reducing blood pressure by about five points on an average.

It appears to control blood pressure by relaxing the nerve-muscle that directly coordinate with the heart function, the tension in blood vessels and the “fight-or-flight” response that multiplies the alertness in stressful situations.

12. Help Fight Addictions

By training your mind with meditation you can break dependencies on your addiction behavior by increasing awareness of such triggers and self-awareness.

Various studies have shown that meditation may help people enhance will-power, redirect their attention, control their emotions and impulses.

By meditating you can also control food cravings. It can help you recover from addiction, reduce weight, and boost your self-confidence.

The bottom line is that meditation can improve your complete personality, mentally as well physically. You can do it anywhere, without any special equipment.

What are you waiting for? Find a comfortable spot and get ready to relax!!