Take a deep breath, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Take another one, this time make sure that the breath out is longer than the one that you are taking in. Take a few more breaths, only focusing on your breath and not a single thought that may cross your mind. How did that feel? Hopefully it was refreshing, hopefully it gave your mind a moment of calm. Hopefully, naturally all the rapid thoughts that were jetting through your mind had a moment to calm down.
Meditation gives your mind a moment of peace that sometimes we neglect and overlook the importance of. I first started meditation when I was a senior in high school in my sport psychology class, then they were long (about 20 minutes) and I couldn’t for the life of me focus the entire time. Over time however things began to click. It’s pretty ironic, to me that you have to train your brain to think the right way or rather the way that you want it to. For me, I find short meditations in the morning or throughout the day to be much more effective than a long 20 minute one. Taking 5 to 10 minutes in the morning or at night have benefits that last most of the day and even throughout the night. I just wanted to share with you some of my favorite reasons to practice meditation.
- Reduces Stress and Anxiety– The obvious is that it gives you a mental and physical breath that allows for you not only pause and gather your thoughts but it also encourages to stop thinking about anything specific at all. Anxiety is often caused by distracting thoughts and meditation helps you control what thoughts that you focus on. Scientifically, meditation works to reduce stress hormones like cortisone and increase your happy hormones like serotonin.
- Promotes Better Sleep– Meditation helps you calm down all the distracting thoughts going through your mind, ultimately improving the quality of your sleep. Meditation before bed even allows you to fall asleep deeper and faster. Added bonus is that a meditation session in the middle of the day can give you the quick pick me up and energy boost you need to get through whatever else you may have planned.
- Increases Healing and Reduces Pain– To me this is the coolest part about meditation. Meditation and imagery have been proven to help speed up the healing process of injuries and even reduce pain. When you focus your mind completely on the healing process through meditation the body responds and begins to heal faster and returns to a healthy rate faster. Meditation also changes the overall structure of the brain which allows for you to longer feel pain at the same intensity.
There are an unbelievable amount of benefits to meditation and I really encourage you each to look into how it can strengthen your daily life and overall health and well-being. If you want more information on the benefits of meditation, check out the link below. Also coming soon will be some brief daily meditations that you can use throughout your day.
Additional information: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/feeling-it/201309/20-scientific-reasons-start-meditating-today