How Meditation Benefits Your Mental Health and Helps with Anxiety and Depression
Meditation is the fastest growing trend in the medical industry and for good reason.
More and more research points to a correlation between meditation and improved mental health.
Lowered blood pressure, decreased stress, improved mood, and reduced anxiety and depression are a few of the many benefits meditation is touted to have.
Meditation is the practice of deeply focusing one's mind for a period of time. There are a number of different types of meditative techniques out there but the main goal of each one is to re-center oneself and find a sense of calm, which can result in improved mental health.
Depression and anxiety continue to pose major health issues for many adults. Meditation could be something that can be incorporated into your daily routine to aid with the necessary professional help to maximize your mental health efforts.
Let’s have a look at how our mental health can benefit from meditation.
Improved Self-Awareness
Meditation encourages you to slow down, observe your inner self through the mind's magnifying glass, and help you rediscover the positives about yourself.
Navigating past your constant inner chatter and willing to examine your inner self without judgment improves your self-esteem and self-awareness.
It also makes you aware of all the things you can improve about yourself without making you feel bad about the person you are.
During a 2009 study carried out on 14 participants with social anxiety, two months of meditation was reported to generate improved feelings of self-esteem and body-image.
Becoming more self-aware can help you in tackling the negative emotions you have attached with your certain attributes, thereby, decreasing stress and anxiety.
Regulating Negative Emotions
Meditation forces us to slow down which can then carry through with us in our daily lives and help us control our negative emotions like fear and anger. In fact, research has gone so far as to suggest emotional improvements after just one session of meditation.
Meditation helps to slow your heart rate down which is why you are less likely to lose control of your emotions when in stressful situations.
So the next time you are sitting in traffic and someone decides to cut you off, meditation will help you think twice before you start spewing curses and go off on your horn.
Increased Pain Tolerance
Severe physical pain can leave its negative after-effects on your mental health.
Brain scans have revealed increased activity in parts of the brain that are directly correlated with a decrease in depression and an increase in pain tolerance.
A study carried out in 2020 with over 6000 participants found that mindfulness meditation helped patients reduce pain from surgical procedures or acute and chronic pains.
Of course, the effects of meditation on pain should not be overestimated. It is not a magic cure-all and it certainly does not make the pain vanish into thin air.
The point of meditation is to provide that necessary distraction and calmness that would make the pain a lot more bearable.
By decreasing the stress of physical pain on our bodies, meditation then causes our mental stresses to not get triggered and remain under control as well.
Controlling Anxiety and Depression
Apart from all the reasons mentioned above, there are a plethora of other reasons that meditation helps us with including anxiety and depression.
Meditation is widely known to provide distress-relieving effects.
A study found that only 8 weeks of consistent meditative mindfulness helped decreased anxiousness in people with anxiety disorders. It also resulted in a boost in positive self-image and stress-coping mechanisms.
Another study found that employees who integrated the mindfulness technique of meditation in their lives, for as little as 8 weeks, experienced decreased job-related stress and anxiety.
All these benefits could likely be a result of the meditation itself coupled with increased physical activity.
Stress Reduction
Stress is one of the most common reasons why people turn their attention towards meditation.
Stress has many harmful effects on a person's life, many of which are long-term. If not controlled over a long period of time, stress starts manifesting itself in the form of physical diseases. This is why it should not be taken lightly and should be dealt with every possible effort.
Physical and mental stresses cause a spike in cortisol which is the hormone responsible for stress and anxiety. Cortisol produces many harmful effects on the body, the biggest of which is inflammation.
An increase in inflammation can give birth to a bunch of different problems in our lives. It can result in worsening of chronic illnesses, disrupting your sleep, and increasing blood pressure and heart rate, among many other things, all of which then contribute to depression and anxiety.
Research has shown that meditation reduces inflammation responses to physical and mental stressors.
This is good news as reduced levels of stress save us from countless other cognitive disorders and physical diseases.
Reduction in Amygdala Size
The amygdala is central to how we generate emotions.
Activity in the amygdala usually increases when we are stressed or encounter negative situations or emotions.
Studies have suggested a decrease in amygdala proportions in people who practiced mindful meditation over a period of time.
A decrease in amygdala activity and size also points towards increased emotional maturity and regulation. It changes the way we process negative situations and dampens the effects of external sources that might cause us distress.
The bottom line
Meditation can have endless benefits in our lives but we have to keep in mind that it is not a magic fix-all. It does not replace necessary medical treatments and drugs.
Meditation should be thought of as a compliment to an already healthy lifestyle, something that goes as a bonus along with healthy eating habits and regular physical activity.