Meditation – A perfect way for mental hygiene
The benefits of meditation affect all areas of your life, not just the physical and mental ones. Meditation helps you achieve mental hygiene. Meditation can be of different types but they all work towards achieving the same benefits.
Reducing Stress
Meditation is aptly called as 'mind without agitation' by experts. The stress levels we face in our lives are due to not only our jobs, but also because of small everyday problems and incidents. Small stressors build up and then take a severe toll on our mental and physical health. Most of the times, the stress acts on us over a time and we end up as a different personality altogether. For example, a new stressful job will make an otherwise cheerful man an irritable, always-on-the-edge person. Meditation helps us to channelize our thinking in such a way that the stress is driven out. It empowers us. Studies have shown that meditation improves the ability to regulate emotions in the brain.
Adopting a healthy lifestyle
Meditation makes your mind and body clean and fresh. You don't feel like polluting it with all the badness of an unhealthy lifestyle. Most of the people who meditate regularly, observe experts, adopt a healthy lifestyle. They eat more of fresh fruits and vegetables, cut down on coffee and tea, quit alcohol and smoking, and exercise regularly.
Improving concentration
Meditation makes you more focused and centered into whatever you do. It does not distract your mind from the activity at hand. Due to this, you find yourself becoming more productive. It improves the ability to multitask effectively. Meditation improves your energy levels, both physically and mentally.
Bringing awareness and acceptance.
Meditation helps you to become aware of your own feelings and emotions. It helps you to identify yourself and your personality. The best part is that it helps to become aware of the flaws, accept them and to correct them. In short, meditation makes you a better person.
Bringing happy emotions
The left side of the prefrontal cortex in the brain is responsible for eliciting happy, positive emotions while the right side is responsible for the negative, sad ones. Studies have proven that meditation increases the signals to the left side and decreases the signals to the right side. Thus it can be scientifically explained why people who meditate regularly are more calm, at peace with themselves, and generally happy.
Slows down ageing process
Researchers have seen that the grey cells in the brain are more in number in people who meditate regularly. They also have better preserved cognitive abilities. Meditation also affects chromosomes in a way that results in increased biological age.
Immunity boosting
Meditation has effects on the brain and the body that boost the immunity. One's resistance towards diseases is increased. Falling ill becomes a less repeated activity.
Heart friendly
Meditation helps release nitric oxide. This in turn is responsible for the dilatation of blood vessels and lowering of blood pressure. Thus, meditation helps keep the blood pressure and along with it other cardiac ailments under check.
Physical benefits
On the physical level, meditation helps to: 1. Lower the blood lactate levels which leads to reduced anxiety. 2. Decrease the psychosomatic conditions like peptic ulcers, sleep disorders, joint aches, and muscle pains 3. Increase serotonin production which acts as a mood enhancer.
Rejuvenation
Meditation is one of the best forms of prevention as well as medication. All it requires is 10 minutes of your time daily. Dedicatedly practice meditation and see the positive effects it brings into your life.
