Why You Should Meditate
There’s no getting around the fact that the pandemic has taken a negative toll on a lot of people, whether it be mentally or physically. To get away from the mental distress, a lot of people have been looking for ways to calm their minds and drift away from the chaos. The best solution for this is meditation. Meditation is an activity that improves a person’s self-esteem, lowers levels of stress and anxiety, and more.
First of all, meditation lets you improve your self-esteem by allowing you to reflect on yourself and discover your positive attributes. When sitting alone in silence for 10-20 minutes, you have a chance to reflect on who you are as a person and your actions. Doing this also encourages you to see yourself in a more positive light, which therefore improves your self-esteem.
Second, meditation lowers levels of stress and anxiety by calming you down and helping you focus. This is because meditation helps lower the stress hormone cortisol in your body, making you feel more relaxed. Supporting this is a research analysis which was conducted in 2014 and was published in JAMA Internal Medicine. It found that mindful meditation can help ease anxiety and depression. Meditation also lowers stress levels by allowing the mind to focus on peaceful thoughts, redirecting it to something more positive.
Finally, meditation comes with many health benefits, including lowering blood pressure by 80%, relieving back pain by 30%, and reducing the chance of being hospitalized for coronary heart disease by 87%. All of these benefits help people live a much longer and healthier life.
While meditating can have negative effects, they aren’t common. Meditation has been noted to make people feel lost or lose their sense of self- some even claim to have visions and hallucinations. As bad as these effects are, they are extremely rare and there is a high chance that these effects occur due to outside factors.
Overall, meditation has many positive effects that outweigh the negative effects. It will allow you to gain a deeper understanding of yourself, lower your stress levels, and may even increase your lifespan! So, try it out whenever you can, because during this pandemic, keeping a healthy mind and body is extremely important.
Sources:
https://www.insider.com/benefits-of-meditation
https://zenfulspirit.com/2017/09/13/meditation-self-reflection-introspection-awareness/
https://www.thegoodbody.com/meditation-statistics/
https://comparecamp.com/meditation-statistics/