Benefits of Meditation for Physical and Mental Health

There are a number of scientific studies reviewing the benefits of meditation which are believed to have a positive impact on overall mental and physical health. Meditation can help reduce stress and anxiety, and make you feel healthier and relaxed. Meditation is one of the relaxation practices that is done by training, directing, and focusing the mind so as to create a sense of calm and peace, clear mind and increase concentration.

Understand Meditation better

One of the many meditation techniques developed today is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is a meditation technique that emphasizes attention and full self-awareness. This technique invites you to focus and feel things in yourself, such as heart rate and breathing, the sensation of air flowing into the nostrils and released when exhaling. Then, this meditation technique will also guide you to organize thoughts, ideas, or feelings naturally without judging or judging those thoughts. Mindfulness meditation techniques can be done by anyone at any time without the need for guidance from a teacher or meditation expert. The benefits of meditation are very closely related to emotional health. Meditation helps you build self-skills to manage stress and anxiety, even loneliness. Meditation is also able to fight negative emotions, form positive and optimistic thought patterns, and increase creativity, memory, and self-awareness, and focus on life goals. Meditation can also fight memory loss and dementia caused by age. As for physical health, meditation is beneficial to help heart health, lower blood pressure, strengthen the immune system, help overcome addictions, control appetite, and lose weight. Meditation also helps someone to overcome insomnia. By doing meditation, you can reduce the perception of pain in the brain, this is useful for managing various symptoms of the disease, such as asthma, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, tension headaches, high blood pressure, to cancer.

Benefits of Meditation for Someone's Physical and Mental

Here are some explanations related to the health benefits of meditation based on a number of studies, namely:

• Manage stress and illness caused

One of the benefits of meditation is to deal with stress and illness. The brain has many nerves that are connected throughout the body. That's why when stress has affected the brain, then the whole body will feel the effects too. Physical activities such as exercise and meditation have an important role to manage stress through the endorphins produced. The endorphin hormone is a chemical in the brain that acts as a natural painkiller, making you sleep more soundly, which can then help reduce stress. When stressed, cortisol levels in the blood increase. The cortisol hormone is a hormone that appears as a reaction of the body when under pressure, both physically and mentally. The results showed that mindfulness meditation techniques performed correctly can reduce cortisol levels in the blood. However, the effects of meditation on quality of life and the reduction in stress in general still have not shown consistent results and still need further study.

• Overcoming anxiety and depression disorders

Routine meditation is said to help overcome problems in mental health, such as anxiety disorders, phobias, and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). According to research results, mindfullness meditation techniques can reduce excessive anxiety and anxiety. Brain imaging performed shows that meditation is closely related to the reduction of anxiety, because of increased activity in the brain that has an important role as a regulator of thoughts and emotions, and controlling anxiety. Inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, which are released in response to stress, can affect mood, which ultimately causes depression. The study of several studies shows that meditation can reduce cytokines, so it is thought to have a good impact on depression.

• Creating positive and optimistic emotions

Meditation is also thought to be effective in activating activities in the brain that play a role in the process of learning, concentration, memory, and awareness. Therefore, meditation is believed to be able to produce positive emotions in the form of happiness. The results of other studies show an increase in electrical activity in areas of the brain that tend to be more active in optimistic people, after meditating for 8 weeks.

• Stabilize blood pressure and maintain heart health

High blood pressure makes the heart work harder to pump blood, which can cause heart function to deteriorate. High blood pressure also contributes to atherosclerosis or narrowing of the arteries, which can cause heart attacks and strokes. Related to this, meditation is useful to help overcome them. The results showed that regular meditation can reduce and stabilize blood pressure. This can reduce tension in the heart and arteries, and help prevent heart disease.

• Boosts the immune system

Meditation is believed to help ward off illness and infection. The results of a study of a group of people who regularly meditated and did not meditate showed that there was a higher increase in antibodies in the group of people who meditated regularly than those who did not meditate.

• Reducing pain

There are many conditions that can cause a person to experience pain, one of which is cancer. Pain in cancer can occur due to the growth of cancer cells, side effects of cancer treatment (chemotherapy), to the high stress experienced by the body. Research shows that the mindfulness meditation method can help ease pain in cancer sufferers.

Until now, research and research related to the benefits of meditation are still being developed. But there are also other effects of meditation that are seen, namely clear mind and controlled mood. This can help you to maintain healthy relationships, ranging from relationships with partners, friendships, and family. Meditation is also likely to improve the overall quality of life, including the quality of your sexual life. To get the maximum benefits of meditation, make sure meditation is done routinely and in the right way. Because meditation usually involves sitting quietly for a period of time and breathing deeply, anyone who cannot sit comfortably or who has breathing problems may have difficulty practicing meditation. Meditation generally does not have negative side effects even if combined with medical treatment, but this type of therapy is not appropriate for acute medical conditions that are life-threatening, or mental health problems such as schizophrenia. People with certain medical conditions are encouraged to continue to consult a doctor if they want to do meditation therapy and get the full benefits of meditation.