I don’t know why I put off my meditation practice ’til my late twenties. I kept telling myself I was too busy and that I’d do it later, and that lead into months and then years of neglect. I started to back to it recently, in order to help with stress and grounding, and after trying out different techniques – body scan, mantra repetition, breath focus, and guided imagery – settled on transcendental meditation as my go-to practice (along with a not so regular yoga practice) and have kept to it ever since and have appreciated the benefits of keeping up a regular practice that includes deep relief from stress and anxiety, enhanced brain function, and a healthier heart.
While a lot of people start by incorporating meditation into their yoga practice and building on that, you obviously don’t have to start yoga or convert to Buddhism to start. If you’re looking for more reasons to validate spending 10 minutes to ground yourself before you begin or end your day, here are eight:
1. Helps reduce stress. Meditating encourages us to relax and as a result helps to reduce our stress levels. A landmark study published in Hormones and Behavior found the TM technique reduces cortisol by 30%.
2. Treats depression. Those with depression reported that their symptoms had nearly halved within three months of starting the treatment, and the effects were maintained across the rest of the year-long study. “These results are encouraging and provide support for testing the efficacy of Transcendental Meditation … in the treatment of clinical depression,” said Hector Myers, the co-author of one of the studies and professor and director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychology at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).
3. Enhances brain function. A regular meditation practice can offer increase mental strength and focus, memory retention and recall, better cognitive skills, creative thinking, and information processing. During meditation, we learn to bring our wandering minds back to an anchor (breath or sound) time and time again, becoming aware of interruptions, distractive thoughts and tendencies. Jedi mind skills are just around the corner.
4. Boosts heart health. Yup, a simple meditation practice is the first effortless, enjoyable step to safeguarding your heart. The American Heart Association reported it can lower blood pressure, decrease in high cholesterol, reduction in atherosclerosis, and a 48% reduction in heart attack, stroke, and death.
5. Promotes mindfulness. Meditation allows us to observe our thoughts and to become aware of our impulses from moment to moment. With this awareness and recognition, we’re given a conscious choice around how we respond. Whether we react on impulse or respond with consideration. Once we begin to notice the triggers for negative and obsessive thought patterns, we can make a conscious effort to stop them. Through mindfulness meditation, we learn to let go of thoughts. And as a result we can put a stop to poisonous, obsessive thoughts before they become spirals of negativity.
6. Improves self-management. Meditation allows us to familiarise ourselves with our internal landscapes (mind and body). Providing an ideal time to be curious and explore what’s going on. With regular practice, this increased awareness of our thoughts and emotions, spills into every aspect of our lives and self-management becomes easier.
7. Makes you a lot more sociable. Research shows that meditation actually helps boost social connection, improves empathy and compassion, generates helpfulness, and increases resilience in heard times.
8. Increases happiness. Meditating stimulates activity in the pre-frontal cortex, the area of our brains associated with positive emotions and life satisfaction. Boosting our mood and allowing us to access these positive feelings more readily once the mood has passed.