What if I told you you could do something for 10 minutes a day, and you'd be able to increase your focus, decrease anxiety, minimize stress, and actually change your brain. Well, luckily for you, it's possible! It's been proven that meditation actually has these and many additional benefits.
What is Meditation?
Meditation is the intentional practice of uncritically focusing your attention on one thing at a time. Exactly what that thing might be relatively unimportant. Often people focus on the rising and falling of their own breath, mantras, or objects outside of oneself. The goal is acknowledge the content of your thoughts without becoming identified with that content. Long term, meditation allows you to create a buffer between your mind, emotions, and reactions allowing you to lead a more mindful life.
Why Train our Minds
It's interesting that we all seem to agree that training the body through exercise, diet, and relaxation is a good idea, but most of us don't think about training our mind. In many circumstances, our minds are more powerful than our bodies and are what can limit us or push us forward. Most of us are slaves to our mind. For example, the moment we feel anger we act angry. There is no buffer between our thoughts and reactions. Working on mastering our mind allows us to master our lives, and can help us in any activity, whether it's sports or business or study.
Benefits of Meditation
I've included proven scientific research studies below as to why meditation can improve your life. As you can imagine, there are a lot of other claims out there as well!
- HEALTH - Meditation can increase your immune function, decrease pain, and decrease inflammation at a cellular level
- HAPPINESS - It increases positive emotion, decreases depression, lowers anxiety, and decreases stress
- SOCIAL LIFE - Think meditation is a solitary activity? It may be (unless you meditate in a group which many do!) but it actually increases your sense of connection to others: Meditation can increase social connection & emotional intelligence, makes you more compassionate, and makes you feel less lonely
- SELF-CONTROL - Improves your ability to regulate your emotions and improves your ability to be introspective
- IMPROVES YOUR BRAIN - Meditation actually increases grey matter, increases volume in areas related to emotion regulation, positive emotions & self-control, increases corticol thickness in areas related to paying attention
- PRODUCTIVITY - Increases your focus & attention, improves your ability to multitask, and improves your memory
Check out Dan Harris' video about how meditation changed his life.
Have you tried meditation before? What benefits have you had?