1 - What Can Meditation Do For Your Mind And Body?

Maybe, you are one of those who have already jump on the meditation bandwagon and enjoy its benefits daily. Good for you!!

Maybe you’ve tried it for a while and quiet when you didn't get the results you wanted or you hate it.

Or maybe meditation for you is just another trend that has become fashionable among cool people with a lot of free time. 

In any case, trends apart, know that meditation is one of the best ways to learn to control your mind and take care of your inner self, and meditating is a practice that has many benefits in our emotional health.

When we are aware that we can control our minds, we realize that we can achieve a state of emotional well-being that will help us cope better with any situation.

Several scientific studies have proven the benefits of meditation and its impact on physical and mental health. 

Currently, meditation is known to help reduce stress, anxiety, and addictions and increase creativity, learning, attention, and memory. You can begin to perceive all these benefits through meditation, mindfulness, and relaxation techniques.

The mind and the body are closely related; you may experience physical symptoms if you get upset. 

Let me tell you more about the benefits of meditation proven by science. 

What can meditation do for your mind?

Meditation is a holistic process that regulates consciousness, focuses your mind, and trains your functions. The attention and perception process allows you to anchor yourself in the present moment and stop worrying about things in the past or future, simply living in the here and now. 

It stimulates excellent mental development in the corpus callosum, sounds funny right? It is just a bundle of nerve fibers that connects both cerebral hemispheres.

 Self-knowledge

Meditation and mindfulness allow you to reduce the speed of thoughts and lead you to a deep understanding, which helps you establish a different relationship with yourself. It enables you to focus on your abilities, make the most of them, and reduce those aspects you feel dissatisfied with. 

In addition, observing your thoughts, feelings, and emotions without judgment (emphasizing in without judgment 😜)  increases your self-esteem because you gain insight into your mental mechanisms.

Relieves stress, anxiety, and depression

Meditation helps you reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. Mindfulness and Zen meditation allow the brain to adapt to mitigate its symptoms. It has also been proven that reduces the density of brain tissue associated with feelings of worry. (something we women never deal with)

Meditation can reduce cortisol levels and help you feel more relaxed, a state of stillness and stability that you can achieve with just 10 minutes of practice. It also allows you to train your mind to focus on the present and reduce anxious thoughts, which has a calming effect on problems such as depression, insomnia, low mood, and loss of appetite.

Increases productivity

Meditation helps you boost productivity and increase your creativity. Companies as Google, Nike, and Amazon commit to implementing meditation programs that help employees reduce stress and improve workflow and collaboration. 

Neuroscience affirms that meditation causes brain areas dedicated to ingenuity to benefit from relaxation; there is even a branch dedicated to this sector called corporate mindfulness.

Increases your ability to face challenges

By calming your body and mind, you realize that all emotions and situations are temporary, nothing is permanent, so you can face problems that before seemed impossible or very difficult to deal with. 

Meditation makes you experience peace of mind, which in turn allows you to take a broader view of reality and see a field of infinite possibilities. So you can look at obstacles with poise and make the most appropriate decision for each challenge, as you can pause to connect with yourself and take the one that best suits what you need.

What can meditation do for your body?

50 years ago, meditation began to be used for preventive purposes or as a complement to treat many diseases.  Besides, several scientific studies showed that meditation could increase patients’ health, reduce the intake of drugs, and reduce health spending population. 

Here are the benefits that meditation brings to your body:

Strengthens the immune system

Meditation stimulates the prefrontal cortex, the right anterior insula, and the right hippocampus of the brain. These are related to stress control, anxiety, and the strengthening of the immune system. 

A study by the scientific journal Psychosomatic Medicine showed that practicing meditation for 8 weeks benefits the production of proteins and increases antibodies, which allows you to recognize the pathogens with which you have contact and protect yourself from them.

Increases attention and concentration

Meditation improves cognition and increases the ability to perform tasks with greater focus.

There is a close relationship between mindfulness and the processing of new information, which is why meditation is highly beneficial for people of all ages and recommended to prevent Alzheimer's disease.

Increases memory

Meditation increases the gray matter of the hippocampus, which impacts mental processes that help memorization; it also helps promote compassion, introspection, and self-awareness. 

With just 30 minutes of meditation a day, you can enhance this ability, which will enable you to have better progress at work, school, and daily life. In adults, it also helps to counteract the reduction of the cerebral cortex that occurs naturally with the passing of the years, which generates a better cognitive process.

Develops emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is an innate human capacity that allows you to recognize your own feelings and emotions, as well as those of other people. Meditation can help you strengthen emotional intelligence, achieve a fuller life, and have greater well-being.

Meditation stimulates the management of emotions by making you more aware of your body and developing the capacity of observation, which allows you to act from a more centered place and take distance from your thoughts. 

Helps relieve pain

Scientific journal JAMA (Internal Medicine of the American Medical Association) conducted a study discovering how the practice of meditation can reduce the physical and emotional pain of those who had a surgical process or chronic discomfort. 

It does not make the disease disappear, but it will help deal with it better.

Meditation is compared to painkillers such as morphine and is recommended to patients to manage these conditions better.

Women benefit more from meditation than men?

According to a recent study from Brown University, mindfulness meditation, in which practitioners focus on attending to the present moment without judgment, may have more significant benefits for women, at least in a college course setting.

They observed 77 undergraduates who did a 12-week course on mindfulness, including 30 minutes of meditation three times per week. 

Women showed more significant decreases in guilt and irritability and significant improvement in self-compassion.

Men’s improvements in mindfulness and self-compassion did not correlate with improvements in negative affect, on average (to the extent that negative affect did improve for men, changes were correlated with the ability to identify, describe, and differentiate one’s emotions). But that doesn’t mean mindfulness meditation isn’t beneficial for men, says co-lead author Rahil Rojiani, a Brown graduate and now a medical student at Yale.

Meditating is especially difficult when our body's physiology is not up to par. The body thrives on being in a state of balance, and that begins with healthy eating. Our body depends on complete nutrition to function at an optimal level. 

Therefore, if we have any nutrient deficiencies, it will be much more challenging to gain mental clarity and achieve a state of Zen. Include good fats in your diet such as nuts, salmon, avocado or tahini.  Avoid all sugar and replace it with sugar from fruits and vegetables such as pumpkin; include fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, kefir, and miso. 

Having meditation in your daily routine is very beneficial for your health, both mind and body. We live in a state of constant stimulation, and calming the mind and finding stillness can be a great challenge for most of us. Meditation, which has been around for centuries, is one of the best ways to maintain balance when life gets hectic.

Let’s find balance together!