Benefits of Meditation for Physical and Mental Health
There's a number of scientific studies reviewing the benefits of meditation that 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 more relaxed.
Meditation is one of the relaxation practices done by training, directing and centralizing thoughts that create a sense of calm and peace, clear mind, and increased concentration.
More Understanding Meditation
One of the most developed meditation techniques when this is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness meditation is a meditation technique that emphasizes full attention and 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 expelled when exhaling.
Then, this meditation technique will also guide You to organize thoughts, ideas, or feelings naturally without judging or judging the thought. The mindfulness meditation technique can be done by anyone and anytime without the need for guidance from a teacher or meditator.
The benefits of meditation are closely related to emotional health. Meditation helps you build self-skill to manage stress and anxiety, even sense of loneliness. Meditation is also able to fight negative emotions, form a positive and optimistic mindset, and increase creativity, memory, and self-awareness, and focus on the purpose of life. Meditation can also combat memory dementia and dementia caused by age.
As for physical health, meditation is helpful to help heart health, lower blood pressure, strengthen the immune system, help overcome addiction, control appetite , and lose weight. Meditation also helps a person to overcome insomnia. By meditation, you can reduce the perception of pain in the brain, it is useful to manage various symptoms of the disease, such as asthma, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, tension headaches, high blood pressure, to cancer.
The Benefits of Meditation for Physical and Mentally Someone
Here are some explanations regarding the benefits of meditation for health based on a number of studies, namely:
- Managing stress and sickness in as a result
One of the benefits of meditation is to cope with stress and disease. The brain has many nerves that are connected throughout the body. That's why when stress affects the brain, the whole body will feel its effects as well. Physical activity such as exercise and meditation have an important role to manage stress through the resulting endorphin hormone. Endorphin hormone is a chemical substance in the brain that acts as a natural pain reliever, making sleep more soundly, which can then help reduce stress.
When stress, blood cortisol levels increase. The hormone cortisol is a hormone that appears as the body's reaction when under stress, both physically and mentally. The results showed that the meditation technique of mindfulness that is done correctly can lower cortisol levels in the blood. However, the effects of meditation on quality of life and reduced stress in general still have not shown consistent results and still need to be investigated further.
- Overcoming anxiety and depression disorders Routine meditation called can help overcome mental health problems, such as anxiety disorders, phobias, as well as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). According to research results, mindfullness meditation techniques can reduce the anxiety and excessive anxiety. Brain imaging has shown that meditation is closely related to less anxiety, due to increased activity in the part of the brain that plays an important role in regulating thought and emotion, and controlling worry.
Inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, which are released in response to stress, can affect mood, leading to depression. Studies of several studies have shown that meditation can reduce cytokines, so it is thought to have a good effect on depression.
- Creating positive and optimistic emotions
Meditation is also suspected to be effective in activating activity in the brain that plays a role in learning, concentration, memory, and consciousness. Therefore, meditation is believed to produce positive emotions of happiness.
Other research results show an increase in electrical activity in areas of the brain that tend to be more active in people people who are optimistic, 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 lead to worsening cardiac function. High blood pressure also contributes to atherosclerosis or arterial narrowing, which can lead to heart attacks and strokes. Related to that, meditation is helpful to help overcome it. The results showed that meditation performed regularly can decrease and stabilize blood pressure. This can reduce the tension in the heart and arteries, and help prevent heart disease. - Boost the immune system
Meditation is believed to help ward off disease and infection. The results of a study of a group of people who regularly meditate and do not meditate show a higher antibody increase in the group of people who regularly meditate than those who do not meditate. - Reduce pain
There are many conditions that can cause a person to experience pain, one of which is cancer. Pain in cancer can arise due to the growth of cancer cells, cancer treatment side effects (chemotherapy), to the high stress experienced by the body. Research shows that mindfulness meditation methods can help relieve pain in cancer patients.
To date, research and research on the benefits of meditation are still being developed. But there are other visible effects of meditation, such as a clear mind and a controlled mood. This can help you to maintain a healthy relationship, from relationship with partner, friendship, and family. Meditation is also likely to improve the overall quality of life, including the quality of your sexual life.
To get the most benefit of meditation, make sure meditation is done regularly and in the right way. Since meditation usually involves sitting quietly for a period of time and breathing deeply, then anyone who can not sit comfortably or who has breathing problems may have difficulty practicing meditation.
Meditation generally lacks even negative side effects combined with medical treatment, but this type of therapy is not appropriate for life-threatening acute medical conditions, or mental health problems such as schizophrenia. People with certain medical conditions are advised to continue to see a doctor if they wish to do meditation therapy and benefit fully meditation.