Mindfulness meditation is a type of meditation in which you focus on being aware of what you are sensing and feeling in a given moment without judgment. Practising mindfulness involves guided imagery, breathing methods, and other practices that help relax your body and eliminate stress. Meditation helps alleviate stress, anxiety, pain, insomnia, depression, and hypertension.
The cultivation of mindfulness has roots in Buddhism. Practising mindfulness meditation can improve physical and psychological symptoms. It also brings positive changes in health, attitudes and behaviours.
Types of Meditation
Breathing Meditation
Mindful breathing is a basic but powerful mindfulness meditation practice. The idea is to focus on your breathing and how it feels when you inhale or exhale.
Body Scan Meditation
Body Scan Meditation (BSM) focuses on the different sensations in your body, from your head to toe. This practice helps you become more attuned to your bodily sensations, feelings, and emotions.
Loving-Kindness Meditation
This type of meditation is an ancient Buddhist practice that cultivates goodwill and universal friendliness towards oneself and others.
Observing- Thought Meditation
This meditation is a practice that teaches you to notice your thoughts as they arise and label them. These thoughts can be negative or positive, centred on yourself or others.
Benefits Of Mindfulness Meditation
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Improves Well- Being
Being mindful makes you live a satisfied life and helps savour pleasure in the small moments of life. Being mindful makes you fully engaged in activities and makes you capable of enduring adverse situations. People who practice mindfulness don’t live with the worries of the future or the regrets of the past.
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Enhances Your Sleep
On average, an adult needs seven to nine hours of sleep, and being sleep-deprived can wreak havoc on the mind. Practising mindful meditation helps with insomnia. This meditation helps increase the production of sleep hormones called melatonin and serotonin. It reduces heart rate and decreases blood pressure.
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Helps Manage Your Weight
Mindfulness Meditation helps you lose weight and adhere to positive changes in your lifestyle. Meditation helps reduce stress that triggers overeating. Through meditation, you become aware of your feelings and emotions. It also reduces cortisol and C-reactive protein levels, which is beneficial for overall health, achieving weight loss and maintaining a healthy weight.
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Lower Your Stress Levels
Mindfulness Meditation is a therapeutic intervention that improves psychological functioning and reduces emotional exhaustion, stress, psychological distress, depression, and anxiety.
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Improves Brain Health
In 2019, a study was conducted on first-time meditators who had 40-day training in mindfulness meditation, and changes were seen in the brain structure, grey cell volume, and cortical thickness linked with lower depression scores. You can increase your mental clarity and memory through regular practice of mindfulness meditation.
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Enhances The Quality Of Life
Mindfulness meditation also helps in enhancing the quality of life. Here’s how:
- Reducing stress and pain
- Improving quality of life
- Reducing fatigue
- Reducing cachexia- fat or muscle loss in the last stages of the disease
- Providing relief from digestive disorders
- Improving symptoms of sleep disorders
- Improving immune responses
In Conclusion
Mindfulness Meditation is about connecting with the present moment and not focusing on what is in the past. This meditation helps reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. You must give it a try to see visible changes in your behaviour and lifestyle.
