Mindfulness and meditation exercises are becoming increasingly popular around the world, and for good reason. Simple practices, easy to work into a daily routine, have countless benefits for both the mind and the body.
What Exactly is Mindfulness Anyway?
Mindfulness is the state we hope to acquire when we practice mediation. It entails focusing entirely on the workings of the mind in that very moment, without thinking at all about the past, future, or outside happenings in the present. It is all about focus and concentration, and is best practiced with simple breathing exercises.
What are the Health Benefits?
These exercises don’t just make you feel better, but they make your body function better as well. Here are three remarkable benefits of meditation and mindfulness.
Stress Reduction
As you can imagine, regular meditation helps a person to relax. What you might not know is that stress reduction has a big impact on physical as well as mental health. When a person is stressed, it negatively affects the cardiovascular and central nervous systems, causing symptoms like fatigue, headaches, and accelerated heart rate. Mindfulness exercises and meditation help keep these symptoms at bay.
Less Anxiety
Anxiety can be anything from a mild nuisance to a life-altering condition. In many cases, anxiety is a serious mental health problem that makes day to day life difficult and almost unbearable. Meditation has been shown to help control this debilitating mental condition. It also helps you recognize the sources of your anxiety so that you can deal with them and move on.
A Better Night’s Sleep
An overactive mind is never pleasant to be inside of, but especially not when you’re lying in bed, hoping to fall asleep. With each toss and turn, your worried mind seems to fabricate another calamity in your life that makes drowsiness impossible to come by. Luckily, there is a solution to this problem, and, once again, the solution is meditation. Simple mindfulness exercises help you teach yourself how to abandon those nagging concerns that are so prone to keeping you tossing and turning in your sheets. For a mind trained in meditation, it becomes second nature to flush the worries away and worry only about the here and now.