The Benefits of Meditation to Your Mental State and Overall Health

Meditation clears one’s thoughts and confusion. It discards the disruptive stimuli in the environment to achieve a sense of tranquility and inner peace. But what makes meditation so special is that it doesn’t have any negative impact on your body or your mind. It only brings forth many benefits in your mental and overall health.

Here are the many benefits that meditation can give you.

Improves Mental Health

When you meditate, it brings about a relaxing and soothing feeling within your mind. It gives you peace and tranquility. Meditation contributes to the psychological aspect of mental health, which is true. However, meditation also improves your mental state physiologically speaking.

In our nervous system, we have chemical substances called neurotransmitters. The role of these neurotransmitters is to manage the conduction of impulses in the brain. It allows you to receive, deliver, and respond to stimuli. One of these neurotransmitters is serotonin, which controls our mood and sleep patterns and inhibits the pain pathways. When serotonin in the brain decreases, so does the mood, often resulting in a state of depression. When you meditate, this increases serotonin in your body.  Subsequently battling your bouts of depression and increase your pain threshold.

Controls Your Emotions

Meditation is a great way to manage your emotions. By clearing your mind and focusing on the present, you get a sense of relief over things that trouble you. It also allows a release of pent up emotions. Instead of the loud ways to vent out your anger, meditation will enable you to achieve control and resolve the issues in a peaceful way. Meditation works in managing your emotions, mainly letting you gain patience, compassion, kindness, and empathy. All of which are essential in maintaining your anger and keeping your cool.

 Allows You To Focus

With all the gadgets in our hands these days, it’s quite challenging to focus your mind on a single thing. That’s the bad thing about multi-tasking. With months and years of experience, we’ve developed a system wherein we just can’t focus on a single task. We work simultaneously on a lot of things making sure our minds do not get time to rest.

Even if we’re doing a single task, our mind often wanders towards other things. You often find yourself blankly staring into your surroundings, daydreaming, or procrastinating. Thus leaving your work incomplete or haphazardly done in haste. With meditation, you can achieve better focus. This would result in an increase in efficiency not just in your work but also in your personal life.

Increases Brain Activity

As we age, our body undergoes a wear and tear process that affects every system in our body. With years going by, our physiological body degrades as well. That includes the brain. People who have been meditating for a long time have more gyri or folding in the brain’s cortex region compared to those people who don’t practice meditation at all.

These folds indicate that the amount of information processed within the brain becomes faster. It also showed that these people have more reliable connections within the brain’s various areas and a lesser amount of age-related brain shrinking and deterioration. Gray and white matters are abundant in those who meditated compared to those who didn’t. The gray matter and white mater help in the transmission and communication of electrical impulses in the brain.

Reduces Pain

Whether it’s your back or your head, scientific studies have shown that meditation helps in managing the minor pain and aches that you experience. It’s even believed that meditation can potentially cut the pain perception in half, resulting in increased pain tolerance. People who meditate regularly found pain to be more tolerable compared to when they did not meditate. Researchers suggest that since the person is focusing on the present, the emotional response to pain reduces.

The benefits that meditation brings are endless. Your body becomes more energetic and healthier. Your mind becomes more lucid and insightful. Meditation also helps you gain better control over your emotions, enhance your social relationships, improve the way of thinking and much more

With meditation, you don’t just achieve good mental health, but a healthy state of being. You develop a sense of peace within yourself, and you’ll start to look at things in a more balanced and peaceful way. And with what’s happening in the world today, having sound mental health and a peaceful view towards life and others, goes a very long way.