By JC Marchionda
Do you find yourself not being able to wind down, or get restful sleep?
Everyone wants to go home and relax after long days at work, or a busy weekend catching up on tasks, but many find it hard to actually commit to relaxing.
But this is exactly what meditation is for – peace and mindfulness.
I started to meditate to help with insomnia a year ago, and it has improved my life in many ways.
Here are seven ways meditation can improve your life as well.
Improved sleep quality
Meditating every night has been proven to lead to better sleep.
In a Harvard Study participants used mindfulness meditation once a week and found that all of them experienced less insomnia and restless sleep.
Psychologists have found that meditation leads to a relaxation response and allows the body to wind down before sleep.
Enriched breathing skills
Most of us don’t think about breathing every day, we just do it.
Although more of us should be focusing on breathing to improve our day to day lives.
Meditation has shown to reduce respiration rate and only use breathing properly. You may wonder how the breath is not being used properly.
Many of us find ourselves changing our breath with the mood we are in, say you are anxious your breath will speed up when we should be keeping calm to regulate our emotional responses.
Focused mindfulness
Meditation allows us to practice being mindful and present by focusing on the moment we are in rather than looking back or ahead on life.
When meditating you are counting your breath and focusing on the guide, which can decrease the amount of wandering thoughts we have and lead to being focused on the present moment.
Stress removed
Meditation competes with your body’s ability to produce cortisol which is the stress hormone. From the research Headspace has conducted with users from their app they have found that with regular meditation practice our amygdala shrinks allowing us to have less stress, fear and anxiety.
Less anxiety and depression
Society is seeing numbers higher than ever of reported struggles with mental health and meditation could be the key to getting these numbers down.
One study out of Harvard found that meditation can stop “unproductive worries,” leading to less anxiety.
Meditation can take over the overwhelming effects of anxiety, such as overthinking, and it allows you to practice having positive thoughts about yourself, your life and achievements – small or big.
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