The Benefits of Meditation for Stress Relief

Our lives are chaotic. We are constantly being bombarded with stimulation in various forms, whether it be at work, at home or even during leisure activities. All of this external stimulation, in addition to how we react to it, serves to cause feelings of anxiety, of being "stressed out."

What better way to relax and relieve tension and stress than to put aside the world around you for some moments of quiet reflection?

Meditation is a state of thoughtless awareness, a way to a relaxed state of mind by putting aside thoughts and feelings and focusing on self, on one's own consciousness. Meditation is a mind-body type of complementary medicine, in the same classification as yoga and tai chi. Meditation is a mental discipline.

"Thoughtless awareness" may sound like an oxymoron, but the term means to develop an awareness of yourself, your consciousness, by filtering out thoughts. Some people are able to quiet their thoughts completely after some practice of meditation techniques, but many more people are able to filter out most of their conscious thoughts after a time.

In order to achieve a feeling of calm, a lessening of anxiety and tension, the most important thoughts to be able to filter are those which have caused your feeling of stress. For example, if your boss has been hounding you to reach a deadline and you feel as if your head may explode, take a few moments to meditate, to filter out the boss's voice, to filter out concerns for the deadline. After even a few minutes of this, in addition to some slow, deep breathing, you may well feel more relaxed and better able to meet your goal when you return to your conscious thoughts.

A study conducted by Harvard Medical School and affiliated researchers demonstrated that after an eight-week meditation course, the brains of study participants physically changed. The areas of the brain associated with self-awareness and compassion had grown larger, and the area associated with stress had become smaller.

The importance that portion of the brain associated with stress becoming smaller is important in two ways: The now-smaller portion may mean improved mental and emotional responses to stress in your life and improvement in physical health.

Physical health would improve because with less stress, less anxiety and more calmness in your mind, the autonomic "fight or flight" response will occur less often. This response releases adrenalin that acts on your blood vessels, causing an increase in blood pressure and reduced circulation to your heart. High blood pressure is known as the silent killer; it can result in heart attacks and stroke, even kidney failure.

Slowing down, taking the time to meditate, to filter out conscious thoughts, can produce important, even life-saving benefits, as well as contributing to your peace of mind.

Additional benefits associated with meditation include:

• Gaining skills for stress management
• Reducing negative emotions
• Focusing on the present, staying in the moment
• Allows development of new perspectives in stress management

Meditation is an ancient practice, one that predates organized religion, but traditional Western medicine has been slower to approve and use meditation than its eastern counterparts. Western medicine requires scientific proof of not only benefits of a practice, but also any potential harmful effects.

As more research is completed, more traditional health care providers are suggesting the use of meditation to their patients. The research into meditation and its effects on the brain may even lead to improved understanding of such conditions as autism and schizophrenia, as researchers at Yale suggest.

Because our bodies are sets of systems all interlinked, anxiety and other negative emotions can adversely affect other body systems as we see from the correlation with high blood pressure. Other body systems can also be affected by ongoing stress, such as a weakening of our immune systems, leaving us more vulnerable to illness and infection, or the gastrointestinal system that may cause your stomach to produce excess acid, or have difficulty properly digesting food, or affect bowel habits.

While meditation is not the only practice that can help you to relieve stress and filter out negative emotions, it is a practice that you can do just about any time and any where, making it a no-cost method of achieving that inner calm you deserve.