How Meditation Helps In Lowering Anxiety Levels
Anxiety is one of the most common problems faced by people of all ages around the world. Whenever you are stressed and nervous about a forthcoming situation, such a feeling is called anxiety. If left untreated, it can further lead to other physical and mental problems. The main causes of anxiety include genetics, environment, and brain chemical processes. The symptoms of anxiety include faster heart rate, short breath, impatience, poor concentration, and poor sleep. Although, there are medicinal treatments available for this disorder, yet they are not health-friendly. But don’t worry as meditation can easily help in treating your anxiety problem.
So let’s check in detail the 8 ways in which meditation helps in lowering anxiety levels.
Helps To Control Thoughts
As we all read, People with anxiety are caused due to restless and nervous thoughts in mind. In medical research, it has been found that a normal person experiences more than 70,000 thoughts daily. Moreover, most of these thoughts are filled with fear, worry, and other negative feelings. Thus, our thoughts help in boosting the anxiety levels. But by doing meditation, you can easily remove all these thoughts filled with worries and fears. Your mind calms down and reaches a state of relaxation in its natural state.
Calms The Talkative Mind
The human mind is always filled with non-stop chit-chats, thoughts, and imaginations. Thus, you always get nervous and afraid in new situations because of the continuous ideas popping in your head. The most common fearful question that comes into our mind is ‘what if’. When this question keeps popping in our minds, we keep getting all kinds of anxious & negative answers. Meditation helps you to understand your fears, worries and cognitive behavior of our mind. Thus, it becomes easier for us to calm down our mind and thoughts.
Boosts Endorphins Production
Endorphins are known as the feel-good hormones, as they help in reducing stress, pain, and nervousness. These hormones are automatically produced by our nervous system in anxious situations. Furthermore, these hormones also help in improving mood, quality of sleep, and brain’s functionality. Also, they are an effective pain reliever. Several medical studies have shown that meditation helps in boosting the production of endorphins in the body. Thus, it helps in alleviating anxiety while making you feel happy and satisfied.
Balances The Brain Chemicals
Imbalanced brain chemicals are one of the most probable causes of anxiety. When your brain chemicals are imbalanced, it can lead to stress, improper sleep, nervousness, and fearfulness. Thus, your anxiety levels can easily increase due to these problems. Therefore, it becomes very important to balance brain chemicals. For this purpose, meditation is one of the best solutions as it helps in releasing gamma-am inobutyric acid (GABA) in the brain. GABA is a neurotransmitter that helps in increasing positive feelings like happiness and relaxation in the mind. That’s how meditation helps in alleviating anxiety and stress.
Alleviates Brain Inflammation
Inflammation of the brain can often result in psychological problems like anxiety, stress, fearfulness, and hopelessness, etc. The brain inflammation is due to the overproduction of cytokines in the brain. Thus, it is very important to regulate cytokines levels. Meditation helps in lowering the cytokines levels to reduce brain inflammation greatly. Thus, feelings of anxiety and stress are allevaites on their own.
Reverses The Anxiety
As our lives are becoming busy each day, it is common to face severe stressful and nervous symptoms. Whether it is personal life or professional life, everyone has infinite thoughts in their minds. This a type of ‘fight or flight’ phenomenon. In this phenomenon, an adrenaline rush enters in our brain to either ‘stay and fight’ or ‘run away from the situation’. This happens due to the activation of our sympathetic nervous system. Meditation helps in activating our parasympathetic nervous system, which turns off the ‘fight or flight’ phenomenon. Thus, the anxiety reverses and we feel happier and relaxed.
Stabilizes Our Mind
Because of our highly complicated lives, we distract and disturb our minds. This can be due to a failure, sudden loss, personal problems, workplace tensions, and other possible reasons. Thus, our mind starts wandering into endless thoughts and we get far away from reality. Meditation helps to provide our minds with clarity about things through reasonable thinking and boosted concentration power. Rather than facing distraction by a million things, we can focus on what’s important for us to stay happy and fulfilled in life.
Breaks Anxiousness Patterns
Several psychological studies prove that our mind has a tendency to get more towards negative thoughts than positive ones. Thus, a continuous pattern of anxious thoughts keeps running through our minds always. No matter what we think about, our mind keeps creating a cycle of negative thoughts and outcomes. This further leads to feelings like anxiety, hopelessness, and stress, etc. Meditation helps in breaking the anxiousness patterns by making our mind focus on the positive and good thoughts. Furthermore, it helps in enhancing our control over our mind and thoughts as well.
The Takeaway!
So these were the top 8 ways in which meditation helps who deal with anxiety levels. Meditation is a treasure of health benefits for our mind and body. Most of the world-renowned spiritual mentors recommend everyone to meditate daily for staying healthy always. Regular meditation can change your life by making your spirit, body, and mind stronger and healthier.
