Meditation is an ancient practice that has by utilized in self-care for countless centuries. It incorporates a number of mindfulness and breathing techniques to yield a number of mental health benefits from decreased anxiety and stress levels to increase self-confidence and much more.
If you’re feeling out of touch with yourself and the world, or you struggle daily with self-worth, stress, anxiety, and other mental health challenges, it might be time to give meditation a try. These are all positive effects of meditation on mental health.
In this article, we’ll discuss the numerous mental health benefits of meditation by explaining how its techniques and practices positively affect your body and its systems to improve your state of mind, even when you aren’t meditating.
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The State of Mental Health Today
Mental health is a challenge every human being struggles to maintain throughout their life. While the odds might seem stacked against some, it is still present for everyone to some degree. Of course, recent events, such as the global COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in spikes in mental health crises, diseases, and disorders across nearly every nation, ethnicity, and social status.
According to data acquired by Mental Health America, 47 million adult Americans, amassing 19% of the nation’s adult population, are experiencing a mental illness while 4.55% are experiencing a severe mental illness.
This leads to other unpleasant statistics, such as 7.67% of American adults reporting they had a substance use disorder from 2020-2021 and 4.34% (over 10.7 million) reporting serious thoughts of suicide.
Statistically, mental health hasn’t improved for a significant percentage of Americans in the past year, and this is only statistics for American adults. Children and teenagers who have also been affected.
These individuals have been expected to show exceptional adaptations skills by switching from in-person to online schooling to hybrid courses and back again. They have also been expected to distance themselves from friends and other people in their lives, inhibiting their ability to work on essential social skills.
There is also the fact that many children, teenagers, and adults have lost a significant number of friends and family members to the disease and related complications. Not only do they grieve for these individuals, but many are dealing with the financial and familial repercussions of the loss that they were entirely unprepared for.
Much of what people found comfort and stability in before 2019 has been eliminated or completely altered so that it is now a source of anxiety and frustration instead. As a result, mental health has decreased, and there has never been a better time for people to know about the benefits of meditation than right now.
How Does Meditation Affect Mental Health?
The concept of meditation might seem humorous or even pointless when you feel like the world is crashing and burning around you or its burdens are unbearable. But don’t give up. There are significant benefits of meditation that are scientifically proven to improve a person’s mental health and could set you on the path to improving your outlook on the world and how you interact with it.
The techniques and practices of mediation can improve a person’s mental health by:
- Reducing symptoms of anxiety and stress
- Quieting a busy mind
- Improving concentration and attention and ability to learn
- Increasing self-confidence
- Increasing self-control
All of these are achieved by meditation affecting various systems in your brain and nervous system. This results in real physical and neurological changes that relieve unpleasant mental and physical symptoms, therefore allowing the individual to feel calmer, happier, and more grounded.
Reduces Anxiety and Stress
Two of the most common challenges for a person’s mental health are anxiety and stress. It’s no secret many of us live hectic lives where we’re constantly worried about being productive and are always on the go. As a result, anxiety, and stress might be constant companions inhibiting your mental health and overall quality of life. Thankfully, meditation can relieve many of their unpleasant symptoms.
A key element of meditation is its deep breathing techniques, which significantly affect your body’s HPA axis (or hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) and, consequently, your sympathetic nervous system (your fight or flight response) and your parasympathetic nervous system (your rest and digest system).
As you start meditating and breathing deeply and regularly, your HPA and sympathetic nervous systems find balance, allowing you to feel less on edge (a symptom often contributed to anxiety and stress). While those systems are calming down, your parasympathetic nervous system helps you enter a more restorative state that will leave you feeling happier and calmer.
At the same time, your heart rate and blood pressure will also decrease, which can help a series of physical ailments that are often connected to living in a constant state of stress and anxiety, such as fatigue, muscle aches, headaches, or even more significant issues, such as heart palpitations.
Studies have also shown that brain cell volume in the amygdala decreases while you meditate. Because the amygdala is responsible for an individual’s fear, anxiety, and stress responses, this can reduce their symptoms.
Quiets the Mind
Having a busy mind can be helpful in a number of life aspects, but when it becomes overactive to the point that you are constantly dwelling on the past and worrying about the present and the future, then it can start taking a toll on your mental health and even cause or exacerbate other mental health issues.
One of the main goals of meditation is to use methods of mindfulness to quiet your mind and focus on how you are feeling in the moment. It is vital that you let go of everything you’ve been worrying about up until this session starter and channel all of your energy into the present moment.
For most, this is easier said than done, and for some, the skeptic emerges who questions how “mindfulness” can quiet your mind. Well, scientifically, this can be explained by meditation decreasing the activity in a network in your brain known as the default mode network (DMN).
When this part of the brain is active, it means your mind is more or less wandering, meaning you could be thinking about nothing in particular or you could be excessively worrying about something. Meditation will help prevent your DMN from becoming too active so you can focus on the moment rather than wandering off with your concerns.
This can make it extremely helpful for people unable to focus on work or who lay awake in bed because they can’t shut off their thoughts.
Improves Concentration, Attention, and Learning Abilities
Meditation can improve your concentration and reduce inattentiveness for a reason similar to why it can help quiet the mind. This makes it especially beneficial for students of all levels who find their mental health is directly related to their grades, and their grades are low due to an inability to focus in class.
We mentioned earlier how meditating could affect the DMN to help your mind wander less. This can also effectively reduce inattentiveness and improve someone’s focus when they are trying to concentrate. In fact, a study conducted by Catherine J. Norris and Daniel Creem states that meditation, or rather, listening to meditation tapes, can lengthen or improve a person’s attention span, allowing them to focus on the task at hand for longer periods.
Another way meditation has been scientifically proven to improve a person’s mental health is their ability to learn and retain information. One study, in particular, found that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) can increase cortical thickness in the hippocampus (the area of the brain responsible for memory and learning).
This, paired with the repetitive motions of meditation, such as mantras, has been used to aid individuals with age-related memory with significant success.
Increases Self-Confidence
For many, the most significant meditation has on their mental health is due to its ability to increase their self-confidence.
This is largely connected to all of the other points we’ve made and the systems described therein; for instance, engaging your parasympathetic nervous system will help you feel happier while also reducing stress and anxiety.
Additionally, scientific studies have demonstrated that meditation can increase your dopamine production significantly, resulting in your feeling calmer and happier, all of which contribute to the individual feeling more self-confident.
Self-confidence is also bred from previous issues, such as anxiety, stress, and inattentiveness being resolved, allowing you to feel more content with yourself and how you live your life. It can also help you have a better outlook on life, as a study by Laura G. Kiken and Natalie J. Shook proved meditation can help individuals experience fewer negative thoughts when presented with something negative.
This helps prevent people from wallowing in their negative emotions or falling down the rabbit hole of unpleasant thoughts by more or less preventing them from occurring in the first place.
Increases Self-Control
The final benefit of meditation we’d like to discuss regarding mental health is its ability to increase a person’s self-control.
This benefit is massively important, especially for an individual who experiences addiction, self-harm, or other severe extensions of poor mental health.
While not all forms of meditation are known for achieving this, some can enhance an individual’s self-awareness and, consequentially, help them learn more self-control. This can be done by increasing your awareness of your own thoughts and how you respond to them.
They can also adapt methods of meditation in moments of need to calm their minds, increase their dopamine production, and reduce any stress or anxiety that might be causing them to resort to these unsafe behaviors.
Scientifically, meditation can also assist with self-control because it affects the hippocampus, as we mentioned previously. While this can help with learning and memory, parts of the hippocampus also assist with emotion regulation so that people might feel more in control of their emotions after a few minutes of meditation and, therefore, can make more rational decisions.
How Do You Meditate for Mental Health?
Knowing all of the benefits of meditation on mental health is always helpful, but sometimes it can be not easy to know how to start when you’re given all of this information on something you’ve never tried before. We can help with that.
The best way to meditate for mental health is to simply take that first step and start learning all of the methods and techniques that are guaranteed to target your mental health obstacles and help you overcome them. Online sources, such as Online Meditation Planet, are great resources.
Online Meditation Planet has easily accessible beginner courses that will teach you everything you need to know about how to meditate, how this will affect your body, and how to use different methods and techniques to more appropriately match you and your needs.
They will provide step-by-step guides through numerous online videos and other resources, all taught and created by meditation, mental health, and medical experts to help you use meditation as a skill that will improve your mental health and overall quality of life.
Final Thoughts
Trying to improve your mental health is not an easy feat by any means, but it can be done by doing something as easy as regular meditation. Even if you don’t have time to meditate every day, knowing the techniques and methods of this practice can significantly improve your mental health in moments of immense stress, anxiety, or crises.
If you’re looking for a new way to improve your mental health, try some of the beginner courses on Online Meditation Planet to fully reap the benefits of this life-changing practice.
