Amazing Mental Health Benefits of Meditation
One of the main items that we learn in the TRUE Beginners Meditation Class is that meditation is not for everyone. This might be surprising to hear since meditation is often presented as a panacea (it’s not). And while it provides benefits to a lot of people, it doesn’t work for some. And that's okay because there are other ways of achieving mindfulness and the benefits below - formal meditation is just one of them. But if formal meditation does work for you, below are some benefits you might expect.
Ability to actually be present
So often we hear how important it is to “be present” or “be in the now” and we might agree ...but what does that even mean? In brain terms, it’s like this: when our minds are wandering (thinking about the past, ruminating, thinking about the future), the default mode network or DMN parts of the brain is activated. In this mode, we are not thinking or experiencing what is happening now. And being in this mode for too long or too often typically leads to people feeling unhappy. Meditation offers a way to gently train the brain to rest in the mode of thinking and experiencing what is happening now.
This 1 minute video by Headspace does a great job of explaining this concept.
When you first close your eyes to meditate, you might be surprised by how energetic the mind is. Where is the peace I was promised? It's not peaceful in here...
One of the most common mindfulness meditations is to rest your attention on your breath and every time your mind wanders, you kindly guide it back to the breath. This then translates to other areas of our life. Let’s say we are cooking but our mind keep ruminating on that stupid thing your coworker said that day on the Zoom call. By practicing meditation, you can learn to recognize these moments of wandering and guide yourself back to the present moment of cooking.
Increase your awareness to make better and more intentional decisions
Piggy-backing on the last point about how meditation helps you recognize when your mind has wandered. By increasing this type of self-awareness, you can increase other types of self-awareness through meditation. For example, when you use the noting technique in meditation (a way of labeling the wandering thoughts), you begin to recognize when your mind has been wandering or maybe even trapped in a particular emotion like anxiety. By practicing noting, you become more aware of what your anxiety manifests as and instead of getting lost in the thoughts of it, you can step back and go “oh yeah, that’s my anxiety, okay” and then guide yourself back to the task at hand if that feels good or do something that addresses your anxiety like going for a walk.
Moreover (and perhaps more importantly), meditation doesn't just help you recognize when your mind is being consumed by an emotion but your body symptoms too. This is important because it is often the case that people will identify emotions quicker via body sensations than processing in our mind. For example, I know that when I get a tightness in my throat, stomach or chest, it is likely anxiety. I can more easily recognize these physical symptoms than trying to think about why I’m feeling off.
Developing these senses also has another benefit - developing the ability to pause before reacting. Once I recognize the tightness in my throat, I can take a moment to pause. I often say to myself “take a deep breath and then decide what to do.” That millisecond of a break creates pleasant distancing between me and what is happening to me. With this little break, I get an opportunity to slow down and make a more intentional decision.
Ability to cut the intensity of pain
Meditation does not get rid of our unpleasant emotions or pain but it can help cut the intensity of difficult or overwhelming emotions and pain. Maybe even up by 44%, which is very significant. It does so by helping us uncouple the pain we are experiencing with the emotional response to the pain. I’ve found this to be true in my personal practice and have seen a decrease in the intensity of both my emotional and physical pain. Something to note is that my practice consists primarily of short guided meditations that I do while in bed so even with this style of practice, I’ve seen good results.
Change how you relate and cultivate more inner peace
Meditation helps you cultivate inner peace in many ways. One of the most effective one I’ve experienced is by helping me change my relationship with stressful life events. It doesn’t mean I’m okay with the stressful things happening or that I condone someone’s bad behavior towards me. It’s an acceptance that we are not guaranteed a stress-free life so it’s human nature to experience difficulty and trauma. The difference between people is how each person reacts to these things. We can react with helplessness and despair. Or we can react with self-compassion/compassion and hope. Meditation, especially relational mediations like compassion-based and loving kindness, trains our brains to react in the latter way. There is no magic pill or sorcery to this approach, it is simply and consistently practicing either bringing up a difficulty and guiding our brain and body to respond with kindness or cultivating and connecting with our natural capacities for joy, peace and ease.
Increase resiliency
In terms of mental health, resiliency is the ability to emotionally recover from a setback, trauma, loss, hardship or difficulty. Changing our relationship with stressful events and the ability to observe our life as it unfolds without judgement can further increase this quality in ourselves. People with greater mindfulness (aka the thing that mindfulness-based meditation aims to increase) can experience difficult emotions without shutting down emotionally and also ruminate less on their problems. This support their abilities to bounce back from adversity.
As you can see, the mental health benefits of meditation are multifaceted and touch on many core aspects of our daily life. The ones listed here are the benefits that I’ve seen first hand and that are supported by evidence in different research studies. There are so many other ways that meditations can help us, like with sleep and addiction.
Click here to learn more about mindfulness therapy.
