Meditations help you to alter how you handle stress in a meaningful way. Mindfulness meditations help you to live in the moment, not on past stressors or disappointments, or what you have to do in the future.
This is training your brain to stop focusing on past traumas or future stressors. Part of mindfulness meditations include focusing on your breath, breathing in and breathing out, and the different sensations that you feel around the body as you sit there and focus on your breath.
For example, is there a light breeze that you can feel on your skin or can you hear the birds chirping in the background. Mindfulness meditations can help to reduce stress anxiety because it moderates your body’s production of cortisol, so you feel less stress under pressure. Other studies show that Mindfulness meditations can lower blood pressure and help with pain control.
Even just a five-minute mindful meditation can be extremely beneficial. So, when we look at what causes stress, it’s when our perceived demands at any given moment are greater than our personal and social resources to meet those demands. Now it’s key about that definition is that the perceived demand’s aspect is critical because our perceived demands in any given moment are usually much greater than our actual demands.
For instance, when we’re in the shower in the morning, how many of you are actually in the shower (mentally)? Most people are already at work and are already thinking about everything that they have to take care of or everything that needs to get done, which is causing yourself unnecessary stress. In reality what’s actually happening is that you’re scrubbing soap on your body.
So, what we need to learn to do is to come back to our present moment, back to what is happening right now and focus on what we see, what we hear, and perhaps what we smell in the present moment to ground ourselves to the present moment. Doing a short five minute mindfulness meditation can help you to ground to the present moment and the current space that you are in.
This five-minute meditation can be done at your desk, in the bathroom, or as you step outside for a short break at work or at home. Simply close your eyes and take a few slow, deep breaths and focus on what you can feel on your skin and what you can smell as you are breathing deeply.
This will help your mind and body to control the amount of cortisol that is being released which will help you to stay calm under pressure and handle stress with ease. You will likely notice that you will be able to come up with more solutions under pressure and you will be calmer under pressure as well.
Your mind, over time, will have more clarity and focus, and you will be able to rely on your strengths during stressful situations with more ease.
Mindfulness meditation is a practice where an individual focuses on their attention and the breath and the person focuses on the changing sensations of their breath as they’re breathing.
The idea is that in doing these meditations, as you release the thoughts that come into your mind as you are focusing on your breathing you are retraining your mind to only focus on what you want it to which will help you when you are outside of the meditation.
Meditations our self-regulatory and overtime can benefit you much more than pharmaceutical medications, because through this process you are training your brain on what you want it to focus on, you are not simply relying on pharmaceutical medications but you are literally retraining your brain or changing the pattern of thinking that you were formerly aware of that might have been problematic, thus creating a new pattern of thinking that is healthier for you.
Pharmaceutical medications can treat the symptoms, but they don’t change the underlying problems. Meditations literally restructure your brain and your thought process. There has been overwhelmingly positive research conducted over the past few years that has suggested that even a short 20-minute meditation can improve symptoms of anxiety, stress, depression, confusion, and loneliness.
One 20-minute meditation practice can on average reduce state anxiety by 22%. There is evidence of this in a research study performed at the Stanford Institute for empathy and compassion that was done in 2014.
So, when someone is stressed out and or increase there is an inability of a part of the brain that controls thoughts and emotions to work so brain regions in the front, prefrontal cortex, are deactivated and generally speaking they are deactivated because they reflected in an inability to govern or control thoughts worries anxieties.
Another brain region that is highly activated during anxiety and stress is the post singular cortex this is the brain region that is associated with mind wandering and thought processes and the thoughts that pop in our heads.