Meditation Techniques to Reduce Stress

Learning how to meditate can be one of the best things you can do to regain some control of your life, and start to reduce your stress and anxiety levels.

People encounter stress everyday, some do at work or school, others at home. While they are usually able to cope with stress, sometimes the burden simply becomes too much that people break down because of it.

The Science of Stress

In the General Adaptation Syndrome model designed by Hans Selye, he identifies three stages that people undergo when stressed.

During the first stage, the body goes on a state of alarm at the realization of a threat. In this stage, cortisol is released by the body.

The second stage is where the body becomes unable to cope with the strain until its resources are depleted.

Finally, the body breaks down which include the exhaustion of the immune system. Because of this, the body is unable to fight of sicknesses which then expose the person to illnesses.

How Meditation Helps Reduce Stress

Meditation is one method which can help reduce the stress levels of a person. By calming the mind and giving the person a sense of control over things, the things that are considered threats (the things which cause stress) become easier to manage.

But the reduction of stress isn’t the end of the exercise. Since stress can make people prone to illnesses, reducing stress can help in keeping the person healthy.

The practice of meditation techniques, therefore, can result in improved health and resistance to illnesses.

So the next time you feel stressed out, try to calm yourself down by practicing meditation. While your problems won’t exactly go away, you at least become mentally prepared to face them.

Meditation and Pain

Anyone who has heard of the expression about the power of mind over matter will easily understand the benefit of meditation on people suffering from different forms of physical pain.

This article will deal with several methods by which meditation can help in alleviating a person’s condition.

Concentration techniques in meditation can help in easing a person’s suffering by keeping his/her mind away from the source of the pain. Usually, the pain is magnified because people choose to focus on it.

If their attention is trained somewhere else, the pain becomes more manageable.

Another method is called mindfulness meditation. This involves being aware of one’s present condition and
accepting it as such. If a person accepts that he/she is currently in pain, dealing with it would be much easier.

Then there’s visualization. It could be considered as a form of self-hypnosis. It is done by creating an image of the pain and imagining it moving away from the body.

As suggested by these methods, they do not actually take away pain from the person. Rather, they make dealing with the pain much easier.

This is also the reason why methods like those mentioned should be coupled with the proper medical advice. In fact, consulting one’s doctor is advised before even trying the meditation exercises out.

Otherwise, there will be a risk of overlooking more serious conditions that could be causing the pain. Along with the proper medical advice, meditation can help improve a person’s tolerance for pain.