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If you are asking yourself “Should I meditate?” well then join the club. Many people around me were talking about meditation and the the positive impact it was having on them, so I started to find out more.
You will probably read that there may be a few “side-effects” to meditating which are listed below but as you will see, these are not common nor significantly bad.
Meditation can bring you a sense of peace, calmness and balance that can benefit both your emotional well-being and your overall health. And these benefits don’t end when your meditation session ends, if you meditate regularly, you find that you are at peace more even after the meditation session has ended.
You Should I Meditate Simply For The Health Benefits of Meditation
- Reduced Stress
- Reduced Anxiety
- Improves Sleep
- Helps With Pain Control
- Can Lower Blood Pressure
- Enhanced Self Awareness
- Enhanced Attention span
- Improves Memory
- Can Help Combat Addiction
- Can Be Done Anywhere
How does meditation reduce stress?
According to WebMD, Meditation can help you control stress, decrease anxiety, improve cardiovascular health, and achieve a greater capacity for relaxation, if practiced for as few as 10 minutes each day.
Meditation can produce a deep state of relaxation and a calm mind. During meditation, you focus your attention and quieten the thoughts that may be busying your mind and causing stress.
Benefits don’t end when your meditation session ends, but carry you more calmly through your day and may help you manage symptoms of certain medical conditions.
How long should I meditate?
The surprising answer is that there is no specific time for you to meditate and research suggests you do what feels the most comfortable and natural to you. But of course, as a beginner, how long do think you can manage?
Maybe 10 minutes sound okay to you? Or maybe a 5-minute meditation session sounds a bit more manageable.
There is no right or wrong answer. Choose to start small, anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes is a good starting point and gradually increase this as you see fit. Just don’t expect results right away. It is a process and takes time.
Can Meditation Be Bad For You?
“Too much of anything can be Bad.”
An early study in 2017, at Brown University, the Varieties of Contemplative Experience research project, studied meditation experiences that were “unexpected, challenging, difficult, distressing, or impairing of functioning.”
“With any treatment of any kind—behavioural or drug—there are two sides,” says Matt Hirshberg, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre who led the study.
As there is no real way to assess harm, researchers needed to examine several common measures of harm, such as whether average symptoms worsened, the number of people who’s symptoms increased, the number reporting greater increase in symptoms and clinically significant harm, or the number of people who reported a categorical worsening in symptoms (e.g., from normal symptom level to mildly symptomatic).
In Summary
Don’t expect results right away but results will come. Think of Meditation like Martial Arts, or Driving; you start off as a White Belt/Learner and you need to develop your meditation skills. Meditation takes practice.
Remember your mind might wander during meditation, no matter how long you’ve been practicing meditation – and that is ok. If you’re meditating to calm your mind and your attention wanders, slowly return to your breathing.
Experiment with the different types of meditation and see what works best for you and which you enjoy. Meditation can be adapted to suit you too – it’s not fixed. There is no right or wrong way to meditate. What matters is that the meditation meets your needs and helps you achieve the result you need, which may be to reduce stress and feel calmer.
Happy Meditating 🙂
