How a 5-minute meditation each day can change your mind and body?
We live in a busy world, the pace of life is extraordinary, our mind is always busy, and we are always doing something. Think about the last time you did nothing for 5 minutes, undisturbed. This means no emailing, no T.V, no WhatsApp, no Facebook, not even thinking about the past and future. Simply doing nothing. Well?
How does our mind work?
The mind is our precious resource, through which we experience every single experience of our life. The mind that we rely upon to be happy, peaceful, content, emotionally stable, to be kind, thoughtful and considerate of our relationship with others. This is the same mind we depend upon to be focused, creative, to perform at our very best in everything we do and yet we don’t take enough time to look after it.
Our mind goes round and round like a washing machine each day every day. And the sad part is that we don’t really know how to deal with this. We are so much distracted that we no longer live in the world we presently live in. And we assume that is how life must be, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
‘’Our mind is lost in our thoughts almost 47% of our waking life”
Meditation is all about stepping back, seeing the thoughts clearly, witnessing the emotions coming and going without judgment with a relaxed mind.
Your mind will be in a state of:
Restless mind: Always thinking about something day in and day out. Always into work pressure, engagements, etc. keeping your mind always alert and busy.
Mechanical Mind: Every day it's like a routine, get up, eat, work, sleep. This goes round and round each day.
Thought-provoking mind: You will be having that one nagging thought which is always in your head and couldn’t take it out.
Whatever your mind is in, meditation offers the potential to step back and get a different perspective to see that things are not always as they appear.
The four pillars of a healthy mind:
Awareness: The capacity to focus our attention and to resist distraction. It also includes meta-awareness which means knowing what our minds are doing.
Connection: This refers to those qualities that nurture harmonious interpersonal relationships.
Insight: This insight is the narrative that we all have about ourselves.
Purpose: Having a sense that our life is headed in a particular direction. Taking more and more activities in our life as belonging to the sense of purpose.
“We can’t change everything that happens in our mind, but we can change the way we experience it, that is the potential of mindfulness”
What are the benefits of meditation?
The benefit of meditation is both short-term and long-term. Reduced anxiety, better sleep, a greater connection within the self, more patience and a greater ability to simply be in the present.
Experts agree that meditation has a powerful impact on our body as a whole. Studies have shown that deep relaxation that comes with meditation has a very positive impact on our health.
Below are some of the health benefits:
Long-term meditators have better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they have more grey matter volume throughout the brain.
Mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the part responsible for mind-wandering thoughts- aka “Monkey brain’’.
Meditation helps to lower depression and act as anti-depressants. Its effect size is 0.3 which is similar to antidepressants drugs available.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) was found to increase critical thickness in the hippocampus which governs learning and memory.
One of the central benefits is that it improves the brain area linked to attention and concentration.
Meditation also helps people with social anxiety disorder and brings changes in brain regions related to stress and anxiety.
It helps on the self-control regions of the brain which is very effective in helping people recover from various types of addiction decoupling the state of craving.
Meditation has the ability and power to change the body on a genetic level. Long-term meditators were shown to have far more disease-fighting genes.