- You have no items in your shopping cart
- Continue Shopping
You’ll Gain Control of Your Stress Through Meditation – Here’s How it works.
For thousands of years, people have discovered and cultivated wonderful tactics of stress management through meditation. While the world around us has changed dramatically, our responses to life’s challenges, cacophony and looming storms haven’t.
Ridding your body and mind of unwanted negativity and stress through practicing meditation works wonders. Let’s take a look at the mechanics of these exercises to see just how they change your life
Relaxation Through Repetition
One of the most powerful tools when engaging in meditative practice is repetition. Particularly, actions such as mindful breathing, ignoring intrusive thoughts, and reciting affirmations can knock your brain out of its anxious funk. The more adept you become at practicing calming repetition, the more profound the impact is on your daily stress level.
You can also try coloring books that reduce stress. This may sound like a silly concept, but many adults have been enjoying coloring for its repetitive nature. It is easy to get lost in an adult coloring book because the designs are very intricate – which is perfect for emptying the mind.
Reordering Your Brain
Studies have shown that meditation increases grey-matter after only a few weeks of practice. This means you’ll enjoy a sharper memory and more effective cognition when you practice regularly.
How stressed out do you get when you realize you’ve forgotten something supremely important? What about when you can’t understand something when it matters most? After only a week of daily practice, you’ll notice a significant difference in the frequency and intensity of these kinds of stress.
In a sense, then, meditation actually prevents future stress from ever occurring.
The Power of Perspective
As living testaments to the power of meditation, the bodies and minds of Buddhist monks are often considered medical wonders. Stories range from these pious men and women undergoing horrendously painful surgeries without anesthesia and coming away unfazed, to the absolute calm some masters faced while literally being burned alive in protest of the horrors of war.
Their absolute control over physical reactions and stressors stems from a lifelong, dedicated application of meditative practice. One of their central teachings is the observation that people, events, and other objects in our lives are neither good, nor bad; we make those judgements ourselves.
You’ll never have to undergo such harrowing tests of your mental resolve – at least, hopefully you won’t. However, the idea remains the same in much less dramatic situations. Subject a pessimist and an optimist to the same everyday stresses, and you’ll notice they react very differently from one another.
Because of the optimist’s general perspective on life and its events, failure doesn’t seem to affect her as harshly as the pessimist. Through the training you receive while meditating, you’ll be able to notice the same difference between how you were and how you are after even just one session.
Rediscover Your Own Creativity
By shelving your introspective anxiety levels, meditation opens the doors to innovation and novel ideas. If writer’s block is commonplace for you, there’s no better example of meditation’s benefits.
When struggling through a writing stupor, take a few seconds to center yourself, and maybe a few minutes to help ease your spasming mind. When you come back to your work after this simple mode of meditation, you’ll find ideas and free association – the ability to connect two dissimilar thoughts – will come much easier.
Another way to spark creativity is to simply be creative! One way that adults are starting to re-ignite their creative flare is to pick up coloring! Here at art therapy coloring, we have many coloring books for adults, coloring books for seniors, coloring books for teens, etc that you can use to foster your creative side.
Find Time You Never Knew You Had
At this point, you may be saying to yourself: This all sounds great, but I have no time. That’s the beauty of meditation practice – it doesn’t take time so much as it shows you how to make more.
If you’re constantly worried about what’s coming next, you have no way of working through or enjoying what you’re experiencing in the present. Meditation gives you the tools to step back, reorganize, and then re-enter your own mind. When you come back, you’ll discover your schedule isn’t as terrifyingly full as you thought.
Meditation has so many health benefits in addition to stress management that the decision should be a no-brainer: you owe it to yourself to practice as much as you can, as often as you can. If you prefer a more active form of meditation than the traditional sit-and-think approach, pensive walks and coloring offer the same great benefits with a welcome twist.
Whatever method you choose, you’ll be better off when you welcome such a wonderful de-stresser into your life.