Benefits of Meditation for Mental Wellbeing

Meditation is a simple way to reduce stress in your world and replace it with peace and calm. Meditation helps to clear the mental overload that builds up every day and contributes to your stress.

The emotional and physical benefits of meditation can include:

• Reduces Stress

• Increasing self-awareness

• Improves focus and attention

• Promotes emotional health

• Focusing on the present

• Reducing negative emotions

• Increasing imagination and creativity

• Increasing patience and tolerance

• Lowering resting heart rate

• Lowering resting blood pressure

• Improving sleep quality

• Improves Productivity

Regular practice of meditation has been shown to help your brain better cope and manage stress and anxiety that can trigger depression. Meditation has been found to change certain brain regions that are specifically linked to depression.

The aim of practising meditation is to not push aside things that you perceive to be stressful or block out negative thinking, but rather to notice those thoughts and feelings, all the while understanding that you don't have to act on those thoughts and feeling and you can just let them go.

Meditation also can help prepare the brain for stressful situations. For example, meditating before an exam or social situation that you perceive to be stressful can help shift the brain and body out of the stress response and into a state of relative calm.

Everyone can meditate however, if you are just starting out I would start with a shorter meditation of about 5 minutes. Guided meditations are the easiest type of meditation to start with as they are normally shorter, easy to follow, and they are easy to find one you like on Youtube.

Rachael Malloy - Natural Mama - 2023